Update: 2/17 - Decks & Vocab Beta

I was thinking more like a setting where it puts the specific vocab into an SRS Level that would be the equivalent of the SRS Level it has on WK - for example if I have 上手 at Master in WK, upon importing it here it could be categorized as SRS Level 7. And only burned items over at WK would be put into SRS 12.

So possible mappings could be:

Apprentice 1-4: SRS 0-3
Guru 1-2: SRS 4-5
Master: SRS 7
Enlightened: SRS 9
Burned: SRS 12

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I like the idea, but that would mean having to work through the same vocabs on WK and BP, effectively doubling the workload. A variation: Only set burned WK items to SRS 12 (or have a setting to let users decide which WK stage they feel comfortable with) and remove other items that are in progress in WK (Apprentice - Enlightened) from the BP lesson queue so they don’t show up automatically. If someone wants to add them to their BP reviews anyway, let them. I admit this sounds rather complicated, though :sweat_smile:

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@DasHannes Thank you for the suggestions! As this is still on Beta it could potentially change a lot. We’re particularly fond of letting the dashboard work as it always has, and separate Vocab/Decks as their own thing, and then allowing the mixing through user settings. What are your thoughts on this?

@DrNefarius Like @Katzerin already mentioned, the idea is for you to not study the same item twice.
Rather than syncing your progress back and forth across the two platforms (which would be super messy to implement), WK Sync is more meant to be used as a “I learnt it over there so I’ll finish it over there” button, allowing your Bunpro progress to be 100% focused on new material.

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I think the vocab feature has a lot of potential, will really boost the value of your service once you get where you want to with it. Some personal wants/suggestions:

  • For vocab decks based on textbooks/courses, arranging the vocab under lesson subsections would be much better than just having pages of unorganised lists. Essentially if it was organised in the same way as the grammar paths or Bunpro lessons. As somebody migrating to Bunpro midway through Genki, I would like to be able to mark all vocab for a lesson as known rather than going through each word individually.

  • Adding to this, having a cram feature for vocab would be a godsend. When I start a new chapter in Genki, I would love to be able to do a cram session for all/selected vocab in a chapter. I haven’t found a service that sufficiently lets me do this.

  • This is probably the biggest ask, but having some way of importing my Anki database so that words already reviewed in Anki get marked as known (or perhaps I could selected to import all of these items to a specific SRS level of my choosing). jdpb.io offer this feature, it is still somewhat limited however.

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Thanks, Jake for your quick work on this. I am in total agreement with what @DrNefarius has suggested regarding importing WK data. I think this is somewhat like what Satori Reader does as well with regards to furigana. I think you can choose at what SRS level a term should be for the furigana to not be shown. At any rate, I feel that importing all vocab at SRS12 is too high and that SRS0 is too low. I was looking at the list of imported items to see what vocab from WK that I want to review some more and then realized that there was no choosing an inbetween SRS level. As it is now, I have to leave it at 12 or completely reset it to 0. This kind of defeats the purpose of importing from WK and makes what DrNefarius suggested a great option if it is possible! :smiley:

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It seems to me the English font became too small with the last update. I’d prefer the size it had before or at least a setting to scale it up if it’s not too much trouble.

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Thanks for the update.
I’ve synced WK but it doesn’t look I can reset it if I wish to.
Also, I’d like to be able to easily reset words as some of them at level 12 I would want to reintegrate into the “to learn” pool.
Adding a button reset on the list view would work (checkboxes then reset a bunch, or a button that trigger async the reset of the word):

Also, the xp unlocking badges seems a bit buggy :stuck_out_tongue:

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I was baffled it was already implemented this morning. Very nice.

I believe that entry also accepts older sister, so I suppose the logic right now activates whenever it deviates 20% from any of the entries.
Personally I did not have such an Issue yet though.

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I patched it right after @HotAirGun mentioned it. He was right, the logic was slightly off but should be correct now :smiley:

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I’ve set my Main Deck to N5 vocab yesterday (I’m testing in depth, will share my results later). My dashboard still says


Because of this I initially thought that only the “Study” option in the navigation bar was now linked to the main deck and that the dashboard would still refer to the Study Level set under General settings. I actually thought that was a cool hidden feature to be able to do lessons from two different sources right from the dashboard (hint hint :smile_cat:)
However, I just wanted to do my 3 N4 grammar lessons and got 8 N5 vocab lessons instead :sob:

Another thought: The “Review: x” option in the nav menu has the number of reviews (x) next to it, why not add the number of lessons to “Study” as well, especially now that we can change batch sizes?

Edit for fun observation: I just realized that the “Study” option is labeled “Learn New” in the mobile burger menu :upside_down_face:

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is there any way to mass reset the cards that have been synced from wanikani? i noticed it set everything to SRS 12 regardless of wanikani level so i’d rather go through them normally on here with the extra example sentences

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Not sure if this is something yet to be implemented, but is there a way to view all available vocab outright, without going into the individual decks?

