Update: 2/17 - Decks & Vocab Beta

This feature is a cool add-on (thanks)! I will try to be brief since most feedback was already given.

I understand it’s in beta phase, but the vocabulary lists really need to be revised: some words present weird or obscure meanings, some only accept the meaning with entire phrases including parêntesis content, others accept only first meaning, others accept any of the meanings, and some do not even accept the given meaning. It’s kind of a mess xD.

I agree that there should be an option to review / srs / all things separately between vocab and grammar. As is, it seems (at least to me) that the vocabulary is eating the grammar alive, taking all the attention away from the real purpose of bunpro which is (I believe) still the grammar. Everytime I look into my srs or reviews there’s nothing but vocabulary all over, and it should, in my opinion be the other way around. Also the mixed review format makes it very hard to focus on grammar, as the attention span needed for a grammar review is kind of different that the automatic one I tend to give for vocabulary.

I also agree that this feature should strive to differentiate from other similar platforms by presenting vocab in context, and that sound would be great.

That being said, keep up the good work!

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All furigana in ヶ月 vocab sticks to 月 only, but it has to be all over Xヶ月 I guess.

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I know people use Anki for this sort of thing, but it would be really great to have a custom deck option. I am always stumbling upon new vocabulary during reviews and such, it would be awesome to have a way to just add them to a deck to study later! (though I suppose having them in grammar reviews does let me learn them through context anyways, maybe this is unnecessary?)

Also, as much as I love “learning naturally” by reading example sentences and figuring out the meaning through context, I think it would also be great to have a Japanese dictionary definition to study from. Currently I’m at a level where in my own decks I study sentences, and put the Japanese definitions of any word(s) I’m unfamiliar with on the other side.

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All of the vocab has 8 ‘in context’ example sentences with it, so you should be able to read each of those straight away in order to get an idea of which word is being looked for. It will also help you get a better idea for how to use those words naturally.

Perhaps something we could do for reviews is have the target word get removed from all of the example sentences, meaning that you would still see the rest of each sentence, giving you a much better chance of guessing the correct word.

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This sounds like what I was suggesting but 8 times better since you’d be providing 8 fill-in-the-blank sentences at once instead of 1. Far better for disambiguation and internalizing appropriate contexts for specific synonyms.

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This is a great point, actually. There could be a perception problem if the balance is not just right. It would be a shame for Bunpro to be viewed as a competitor to Anki/iknow instead of a grammar tool that also renders Anki/iknow redundant because it also does vocab.
On the other hand it shouldn’t be buried so deep or underdeveloped that no one considers it a feature that can rival Anki/iknow. “Underdevelopment”, however, is not a term this team appears to be familiar with, so there’s little risk of that… I’d wager they haven’t heard of the terms “holiday” or “weekend” or “fun” either.

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I didn’t read the whole thread, so I don’t know whether these points have been reported before.

  1. Manual entry for vocabulary should be very lenient when it comes to diacritical marks and punctuation. At the moment, cafe is not accepted for café. Mr is not accepted for Mr.. Also, some items have explanations or examples in parentheses, e.g. thank you (for the meal) or -ite (e.g. Tokyoite). I think answers without the parts in parentheses should be accepted.
  2. It would be really nice to have combined grammar/vocabulary decks for Bunpro N5-N1 as well, in addition to the separate grammar and vocabulary decks.
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  1. It would be helpful if it was possible to mark items as known with a single click directly from the list view.
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^ 100% this, I feel like the way the reviews are set up at the moment loses both the main aim (immersion) and the greatest strength (many natural example sentences) during the review progress. I think that would be a wonderful implementation and would also really set BunPro apart yet again.

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The Finish Session option has a problem with vocab reviews. I have flashcard style set and am using Firefox. Several times when I have chosen Finish Session after doing some vocab reviews, I get into a state where I have a vocab review on screen but there is a text box for “Your Answer”. If I type anything and click Submit, the text box is emptied but nothing else happens. If I don’t type anything and click Submit, it says “Please choose I Don’t Know [1] or I know [2]”, but the buttons are not visible. I have to choose Wrapping Up from the menu to get away from the vocab review and end my session. It might only happen if I have gotten a review wrong earlier in the session; I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what causes it yet (and I don’t want to intentionally get reviews wrong to investigate further).

