Update: 2/17 - Decks & Vocab Beta

[nichendrix]

I’ve already seen that button on my profile. But what I’m talking about is something very different. What I have on BunPro’s Review Forecast is this:

The number of itens being in the review is the only information. I don’t even have the information about the exact time the review session could start.

If I go to the show upcoming reviews on my Profile, I get this information:

Now I can see what topics will be revealed and a better estimate for time. But I don’t get what time the review will be, just how much time from now to there, so if I want to know when I have to do the math. I also don’t get to easily and quickly know the itens that will actually on the review, because I have to manually count them to get this information. Maybe for a professional student that may seen as silly, but to anyone older, with a job and a family to take into account, this kind of thing starts to pile up as time wasted.

Now, look at what the Ultimate Timeline Script does to WaniKani.

I get this dashboard, that allows me to choose to immediately track all my reviews in intervals ranging from 6 hours to 14 days, and I’m the one choosing the granularity of the timeline, it isn’t fixed, even though I usually left it at 3 days.

Then if I click on any review, I get to see a screen like this, where I know the exact time the review session will be up, the number of itens, the type of item, what itens will be on the review, and if I hover the mouse over the item I get a description that includes the item level (here on BunPro this should be something like the JLPT level) and SRS Level o the item.

This is not a native WaniKani functionality, it is a script made to provide this functionality, but it is easily the most useful script for WaniKani because it becomes very easy and almost second nature to manage reviews and put them on a regular schedule for people that are just too busy to waste time looking in two or three places to manage reviews.

I’ve spent the past week trying to make my BunPro reviews fit a predictable schedule, lessons in the early morning and a quick review session, a longer review session at night, and for lower SRS level itens, a review session at lunch, if I can spare the time.

But thus far, I’m failing miserably on this endeavor, I always got a lot of reviews at odd times, and and then when I actually use the time I have for the reviews, I’ll be usually dealing with things so dissimilar that I have to spend quite more time on them, than it would be needed if the information available were concentrated on just one place, and presented on an efficient manner.

So, even though I think the vocabulary decks would be immensely useful for me, actually, right now, they are of no use to me, without the ability to get a predictable review schedule, since the way things are it would just make my review schedule far more wonky than it already is.

[Bang]

Doesn’t knowing which exact reviews will come up kind of defeat the purpose of the SRS? After all, you’ll prime yourself on those items and give your brain extended time in advance to recall them.

[Katzerin]

While I agree that it would be counterproductive to know exactly which reviews are coming up, I think it would be immensely helpful to have a more detailed breakdown of the items (e.g. SRS level, JLPT level or deck, ghosts). Also being able to adjust the range of the timeline, e.g. so that a more detailed breakdown of the review times can be displayed.
Kind of off topic, but what really helps me manage my WK reviews even more than the timeline script is the SRS intervals being one hour short of full days (23 hours, 1 day 23 hours etc.). That way I can keep my schedule and do my pre work reviews at the same time even if I sleep in on weekends.

[Bang]

In vocabulary lessons, I often see misaligned characters like this:

macOS Monterey 12.1, Firefox 96.0.3

[nichendrix]

The SRS System is not a game of “let’s guess”, the goal of the reviews isn’t +guessing the right answer either.

It is impossible to use an SRS system without knowing what will be reviewed, you know what “cards” are available because you have to study them first. You know beforehand the time that has to elapse between reviews for each level of the Spaced Repetitions, and with those two pieces of information you know what “cards” should be on each review.

One of the requirements of SRS is that the during review the “cards” are randomized for each review session, so you may know what topics would be covered, but not in which order they will be covered, and in Systems like BunPro, we know what topics, but we don’t know what sentence will apear for us to use the knowledge about that grammar point.

Also, priming yourself on the itens of the review is very far from defeating the purpose of the SRS. On the contrary, priming your brain to remember the content beforehand, it is the main purpose of a SRS system.

This is how you learn, you’re always priming your brain to remember those itens for longer periods of time, it is how the system is intended to work. You know that the first review comes x time after the first lesson, and if you get the answer right, the next review comes y time after that, and so on, you also know that when you get things wrong and the SRS level drops, the time between reviews gets smaller.

It is this predictability that coaxes your brain to remember the itens being reviewed, and if you space them just right so you do the review right before you would forget, you get an even stronger learning experience. And if your brain is already recalling the learning materials before the review session, it is a telltale sign that you’re in fact learning the material, otherwise even knowing what would be on the review, wouldn’t make you give the right answer.