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Hi,
Nice initiative. However, it would be nice to distinguish vocabulary from grammar points in the upcoming reviews list (different backgrounds or color perhaps). My reviews today were 100% vocabulary, it is hard to find out when my next grammar point review will be when you have so many vocabulary words in the list. Also, regarding the vocabulary, it would be nice to have an option to display the furigana of a vocabulary, either before or after giving an answer. I understand your intent. However, we can memorize the kanji without knowing how to read it. Using the mouse over the kanji is too much time consuming and not practical when you use only a keyboard. The last suggested improvement would be to have an option to bypass or set “to know” the vocabulary that we know. This way, we can concentrate on the vocabulary we want to study. Best

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Sorry if this was already brought up before but I seem to be experiencing a bug with the SRS counter with vocabulary. Sometimes it works as normal but sometimes when i answer something correctly it’ll go down instead of up. ex: SRS5 to SRS4. Sometimes the number won’t change at all. One time it even jumped from 0 to 5. The vocab word was SUPPOSED to be at five but I have no idea what the numbers are doing, and if they affect the SRS study timing or if its just a visual thing. thanks.

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I’d like to be able to view what percentage of the vocab deck I’ve marked as “learnt/known”
Thanks!!

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I’ve got what seems to be a bug where I can’t mark the vocab as “known” until I review it first and then go to the word in the deck itself

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Okay, here it comes (trigger warning: a lot of text). I somewhat systematically tested reviews with the updated features with a lot of items over the last couple of days.

General observations
  • Lesson batch size: The maximum I can set is 8. This seems so random. I wanted to do 50 lessons the other day but ended up only doing 40 :woman_shrugging:t2:
  • Wanikani sync: Seems to be working great. There are some items where the honorific prefix お or the suffix さん are absent on WK but present in BP so they don’t get synchronized (e.g. お地蔵さん; maybe the same with prefix ご). It’s not really bothering me much, just maybe a nice little tweak.
  • Search for vocab: You can search for vocab within a deck but not comprehensively over all decks. If I find a new word somewhere and want to add it to reviews, I’d have to search every deck as a worst case.
  • Filter vocab in a deck would be nice: I wanted to get an overview over the items I hadn’t started yet, but I bet there are a lot more interesting filter options (e.g. type of word, SRS stage or even if it includes Kanji or not)
  • Setting Review Style: I almost automatically hit the big red “Change ALL to flashcards” button without reading first, it just screams “click me” :smiley:
  • Maybe I was playing around too much, but even after I “Changed ALL” to flashcards I kept getting some items as manual input. Logging out on all devices didn’t help (was too lazy to delete cache). After logging in, I had to re-select “Change ALL” on every single device (i.e. was fixed on desktop after I did it there once but still kept happening on mobile) before it finally worked. Edit: Just happened again. Though my deck is set to flashcards, items I add are set to manual.

Reviews
I divided my reviews in 4 groups: manual input vs. flashcards X desktop vs. mobile (Chrome Version 98.0.4758.80 on macOS & Samsung Internet 16.0.6.23 on Note 9). And yes, I wrote test cases :nerd_face:

Flashcards
  • Generally works great. I love how Furigana are revealed automatically when selecting yes/no.
  • When selecting “no” the answer says “Unsure”, not “Unknown”

Specifically on mobile:

  • The yes/no answer buttons are very small and close to each other, so it’s easy to accidentally hit the wrong one.
  • After clicking yes/no and selecting the input field, the keyboard gets displayed and inputs are possible, resulting in a mess of romaji and kana (like kのwんh)
Manual Input
  • The “Show” button is available before answering, actually revealing the meaning (which might be a feature but allows cheating).
  • Furigana are NOT revealed after inputting wrong or right answer

Specifically on mobile:

  • Additionally, meanings are NOT revealed after inputting wrong or right answer, so no exposure to alternative meanings

General request: I would like it if unknown (= not learned on WK) Kanji could get Furigana from the start (before even pressing “Show answer”). But non-WK users might have a different opinion :smiley_cat:

I also found some little vocab mistakes which I will put in a separate reply.

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Some little mistakes:

While Jisho tells me this is actually correct, the N5 level meaning should probably be “first-year-student”
image

Wrong data fields?
image

Ummm…eh? :sweat_smile:
image

Edited to add: Furigana for 人参 seem to be broken.

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Frankly, this looks really cool, but I was very surprised to see that Bunpro’s biggest strength was not included in this: context. I know it’s been mentioned before, but @Jake, I think it would be more useful to learn vocabulary in the context of sentences as suggested by some people above.
Being asked to fill in the missing word for E->J or translate a word in a sentence for J->E would disambiguate many of the synonyms. As anyone who uses WK knows, there are far too many words that are translated similarly to English but are used differently in Japanese.
Knowing which word to use when makes speech more natural by far.

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I tried reviewing vocab and grammar separately this morning:

  • N4 ghosts weren’t included in the review batch for N4
  • I had some N5 reviews, but there was no button for a review batch on the N5 deck card (deck is finished, so there is also no study button)

Going via the individual decks is a great first step for separating review types. For sometime in the future it would be nice to be able to e.g. do all available grammar reviews in one go, regardless of which deck they’re in.

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