Vocab Rework

[Cakeyflames]

I love BunPro, I really do. I think it’s a great resource for people learning Japanese and it’s usually what I recommend to people when they ask what to do about grammar. However, the vocab section is extremely lacking in understandable progression. What I mean by this, is that the N5 and N4 lists have tons of words that just aren’t for that level. Like, where is gynaecologist showing up in a test that’s meant to be the early stages of Japanese learning??? And there’s also a lot of very useful words that either show up far later than they should (私, 近づく,日々 are all somehow N2??) or don’t show up at all. If you only studied vocab from Bunpro, you would never learn how to count. Like genuinely 1, 2, 3, 4 and all the rest do not show up on any of the JLPT vocab lists. I get that the lists are based for the JLPT so maybe that’s why they have so many weird words so early on but as a service the N rating system is considered the default for what you’re going to study. If I was a completely new user I wouldn’t think to select one of the community made decks when I could be selecting the official one done by Bunpro. I’ll still continue using Bunpro but it is slightly frustrating as I’m given more and more useless vocab like orthopaedic surgery while knowing there’s a lot of useful words than I don’t know and I’m not learning.

Sorry for the rant, just had to crash out after having like 20 medical terms in a row, I still love you Bunpro <3

[Cakeyflames]

Quick Update, just learnt the word for “soft shelled turtle”, like cmon Bunpro in N4??? Soft shelled turtle???

[Bezmolwie]

@Cakeyflames

y do. I think it’s a great resource for people learning Japanese and it’s usually what I recommend to people when they ask what to do about grammar. However, the vocab section is extremely lacking in understandable progression. What I mean by this, is that the N5 and N4 lists have tons of words that just aren’t for that level. Like, where

I’m pretty sure everyone had a crash out when learning ophthalmologist and similar terms in their n5 deck You are not alone.

[rdennison7]

Yeah…honestly, it’s pretty bad onboarding. I looked at the N5 vocab deck and really question why most are in it.

I want to know what the motivation behind the ordering of these words and placement. It gives the impression that they were added and then will be sorted eventually.

If I was just learning Japanese and dug into the N5 deck, I would be pretty frustrated, which isn’t helpful.

Actually, if they based the order of the vocab based on the order you see them in the grammar lessons, that would be much more helpful. I was comparing the example sentences in the early N5 grammar and that would be far easier to learn for newbies:

@Asher what do you think?

[Asher]

Hi there and thanks for expressing your concerns @Cakeyflames. Rest assured that you are not the first person to have noticed this.

To address the most egregious offender straight away, a lot of (if not all) of the ‘why on earth is this here’ vocabulary that you will find in the N5 and N4 decks is due to early integration that we did with the JLPT list and the vocabulary lists that can be found in Genki. We have had the discussion internally several times of redoing our lists to better reflect the JLPT, but this has consistently been delayed due to us working on grammar and grammar related things.

However this thread has once again ignited that debate and I think that we are finally in a position that we probably want to sort this out as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, the JLPT lists themselves are for the most part unreliable in terms of if you compiled 10 different JLPT N5 lists from 10 different sources, you would probably have close to 2000 unique items, where N5 students are realistically only expected to know 7~800. So this leaves a lot of room for interpretation with words that are all genuinely extremely common.

At the moment, the way that we are thinking of handling this (although still undecided), is giving users a more customized choice of what kind of deck they would like to study when they first start learning with Bunpro. Whether that be pure frequency, JLPT, or themed. The first 2 are fairly self explanatory, but themed would be a deck split into chapters based on applicable situations such as ‘family’, ‘work’, ‘school’, ‘greetings’, etc etc. The TRY textbooks are a good example of a source that does this, and are actually my personal favorite in terms of the way they approach vocabulary.

We are also planning on setting up an official deck with common counters as well, which I would like to have available as soon as possible.

@rdennison7 my only concern with having a deck that introduces the vocab from the Bunpro grammar path is that it would start to break down in terms of coherency quite quickly once you got past the first few hundred words, due to the vast majority of those sentences being written before we were even considering having vocab on Bunpro at all. I think the easiest way for us to have a semi-reliable Bunpro deck is by integrating it with the JLPT deck, as the JLPT deck is the one that is the most ‘open to interpretation’ by many different sources.

In any case, we apologize for the headache, and assure you that reorganizing the vocab is something that is quite high on our list of priorities in the coming months.

To wrap up, a slight joke that a lot of users have brought up in the past is how out of place 眼科 feels in the N5 deck, but that once you come to Japan it becomes a word that you see basically every day on signs or advertised in trains and buses .

[rdennison7]

Wow, I didn’t anticipate a detailed and thoughtful response, thank you.

It sounds like a rock and a hard place type of situation. As I am painfully going through each grammar point at a snail’s pace, I can try making a “principle’s first” vocab deck with words I see in the grammar points and see if that’s a helpful metric.

Or even might be worth merely re-ordering the existing N5 deck to be more inline with what you see in the grammar points first, then diverges the deeper you get into the deck.