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I also second this. I think bunpro should find a creative way of integrating the vocab learning reviews so that it works as a tool / complement for grammar learning in detriment of having as it is now, two separate features that are provided to users.

Something in the lines of what was suggested: presenting the word that is missing given the english in the existent sentences, identifying the proper english meaning of a word between its possible meanings for a given sentence, identify the different functions grammar-wise of a vocab word according to their position or particle attached (add vocab + particle for instance), and so on…

I understand this suggestions may be harder to implement, but… no pressure :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the feedback!
Like @Asher mentioned, we will probably switch to using in context sentences for the vocab reviews. This was one of the big reasons we put it into beta first. We have a variety of ideas on what might work well, but some only work in theory and others that we don’t think will work well, end up being really great.

@daleksbride Thanks for the feedback! We will look to get something implemented soon to help differentiate things.

@Bang We are still ironing out issues with the leniency and accepted answers. Thanks for the suggestion on single click from the list view!

@lithis I will take a look into that. It seems like a bug.

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I mean it is great that you have added vocabulary too. It allows new learners to use Bunpro as a holistic approach to the self-study part of language learning. Still I personally do not welcome this change. I think you should keep your focus onto grammar and perfect it there. Now that you are spreading out your efforts I am worried that Grammar will no longer receive the same attention that it deserves.

Regardless personally I feel learning the words too actually could be useful for the example sentences, so that you can make sure that learners will already know all words. In that case however you will also have to deal with people not wanting to be asked countless words they already know. I.e. you will need to have an option to blacklist all JLPT Nx as well as an import function where people can dump lists of learned kanji and words so that Bunpro does not request these. Also as other commented now that you have Vocab it wont be long until people will be able to make their own lists and you will end up needing correct audio for basically all common use vocab. This is a giant can of worms you are opening there. Vocab is not just something you can do as a sideproject and do it well.

Also from a market point of view. You do not have any competitors on the Grammar section. There is nothing that remotely comes close. For Vocab I can count 10 that are doing vocab better than you right now and you would have a lot of catching up to do.

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When grammar and vocabulary reviews are mixed, it becomes a bit harder to gauge whether you can take on a few more items to study. I think it would make sense to display numbers for grammar and vocabulary reviews separately in the review forecast. Same potentially for all other statistics on the dashboard and on the stats page.

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I’ve kind of waffled back and forth over the last week on whether or not to try the vocab part out. Based on what I have seen on the decks page and the responses here, I have decided against it until there is some different functionality. However, that got me thinking about the features that would make vocabulary useful on this site, so I wanted to give my feedback. Sorry in advance if some of this has been said before.

I want to start with some background. I am a long-time Japanese learner, however I am very rusty after making it through Genki I and II in university quite a few years ago. I am a low level on Bunpro and Wanikani after recenty coming back to it. I have tried quite a few sites in the past few years for vocab, but I always find that to be the most challenging part to stick to and have not liked Anki, Kitsun, Torii, etc. That being said, I love Bunpro and Wanikani, and I think I might be your target audience for this feature!

I think for me to want to use the vocab feature on this site, the most useful situation would be the following: I am doing grammar sentences and I know all but one word, so I click on it, a lesson pops up, and I add it to my separate vocab reviews. Now, whenever that word pops up again in in my grammar reviews, it is also reinforcing that new vocab word. There could be an 'I already know that word" button for those easy peasy words. When I finish the end of the N5 grammar, I would then dump the remaining N5 words into my vocab reviews to make sure I know those too. Ideally, the example sentences for N5 words would contain N5 grammar only, so that it is also reinforcing grammar that I would hopefully know by that point. To go along with that, I quite dislike the vocab being in alphabetical order and would love to be able to order it by occurence on Bunpro.

