「君_ら(は)_池に入るつもり?」 with/without は?

In the above example marked [spoken casual], where the prompt is for the 〜らpluraliser, らは – as in 「君らは池に入るつもり?」– is not accepted.

Am I missing something here (would this e.g. sound stilted with the は in), or is this an oversight?

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Hi there, and thanks for contacting us. While it wouldn’t be incorrect, it is an example of stacking grammar points. There are many questions on the site where a particle/extra grammar point could potentially be added on to the previous one, but the system doesn’t accept those unless they were taught as part of that grammar point itself.

This is primarily to focus the questions on the grammar point that is being asked for, without unintentionally building habits of putting extra things where they may not be needed. Hope this answer helps :blush:

Hi Asher, thanks for the response. I understand your general point – it is certainly good not to encourage extraneous/unnatural use of grammar –, but I’m not sure I follow in this particular case. As you can see, the implementation of this question leaves some people (sample size: 1 :P) with more confusion that it might help resolve.

The grammar point in particular is about the 〜ら plural forms, but not about the fact that in spoken language, subject marker particles are sometimes omitted entirely. Indeed, the sentence from the title is the only example on ~ら | Japanese Grammar SRS where the particle is elided. Particularly as this was one of the first, if not the first, reviews I got for 〜ら, I thus found it quite confusing that らは was counted as completely incorrect, making myself wonder whether I had missed something about the grammar where e.g. 〜ら would replace は.

Disallowing a gramatically correct answer strikes me as especially confusing as in other situations, Bunpro is much more gratuitous with however you call those “not wrong”/“almost there” hints – perhaps one could be added here as well?

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I see what you mean. With pretty much every question on the site, we usually do not make any particles part of the answer, unless that particle gives a specific nuance to the question. For example がほしい | Japanese Grammar SRS. In this case, we make users add が as part of their answer, as remembering ほしい witout also remembering が may make it hard to use in future.

In the case of grammar points where they are not required, they are not part of the required answer (even if they may be correct). The reason is this. If we allow は, people will see it on the list of accepted answers as they cycle through all of the possibilities. This would lead to feedback like ‘oh, I didn’t know は is sometimes required with ら, why isn’t this taught on the grammar point?’. To which we would need to reply ‘it isn’t required as part of ら, it just can fit in this sentence’. This then leads to further ‘but why not が?’, or ‘but why not の?’. Both of those would also be correct, but again would give the sentence a different nuance. If we answered these questions for one sentence, we would have to do it for evey sentence, otherwise it would give the impression that it may actually be correct for one but not the other.
Basically, we don’t want users to start to think certain things are required, when they may not be. Our overall goal is that users remember ら as ら, and not らは. This becomes important much more when very similar things have very different meanings based on what particles are used. For example として, としては, にして and にしては are four different grammar points that differ only in particle usage.

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Thanks for the summary, but as I mentioend, this almost doesn’t matter for me as a learner using Bunpro as a resource; the way the question is implemented had me confused enough to search for uses of 〜ら plurals online, and then post this message here. Just to be clear, I am not trying to prove a point here, or to request some sort of official support response as a customer; I just hope to convince you that this question could be improved for the benefit of future users.

Two observations from my perspective as somebody who is a beginner learner mainly using Bunpro for structured grammar acquisition:

  1. I don’t recall really coming across a discussion of how subject marker particles are sometimes omitted in casual speech, and would have no clue when it is considered “correct”/natural to do so. I guess this might be obvious to somebody more fluent in Japanese, but I am a total beginner (probably not even at N5 level in some areas). Either way, putting an appropriate subject marker particle in seems to be the unquestionably correct choice in terms of “textbook grammar”.

  2. Bunpro often does require “grammar glue” such as の, だ, etc. to be specified as part of the answer. There are probably even some where は is explicitly required (I seem to recall some “can you add something at the end?” hint prompts). It might be true that these forms are then usually enumerated in the grammar point Structure box like you suggest, but honestly, I couldn’t tell if that was the case or not – after all, I am trying to understand and learn the language grammar, not Bunpro’s particular way of presenting it.

Given this, I found it really surprising that らは, which seems to be the straightforward textbook-correct answer, was just counted as wrong without further explanation. I would thus recommend at least adding one of those hint prompts in italics (“not formal enough”/“almost right, but this needs a particle”/…) if 君らは池に入るつもり is given, something like “this is correct, but we didn’t ask for the particle – it can be omitted in informal speech”. Another option might be to just put は in the prompt to side-step the issue and leave the discussion of subject particle omission for another day.

Edit: A big part of why this seems confusing to me is that Bunpro is usually really good about not making you guess one arbitrary out of several possible correct choices without providing extra feedback – which is in fact the main reason I am paying for it.

As a concrete example that just came up my reviews, 「 文プロを使う____、私だ。」wants のは, even though the prompt is only [verb nominalizer], and the Structure box on that page (correctly) only lists の as the nominalizer.

I think this ties back into what Asher explained about grammar points where the particle affects the grammar being quizzed, like in がほしい。 If you were just to say 「文プロを使うの、私だ」this would be strange, so they require the のは because it’s important here and in many different use-cases for this specific grammar point.

On the contrary, it won’t always be は that follows 〇〇ら。Just about any particle could follow the ら-pluralizer, as I’m sure is the case in other example sentences for this grammar, which is why they don’t require the は in this case. It’s not necessary to marry the 〇〇ら concept with the は-particle in this case like it is with the previous grammar point.

In this example, though, answering either の or のが, which are both clearly wrong/weird, isn’t even counted as a wrong answer, but triggers one of these “good guess, but can you mark the topic of the sentence?”-type hints. Precisely because Bunpro is usually this generous, らは just being flat-out rejected in the original example is inconsistent/confusing. I don’t see how adding a similar hint for the latter is anything but an uncontroversial improvement.

On the contrary, it won’t always be は that follows 〇〇ら。

It isn’t always のは either – のが is also very common.

I have added the following as a hint upon entering らは.

‘Great! Let’s remove the particle though, as it is not a required part of this grammar point.’

In general though, I may recommend against using particles when they are not part of the grammar structure itself, as it could result in internalizing patterns that natives would not use.

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Idk, to me the question is still “What makes 君 plural?” and the answer isn’t らは, but ら by itself. As well as は not really vibing with the context of the rest of the sentence here.

But Asher has replied with what the solution I believe you were after, so I’ll stop dragging this out :zipper_mouth_face:

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