Hey! Just branched in to the vocab section this week and I’m liking it a lot so far.
Just one question: as I’ve started adding more words via lookup, I’ve noticed that some of them have a mystery label like A3, A7, A11, etc. What does this mean? The N3/N2/N1 categories are helpful in understanding how “advanced” a word is, but I don’t know what to make of these A levels.
Edit: This reply is now redundant - it was replying to a comment about A-levels.
Is there a reason you think this? A-levels are just the standard exams students sit at 17/18 in the England. The system used to have AS and A2 levels (I think it is just one set of exams now at 18 so this langauge is old - not sure as I don’t live in the UK now). A3, A7, etc has no meaning in that system. I also don’t see why Bunpro would randomly attach vocab to the British school system when I think literally less than 500 students sat A-level Japanese according to recent statistics (could be misremembering as I checked that information over a year ago).
They are just additional lists beyond the N level system. A stands for additional, and the number is just where it comes after N1. There is no specific difficulty level with the numbers though, they’re just ordered in (relative) level of frequency.
Are there plans to expose any of these additional vocab words in a deck or other list? I’ve been finding that the vast majority of expressions and vocab words I’ve added recently from novels tend to pop up as A level rather than JLPT, so I’d be keen to have some way of systematically studying them rather than adding them wily-nily.
Yep. We’re planning on adding them as decks. They’ll all have 8ish example sentences just like the N-level vocab.
Amazing! Looking forward to it, thank you!
That makes sense. I really appreciate having the pure, additional mass of all the A content. I think it makes it a viable Anki alternative in that I can just plop stuff in to ad-hoc as I come across it reading. The prospect of future voice-along support and example sentences makes it all the more so.
To clarify, are the lower levels of A the relatively more frequent content? e.g. A1 (common) → A20 (rare)? Further, can I assume that the frequency is on a completely separate track from the N stuff? That is to say, that A1 would be extremely common words that just happen to not be in the sanctioned N5 testing material, and not words which are even more rare than N1, say.
The lower levels are relatively more frequent, but you will definitely find some harder words in the lower levels and some easier words in the higher levels. The frequency is reading frequency, but there is also a lot of random words that come from games/shows as well.
You’re also correct in your assumption that A1 is purely based on frequency rather than actually being ‘rarer’ than N1. We are still continuing to make new additional lists, but it is getting longer and longer between making the lists now as we generally don’t see new words too often. That said, there could be words within scientific fields etc that we are missing, but these will also be added in the future once the vocab feature is fully released and we start to allow things like deck building/requests for new words on top of the content that is already available.
Small edit - As of now we have 16 additional lists, all with 1000 words each. Adding on to the N-levels, that’s over 25k words all up.
Out of curiosity, if we come across words or expressions that we aren’t able to find through Bunpro’s vocab search function, would you like us to report them? And if so, what would be the preferred method?
I actually have a list that I was using to keep track of which items I’d added to Bunpro vs items I couldn’t find, so am happy to share them if you feel that it’s something that would be helpful.
For the time being, you’re probably better off letting me know personally through a PM on the forums. Unfortunately not all words will show up on the site search that are actually in our lists yet, so I can let you know pretty quickly if we have it already, or add it to the list if we don’t.
Any words are fine! We will be adding categories and things like filters for obscenities etc in the future so that users that don’t want to learn those types of words can avoid them. We don’t plan on ‘banning’ words outright as it’s all learning so long as the student approaches it as such.
This is super exciting! Once I’ve shored up my fundamentals it would be really cool to like, crack open a “words often seen in IT” or “economics” or “politics” deck. Super practical for people trying to break in to a certain sector who may have vocabulary holding them back.
Just jamming here, but I assume this is accomplished via a projection off of a central repository of words based on tagging, like how various textbook decks work for grammar today. Assuming you can wrangle the trust aspect of it, user proposed tags could solve the scaling issue around making hundreds of niche decks for arbitrary topics. Use case: Persona3 Reload is coming out next year and some users might want to bone up on words found in the game beforehand so that they can play through with less dictionary lookups.
Or, take it from another direction: lots of native content that people care about have a script associated with them. Like, this is a list of every word spoken in this book/movie/series/game. There would be some difficulty filtering out extremely basic stuff, which is very user dependent of course, also there’s some risk of spoilers, but script trawling could produce really powerful decks with useful metadata attached. User’s could start pulling words down to help them watch e.g. “Shall we Dance”, and pop them off the deck in order of most to least frequency in the movie, such that they get the 20/80 advantage and can understand most of what is said without learning every single word. Or the deck could be ordered in terms of where the word first appears in the work, allowing them to start chewing on longer works without going through the entire deck beforehand. Best of all, this could be user configured.
Just some ideas! Love to see your team continuing to build out your product 
Industry specific decks and decks for certain shows etc etc are all things that we have planned in the future. There are many decks already freely available for such things, so we would probably incorporate lots of already existing resources as well as user made decks with some form of quality checking process.