Just wanted to share my dream vocab situation!

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We have had this concern raised by a few different members, but we would like to reiterate that the grammar side of the website will continue receiving the same amount of care that it always has. The team has expanded quite a bit in the last year, which means that we are able to tackle more time intensive/possibly even slightly ambitious projects. On that new team, not everybody is a grammar expert first and foremost, so we have different people working on their specialty areas.

In addition to this, one of the main focuses of the vocabulary is that it uses grammar that is already being taught in the same level. So we aren’t speading our efforts in grammar thin, but actually adding far more exposure chances for grammar within a specific level. For example, the first 3 or 4 sentences within the N5 vocabulary examples will all have N5 grammar used in them, the last 3 or 4 have harder grammar/longer sentences. This will continue to be the same for each progessing N-level, the first 3 or 4 sentences for any vocabulary will have grammar from the same level as it was found in.

I definitely agree with this. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to transition to using the context sentences for learning vocabulary, which means that we will be working very hard over the next few weeks/months to incorporate everything into the process that will make that possible.

Although it is possible that we would do the audio for the context sentences, we may initially focus on having audio for just the new words, both male and female. This is currently in discussion though, so no promises yet. We definitely agree that it is important to hear the pronunciation for new words at least, even if the example sentences themselves do not have audio.

On the vocab side of things, we feel that being a grammar focused resource is what gives us a unique opportunity. While we may need to iron out the system that incorporates vocabulary, we already have the ability to work the vocabulary seamlessly into your grammar studies, with guranteed sentences available at the level you are studying, and with a few more difficult ones left over for when you progress a bit further and want to try out longer/tougher sentences. There may definitely be vocab sources that do vocab better right now, but we have a very passionate team, are constantly making changes/optimizations, and are trying to find the best way to make our strength (Grammar), something that can be converted into ‘in context + understandable’ vocabulary learning as well.

We aren’t necessarily trying to compete with other resources specifically, just take what we already do, and turn it into an environment that is 100% conducive to learning. Regardless of the projects that we take on in the future, we as a team (and I personally as well) would like to assure you that our primary goal will always be to make the process of learning Japanese as easy as possible, regardless of what learning background people come from.

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Sounds like a totally awesome idea!

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I’m sorry to say this, but I see strong indications that you haven’t thought this through well enough. It seems to me that you have had writers write thousands of example sentences while ignoring some fairly major pedagogical problems with how they are going to be used.

Great example sentences for grammar only use vocabulary and concepts that the reader already knows and connects them together in a manner such that the only new part is the grammar. That reduces the overall cognitive load on the reader and allows them to focus solely on the grammar. These sentences are ones the reader could actually put to use in fairly short order.

Great vocabulary example sentences are very different. They have a very simple grammatical structure. For the most part, when they introduce a word, the other words in that sentence have already been introduced, or they are not essential to the overall meaning of the sentence. This makes the relation of the new word to other words stick out. It also makes the example sentence be one that the user could put to use once they have learned that new word.

Great reading practice combines vocabulary and grammar. It is just not isolated sentences, but text where one can see a topic flow from one sentence to the next in a manner that helps one understand the overall context and keeps one engaged.

I don’t think the Bunpro example grammar sentences are great. Too often, they use words and kanji that the reader doesn’t understand. Consequently, the user has to use the English translation as a crutch to understand the words in the sentence, understand its overall meaning, and then to backtrack into inferring the grammatical structure of the Japanese sentence. That’s unnecessarily convoluted and indirect for teaching purposes. I think Bunpro is successful >>in spite of<< the difficulty of its grammar example sentences.

The best vocabulary sentences I have seen to date are in the core 6K deck. They are not quite great because they completely ignore the kanji dimension of Japanese, but they are grammatically simple, the vocabulary is simple, and they demonstrate usage of frequently collocated words.

