Entry the twenty-third - August 10th, 2025
It’s a Sunday once again! Can you believe it?
Today I added more N5 vocab to my First Principle vocab deck and along the way, I noticed that…well, the vocab is hmm, half baked? Let’s be kind and go with that!
As I am entering the vocab into this deck, I am testing it to see how Japanese learners going from zero would fare, and you would be SHOCKED by the results.
Well, perhaps not, but my finding is that the onboarding process is grosser than the smell of Natto.
From a pedagogical standpoint, I find it hard to convince me that filling in the blank using context sentences for beginners is the right way to approach this. Warning gross light mode ahead!
Look at this sentence. You probably got it right instantly. Book is highlighted in red and the rest of the sentence? Easy peasy!
But for someone who is just learning Japanese and has never even seen ten Japanese words out in the wild, this is overwhelming! They don’t know most of this sentence!
This is the second vocab word they are learning using the N5 Vocab deck.
Context-based learning has merit and is useful for the upper-beginner/intermediate phase of learning. But Bunpro’s default method of learning is quite horrible for new learners.
BUT Bunpro has a fix…well, kinda. You see, it’s messy and unreliable.
In my First Principle deck, I added a nice all-cap disclaimer in the description: “FOR NEW JAPANESE LEARNERS: Go to Settings → Reviews. Scroll down until you see the setting “Default Vocab Review Type”. For Question Type, select: Translate. For Answer Type, select: Reveal & Grade.”
Essentially what this does is recommends new learners to go into the settings and change the vocab to give you a Japanese word and use the trusty ol’ honor system to judge if you got it right or not.
Ideally it would look like this (warning gross light mode ahead, again!):
But in reality, its reliability is…well, poo. I updated the vocab settings to reflect such, but when adding new vocab or reviewing some still reflect this:
At least I don’t have to type the answer! But this is bad and doesn’t reflect what settings were changed.
Jonathan Blow, despite being a cranky and miserly old programmer, has a lot of wisdom on the topic of teaching new players how games work. But…games and learning apps aren’t the same!..right?
Well, shockingly enough, there’s a great amount of overlap between the two.
Blow’s take, based on the numerous talks and presentations he has given through the years, is that complexity can naturally arise from mastering simple fundamentals. Now, how does that reflect on what I am saying? Well, if I learn the word for book, let me test my knowledge on book. Give me context for what I know for book and everything else I already know.
The “Reveal & Grade” setting should be default for those who choose zero Japanese as their baseline for learning Japanese. Maybe as their knowledge and experience grows that can change into context-based learning and beyond.
Overall, I think the current setting and UX for Bunpro’s site for absolutely new Japanese learners is bad. Not in an exaggeration bad, but in terms of a lacking a core philosophy and caring for new learners kind of bad.
It’s so bad, that I would completely overhaul the system and rethink the model from scratch.
If you may recall from a bunch of posts ago, I did a deep dive on the referral system and then one on the onboarding process for new users. I tapped out like a chump! So embarrassing.
Sadly, I did that intentionally as if I kept going the way I analyze games, I would’ve torn this to shreds, which wouldn’t have been fun to read as I would’ve repeated myself a lot, and I think the overall point was made early on: it’s bad.
I will merely say this: If you need to give paragraphs of text to the user of the app or player of a game, you have offloaded the UX/designer’s job onto that user/player. That’s really, really bad.
I was playing Resonance Of Fate last week. If you haven’t played it, please do so, it’s weird. In fact, here’s a funny video with Nolan North in it as a palette cleanser:
Great, eh? The combat is quite quirky too! You can play it as a typical turn-based RPG, but you’re doing a great disservice as it’s quite a chaotic and deep game.
…but sadly that beauty in the complexity is hidden in dozens of pages of tutorial text. You have to not only read a ton of text, but you have to remember what all of that does and it sucks! Learning from doing is beauty. Learning from reading is boring.
The onboarding process for Bunpro has me reading paragraphs of text, needing to juggle all of that, and the process can and should be eliminated in favor of a user-centric philosophy.
Think of the user in Bunpro as the main character of the story the Bunpro developers are telling. The onus is on Bunpro to make that story as interesting and engaging as possible. Currently, at least for new users, it fails completely on that goal and it deeply saddens me.
It’s very easy to pay attention to what users on this forum are saying. We are the survivors and we have data points that can be valuable. But from what I have learned through my experience in data science is that the best data is usually the data you don’t see.
What do the kids call this? Survivorship bias! Did you ever see the plane picture? Oh, boy, if you haven’t, I will show you the plane picture:
To understand the context of the classic plane picture, Wikipedia sensei has you covered.
Perhaps understanding the desires and feelings of those who haven’t made it very far in their Japanese journey is worth exploring.
Gosh, this was a rant, eh? Hardly any jokes, but that Resonance of Fate video? That was something. Bunker busters? Did that put a smile on your face and make your eyes roll at the same time? Me too!
Anyway, food for thought for a post deep in a thread where I ramble a lot.
Appreciate raisins, everyone!
I think I watched my husband play Skyrim too many times to count.
