文プロ(Bunpro): Kana, GoKana, new Onboarding & more! - October, 2024 - Japanese Grammar and Vocab SRS

ZenMaster · February 1, 2024, 5:13am

Hey everyone!

A few weeks ago we shined some light on a little project that had been getting worked on behind the scenes - the Teacher Dashboard.

Today we’ve released a new feature related to this called Profile Sharing!

Based on feedback and requested features from you all as well as discussions internally about our past experiences with tutoring, you can now instantly create a snapshot of your recent performance on Bunpro to share with whomever you want.

Some potential ways you can use this:

You can quickly show a new tutor where you are and what you have recently learned.
You can share ongoing progress with your current tutor or teacher.
You can quickly cover troubled grammar and recently missed sentences.
You can go over upcoming content before adding it to your queue on Bunpro.
You can compare your progress with a friend’s

Let’s take a quick peek at what it looks like:

First, go under Profile > Settings > Share to find where the shareable link is located.
Or you can just click here.

To help keep your information private, the link created will expire after 7 days, at which time it can be refreshed.

If for any reason you need to block access to the previous link, you can disable it and generate a new one. The new one will be unique, and the old one will no longer work.

Moving back to the design of the feature, it has all of the important information pulled from your account & dashboard. While there aren’t any major changes here for the user, the benefit is allowing anyone to get a great overview of how you’ve been performing recently.

The goal is that eventually the two parties become linked via the Teacher Dashboard so you don’t need to share your link all the time. However, we know that it sometimes takes trying many different instructors to find one you truly gel with, so the Profile Sharing feature is a great way to bridge the gap temporarily.

Please don’t hesitate to let us know if there are additional data points you would like to be able to share. We hope you enjoy this new feature!

ZenMaster · April 8, 2024, 7:10am

Hi all!

We have just released an onomatopoeia deck on Bunpro. You can find the deck under the Non-JLPT category in our deck library. Click here to visit the deck page directly.

An onomatopoeia deck has been a long-standing request that we have had from users, and we feel that we finally have a big enough library of vocabulary that we could offer something that was quite comprehensive.

Okay, let’s get stuck into the meat of this post.

Making an Onomatopoeia Deck

As many of you would already know, onomatopoeia is one of the hardest areas of Japanese to study. This is primarly due to the vast range of combinations that really only differ in very small ways. However, native Japanese speakers usually don’t have any difficulty at all with these words, despite their vast numbers and similarities. The reason for this is something that is often overloooked when studying Japanese, but can be extremely helpful. This feature is called sound significance.

Sound significance?

Sound significance is exactly as the name states. The significance or ‘meaning’ of any sound. In Japanese, all sounds have a meaning. A very brief guide on the subject can be found here on Tofugu.

As a TLDR, here is an example. Which one of these sounds is more open, か or き? … か, right? How about which one is lower pitched, ち or こ? … that would be こ. This ‘feeling’ that sounds have is sound significance.

For our deck, we have chosen to start by introducing a set of very common onomatopoeia words, as well as some common animal sounds etc, before we dive directly into sound significance. A brief set of words then introduces all the sounds, and what they tend to signify. Sometimes direct translations of onomatopoeia to English can be quite poor, so we recommend using and attempting to memorize the very brief descriptions in the chapter headings to give you a better mental image of what each sound means.

As an example of the limitation of english, let’s pretend that a word is translated as ‘complete’. However, is it complete and solid? complete and brimming to the point of bursting? complete and precise or finely detailed? complete in terms of being all used up? If you learn the sound meanings, which type of ‘complete’ will become clear.

Additional Onomatopoeia

There is an almost ridiculous amount of onomatopoeia in Japanese. In our deck, we have included over 800, but we will continue to update the deck with any categories of words that we are currently missing, or with more examples of words that fit in already existing groups.

Enjoy!

We hope that our approach to the topic and the creation of this deck will help you all get a solid grasp of onomatopoeia. We may continue to make slight adjustments to chapter titles etc over the coming weeks if we can think of descriptions that are easier to grasp or understand. Once you’ve mastered the topic, you’ll definitely have a lot more fun with Japanese as these funny little words start to really make the language spring to life!

Happy studying!

Phryne · April 8, 2024, 7:21am

I am insanely hyped for this. Thanks!!

ZenMaster · April 26, 2024, 9:10pm

Hi All!

This is a little announcement about the first batch of new grammar that we have put on the site, and some plans that we have going forward with the grammar in general.

What’s New?