Your stated goals with your example sentences are to combine grammar and vocabulary, and, I am sorry to say, I think that is not the most effective source for learning either grammar or vocabulary I’d also argue that they also don’t make for very interesting reading practice either…

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a great idea to connect together grammar and vocabulary. For example, if one sees words in a grammar example that one doesn’t understand, it would be great to add it to a vocab deck.
I just think that you need quite different example sentences that are designed for that purpose and are much closer to the core6K sentences than what you currently have. The fact that you don’t have translations available for the example sentences makes it even more important that all the other parts of the sentences be very simple.

Here are a few concrete examples to illustrate my point:

  1. 辞書
    core6K: 彼女[かのじょ]は 辞書[じしょ] をよく 使[つか]います。
    Bunpro N5: 家に辞書が三冊ある。
    Bunpro N5: この辞書はとても古いです。
    Bunpro N4-N2: Too hard for an N5 student.
    It is more useful to learn to say how to use a dictionary than it is to learn how to count them or say that they are old.
  2. 帽子
    Core6K: 帽子[ぼうし]を 被[かぶ]って 外出[がいしゅつ]した。
    Bunpro N5: この帽子はいくら?
    Bunpro N5: その帽子かわいいね。
    Bunpro N4-N2: Too hard for an N5 student.
    The Bunpro example sentences do not help one understand what is being talked about. The core6k sentence includes the frequently collocated 被[かぶ], but it also includes the unnecessarily difficult 外出[がいしゅつ].
  3. 嫌い
    Core6K: 私[わたし]はタバコが 嫌[きら]いです。
    Bunpro N5: 私は虫が嫌いだ。
    Bunpro N5: あなたは野菜が嫌いですか。
    Bunpro N4-N2: Too hard for an N5 student.
    All example sentences are pretty good.

In all cases, the Bunpro N4 and up sentences are too difficult for an N5 student to use when learning these words. If you provided, say, 5 example sentences at the N5 level and 3 at the N4 level each N5 word, I would say you’d have something very useful.
Eventually, you’ll write example sentences for N3 and N2 words. If they are as long as the N3 and N2 example sentences you have produced thus far, then I wouldn’t want to use them for learning vocabulary. They are simply too long and convoluted. Again, great vocab sentences are not the same as great grammar sentences which are also not the same as great reading practice.

Of course, I have completely ignored the kanji dimension, but if you intend to get into vocabulary, you can’t ignore it. Right now, Bunpro tends to be very kanji heavy. However, the entire N5 level only contains 100 kanji, and Genki 1 only teaches 145. Students need a gradual exposure to kanji without being overwhelmed. Of the sites I have seen, I think Satori reader does the best with kanji by supporting a range of controls for kanji (including a custom import list, which is what I need :slight_smile: ) plus the option to use hiragana with spaces between words.

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Ouch. I think the opening language in your comment is a bit harsh, but I think the points you lay out in the rest of your post are rational and interesting.

It’s nice that you included specific examples to go with the overall idea that you are presenting.

Which app is this with? I’ve used a core 6000 deck in the app iKnow, but I don’t think their sentences are particularly great. (I think what iKnow does well is present vocab in multiple formats – written, audio, picture – and read by Japanese actors.)

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These kind of contradict each other IMO, the core decks (both the original layout and also the 1000000000 revisions to the order people have made) don’t build off of that well at all until much later on. The sentences are relatively simple yeah, but sentences are always going to have random stuff thrown in there you’ve never seen before.

But all of this is personal preference obviously. To me, the core deck sentences never challenge you (I stopped the core deck around ~3k, wasn’t hitting useful vocab past that point) whereas with Bunpro I’m constantly learning new words and also seeing things in different scenarios. I learn when I’m challenged, if I’m not stumbling then I’m not learning. Again, purely personal preference regarding that.

Are there a ton of example sentences pertaining to grammar that doesn’t use grammar already taught? I’d be shocked if there were an outrageous amount. The sentences are built using the Bunpro path in mind to help keep some semblance of cohesion, thankfully with the recent changes they’ve put a lot of emphasis on things related to this.

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