Given that I’m not a full time student, I need a little bit extra amount of predictability in order to take the best that BunPro SRS system has to offer me. Specially with the N5 Vocabulary Deck alone, having nearly 1000 itens to be reviewed.

[EdBunpro]

@nichendrix

You know beforehand the time that has to elapse between reviews for each level of the Spaced Repetitions, and with those two pieces of information you know what “cards” should be on each review.

When reviews are spaced 6+ months apart, I’m not sure how this is remotely possible to remember at all. If you’re reviewing super long-term items and the review count is quite small (~10), I personally feel like it completely destroys the purpose of SRS if you know what long-term item you’re supposed to use for the day especially if you aren’t using bunny mode to hide the SRS levels of items you’re getting tested on.

To each their own I suppose, I would recommend submitting a post in the extensions thread to see if one of the devs there can possibly do this for you since they’ve done similar requests for people in the past.

[Terilian]

Found somewhat of a big annoyance with N5 Deck as example. Have been going through it manually and am adding most of its words to reviews and click immediately after on “I know this”. I did this with only a few dozen of these and gained two levels from that…

Please for dear god disable getting XP for putting Vocab into the queue and then to max level by marking them as “known”. I dont exactly want to cheese-rise my level any further just by trying to sort out the vocab I might still not know from the deck

give me back my level 33 please

[nichendrix]

Sincerely, I fail to see the problems you and @Bang see in knowing what will be reviewed, it isn’t like it is something new, the functionality already exist on the Profile page, what I’m saying is that improvements on the Review Dashboard would be quite welcome and make managing the review schedule way easier than it present is.

I also fail to understand what’s the advantage of hiding the SRS levels of the itens, on the contrary, I think that not knowing them leads to poor learning management, to me all this talk about not knowing what will be on review or what SRS level the itens are is quite alien and give me the impression that you use the SRS System more like a game than a learning tool for a very specific purpose. In the end, these are just my own preferences, I suppose that different people learn in different ways.

Sincerely, if I had the time, I would probably do a script for an improved Review Dashboard myself, but unfortunately, I don’t have the free time.

[EdBunpro]

As a potential lil’ exercise, I would try setting bunny mode on during reviews. The reason I suggest this is because for a year+ I would do reviews and I could see the SRS level for each item the question was asking me. Someone a couple months ago told me that by knowing the level, you’re automatically having your brain do some of the work for you and, essentially, ‘cheat’ a lil’ bit. At first I thought their notion didn’t make much sense, but I immediately saw a difference in my reviews. If you see something that says “SRS: 2” and it’s a point that has specific nuance you need to learn, your brain is going to automatically go “it’s that thing you learned recently and not the one you learned weeks ago.” This becomes really, really, really key later on towards N3+. If I had a magic wand, I would have SRS hidden by default during reviews.

If it doesn’t work for you or you don’t like it that’s fine, but I can assure you this isn’t treating learning like a game, but instead trying to truly understand everything without any outside interference helping you out.

[nichendrix]

Sincerely, this is completely psychological in many weird ways. Your brain should be doing the work for you, that’s what’s learning is about.

I really don’t care if the item has a SRS level 1 ou 12, the only actual meaning that information has is the amount of time it takes between the reviews, in no way it influences how much you know or understand about any specific item, the inverse on the other hand have a far greater possibility of being true, the fact that you have a better understanding of the topic makes you commit less mistakes and thus drive the SRS level up.

Maybe you and the other person are just easily influenced by the motivational elements of learning, to me these things simply don’t hold. I’ve had many lenghthy discussions with my wife about this, because she teaches kids, which are far more susceptible and dependant on the motivational side of learning than adults are. I on the other hand teach adults in STEM fields, so even though I do whatever I can to motivate my students, I have to expect they have a good degree of self motivation, given that there’s no workaround doing the math.

Personally, I approach learning language the exact same way I approach learning mathematics (which in itself is a language too), so SRS levels only shows me how the review will fit in my studying schedule, while the actual content of reviews would be methodically mapped in my mind to the semantic and syntactic structure of that specific language (Japanese is the 6th language I’m learning).

In the end the whole concept of SRS level is irrelevant to the SRS system. IIRC, it is something that wasn’t originally on the method, it was something that was introduced later, when people started developing software for it, like Anki. I don’t know how it started or who started it, but, to me, seems that the ideal of attributing levels to SRS started as kind of a motivation factor, than anything else. Much like XP is a motivation factor here, and one that some people here seems to give far too much importance.