We have added a set of grammar points that include several that were missing from the N-Levels, and many that are Non-JLPT. This ‘Non-JLPT’ label will be important as we go forward, as we have chosen to avoid the name ‘N0’, due to it possibly giving the impression that the grammar points are harder than N1. Realistically, many of them are very easy, but simply not included as part of standard JLPT grammar learning flow.

Here’s a list of what we have added this time around.

ぞ Particle
ぜ Particle
わ Particle
い Particle
ん (Slang)
つ (Slang)
～やがる
 がいい
 かろう
 やや
 いずれも
 あわよくば
 あり
 おおよそ
 ～ざる
 ならともかく
 んじゃない

As you may be able to see from this list, for our first batch of post-N1 grammar, we have chosen to add things that have the highest value as a priority. Many of these structures will be things that you have seen in various forms of media in the past, as almost all of them are exceptionally common.

For the several that are actually JLPT grammar, they are already available in their respective grammar decks to study!

Non-JLPT

There are many common structures in Japanese that are not officially considered part of, or incorporated into the JLPT grammar lists. However, this does not mean that they are not valuable to learn. Going forward, we will be adding more and more grammar into this Non-JLPT list to Bunpro, with a focus on adding the more common ones before we start to tackle some of the far less common grammar points.

Non-JLPT grammar does not have its own deck yet, but we are working on getting it set up as soon as possible! Until such time, the grammar points are all fully functional, and you can add them directly to your review queues from the links provided in this post!

Moving Forward

We have a big list of grammar that we would like to continue releasing in batches throughout this year, with somewhere between 15 to 20 new grammar points being the goal each time. Ideally we would like to have released around 100 by the end of 2024.

We will continue to focus on releasing things in batches of priority/commonness, so that users are able to incorporate them into their studies as something that is actually useful first and foremost. As many of the grammar points in this first release are so common, we will be adding them into things like the bookclub decks as well, considering many of them show up very quickly, and may provide a challenge for those who have never seen them before, especially the slang structures!

Important note - As ‘Non-JLPT’ is not something that we consider to be part of the standard learning path on Bunpro, we have put an emphasis on creating easy to understand sentences, rather than focusing too heavily on using other grammar on Bunpro in the sentences as well. Due to this, anything in the Non-JLPT deck will only ever use grammar that is N5, N4, or in the first few lessons of N3. This will mean that many users can tackle the content, without having to be too high in level as a prerequisite!

As Always!

A big thanks to everyone that has provided feedback about the type of extra content they would like to see on Bunpro, and we hope that a lot of the things that we will be adding this year are going to be of really high value in terms of allowing people to dive straight into native content, without any ‘grammar surprises’ lurking in the first few pages/scenes!

Hope you all have a fantastic weekend!

ZenMaster · June 1, 2024, 8:56am

The long awaited time has come…

A certain feature has been requested by the Community for quite a while, and we’re happy to announce:

Decks, and more importantly Vocab, are now available for practicing inside of Cram!

You’ll also notice Cram now uses the new quiz screen/system.
This also now allows us to not have to maintain two entirely different quizzing systems at the same time, and gives you some of the quality-of-life improvements during Cram.

Flashcards… for Grammar??

Yes! You can now test Grammar using the Reveal-and-Grade input type in Bunpro.
Simply select Flashcard as the Cram Type, and have some Grammar Points in your list before hitting Cram.

We’re sorry for the wait!
It did indeed take us a while, but there were some fundamental technical changes that needed to happen behind the scenes before we were able to implement this.

In regards to the timing, we wanted to get this change out for everyone before JLPT in July so you can all make ample use of it before the big day.
Now with the ability to Cram vocab and grammar at the same time, we hope it serves to be a great tool to get some last-minute studying in for those with upcoming tests!

Happy studying!
The team at Bunpro

ZenMaster · June 8, 2024, 11:21am

Hey everyone, I hope you’re all doing well! I’m here with an update to the N5 Reading Practices!

We’ve recently gone through and updated the existing reading practices for the N5 level and added some new ones as well! These were all written by our amazing native speakers to help show how the N5 grammar can be used in a variety of situations.

Some of these updates are minor adjustments to make sentences more natural, while others change the structure of the passage to fit better into the N5 category.

As with previous reading practices, each lesson will have its own dedicated discussion post where we encourage you all to ask questions and share your thoughts on the passages.

For those of you already past N5, worry not! Work on updates and additions to the N4 and above levels are already well underway and will also be coming soon!

Lastly, you can now view a portion of all of the reading passages on the site without needing an account or subscription. With 140 level appropriate reading passages on the site now, they are a great way to brush up on some reading practice before the upcoming JLPT!