To get the most out of a SRS system, you just need to understand the basic idea that repetition is spaced on a very predictable manner and that the frequency of the repetition starts higher for new subjects and then decreases as your skill/mastery over the subject increases.

Much like in mathematics you start doing a lot of numerical/computational problems in order to get familiar with the subject and then, after you get some computational skills, you will start progressing towards more abstract exercises doing demonstrations and proofs of theorems, which takes a lot of time and you end up doing ever less problems, but on each problem you learn a lot more.

BunPro, for all I’ve seen thus far, kind of takes this approach, because I noticed that as I’m progressing on my lessons and reviews, the sentences that appear on the reviews get more complex, and that’s taking into account I didn’t even completed the transition from N5 to N4 yet.

But this discussion is has become off topic far and wide, if you want to continue, I suggest we start a new thread to discuss it.

[Evueimeimei]

I’ve tried out the vocab decks a bit now. I generally find them quite good. The only real feedback point I have is about the way grammar and vocab reviews are mixed. It may be just a case that I’m not used to seeing the vocab yet, but I always get caught up for a second when one of the vocab cards pops up. It’s a bit jarring because I’ve been using Japanese for all the grammar, but the vocab wants English answers. I feel like, for me at least, it would be helpful if either the grammar and vocab were sequential instead of mixed, or if they were marked/colored differently for easier visual differentiation.

[stillwill]

@Jake just now i found this bug in vocab review. It happened twice already with different vocab

[lithis]

I have flashcard style set, but when I use the “Add to Reviews” button on a page for a specific vocab item, it is added as manual input instead of flashcard style. If I use the “Learn [3]” button on either the main Decks page or on the specific deck page, the new reviews are correctly in flashcard style.

I have tried changing between manual input and flashcard style in the deck settings several times and clicked “Change ALL to Flashcards” several times, but I still have to click “Change ALL to Flashcards” every time after I add new vocab with the “Add to Reviews” button on the vocab item page.

Thanks for all your hard work on this!

[atticusd]

Same here. Even pressing the button “Change ALL to Flashcards” in the Deck Settings does nothing for me. I tried it with the N5 Grammar Deck several times.

[Katzerin]

Might just be a coincidence, but since I set every single deck to flashcards for vocab I haven’t had that problem anymore. Maybe the system gets confused when the item is in multiple decks with different settings?

[shikaji]

Can’t praise the development of Bunpro enough and love being able to tackle vocabulary via SRS now. Great addition! But I have something even better than compliments - why, feature suggestions of course!

As others have already mentioned I second being able to separate Grammar and Vocab reviews. Having them mixed is kind of awkward and while my stamina with grammar reviews is fairly limited, vocab questions I could do quite a lot of in one go.

I’d also like a more streamlined way of “burning” vocabs I already know, because even after syncing with Wanikani (yay, free XP ^^) there are plenty left. My favourite mode would be the one employed by KameSame, called Placement Test.

From their website:

Placement test

In this mode, any correctly-answered items will be marked as already-learned (i.e. burned) and any cards you get wrong will be automatically added to your review queue. This is a handy way to work through a list when you already know a significant number of its items.

[Cenon33650]

Hi. Would it be possible that when we removed a item from the vocabulary deck, it does not show up in the study word group? Otherwise, do you have a way to remove permanently items from the study list? Thanks for your outstanding work and website development.

[Evueimeimei]

I have a question about the vocab decks. On some of the cards there’s a yellow triangle with some words after it, like this one for example:

I get that this is some kind of warning or caution or similar, but what exactly does it mean? Are these similar things that I need to be aware of or maybe things that seem similar but aren’t?

I think it might be helpful if there could be a mouseover on the icon that says what the icon means.

[kush]

On the vocab reviews sometimes if i get a single letter misplaced it will mark it wrong insted of asking if it was correct. It happens fairly often when i type too fast and switch two letters around.

[Houndstooth]

One weakness I could foresee with showing every example sentence at once, as opposed to just one, (assuming I understood that correctly) is having “too much” context that may allow for some users to subconsciously memorize which word goes with which sentences based purely on the unique combination of content, rather than actually think about which word is being quizzed based on the context of the actual sentence.

Idk if that makes sense, but for example, I sometimes get grammar reviews correct (usually ghosts or leeches) purely because I’ve seen the sentence so many times that I know what it’s asking for even without reading the whole sentence.