ZenMaster · June 17, 2024, 12:47pm

Hello again everyone!

This is just a tiny post to let you all know that the N4 reading passages have also been updated just like the N5 reading a couple of weeks ago.

All existing passages have been rewritten to be more level appropriate and natural and we’ve also added a few new reading passages for each lesson.

https://bunpro.jp/reading_passages

Updates to the other levels are already underway and will be coming out when they’re complete.

As always, we welcome and encourage any questions or comments you may have about the reading updates!

Keep up the hard work everyone!

Vidar00 · June 28, 2024, 10:09am

I’m trying to sign up for a Bunpro account and the website never proceeds past the section asking for a username, email, and password. Would appreciate some assistance when time permits. Thank you!

ZenMaster · June 28, 2024, 11:53am

Thanks for reaching out. Do you have any ad blockers or addons enabled? We sometimes have had users mention a similar issue and disabling them on the site allowed them to sign up.

Vidar00 · June 28, 2024, 12:17pm

Tried that, sign-up screen progressed to an infinite loading circle. Now I can’t register with the same email because the site says it’s already been taken, but trying to login with the email and password from my previous attempt spits back an “invalid login” error.

ZenMaster · June 28, 2024, 12:50pm

Could you send me an email at jake@bunpro.jp with your username and the browser you are using please? I will take a look!

Vidar00 · June 28, 2024, 1:05pm

Email sent. Thank you!

Akashelia · June 28, 2024, 1:44pm

Have you changed your mind on that? I’m seeing N0 and not Non-JLPT

ZenMaster · July 1, 2024, 1:30am

Thanks for the reminder!

ZenMaster · July 16, 2024, 2:24am

Hey all!

We recently released a listing for a job opening on our Career’s page. Here are the details:

Title:

Mobile App Designer - UI/UX

Role:

We are seeking a passionate UI/UX Designer who specializes in mobile app design to join our team! The ability to think critically from a user perspective and work from initial research and prototypes through to validation and final implementation is important for this role. During your first year at Bunpro, you will lead a total overhaul of the Bunpro mobile app, taking a mobile first approach and redesigning it from the ground up. We are looking for an individual who enjoys making beautiful, user friendly interfaces and is excited about the prospect of redesigning the Bunpro mobile app to take it to the next level.

Requirements:

Experience: UI/UX design experience, in particular, experience designing from a mobile first approach.
Skills: Proficiency with collaborative design tools. We use Figma.
Knowledge: Solid understanding of design principles, design thinking, responsive design, usability and user-centric design.
Proactiveness: Ability to think critically and solve complex design problems creatively.
Best Practice Awareness: Familiarity with the design guidelines for both iOS and Android platforms.
Familiarity with Bunpro (Ideal but not required): Experience learning Japanese, specifically through Bunpro, and a passion for language learning and education.
Branding Experience (Bonus but not required): Experience or interest in working on branding and graphic design.

How to Apply:

If you’re interested in applying, please send us an email to admin@bunpro.jp containing the following:

Your resume and your most up to date portfolio primarily focusing on designing for mobile.
An example case study of an issue you’ve worked on (It does not need to be from a real project, we just want to see how you tackle an issue and work through it).
Answers to the following questions:
- Why are you interested in Bunpro and this role in particular?
- What are the top three professional strengths you would bring to this role?
- What two professional/career highlights are you most proud of? Why?
- Can you describe your design workflow from concept to final product?

Salary:

￥5-6m depending on experience and skill set

Here is the link to the job listing: https://bunpro.jp/careers/mobile-app-designer-ui-ux.

Additionally, if someone you know would be a good fit for the role, we would love it if you would share it with them!

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Thank you!

ZenMaster · August 7, 2024, 1:21am

Learn 3.0 – Navigation Evolved

This feature update includes some TLC to the Learn system.

Purpose

We received a lot of feedback from new users that the old Learn navigation system (with the arrows next to the Grammar/Vocab title and the little 1/3-style progress indicator in the corner) was just not clear enough to convey how a user was meant to use Learn.

We agreed, and thought of a way to make this pretty simple process a lot easier to grasp for new users.

Progress Display

We switched to using a pellet-based system – similar to what’s inside the Dashboard Learn dropdown menu – for smaller sessions, and a progress-bar based system for larger ones (~10+ on smaller screens, ~20+ on larger ones).

We feel that (finally) this system is self explanatory.
Use the Previous / Next buttons to navigate through the items, and click on the pellets/progress bar itself to go directly to items.

Large session:

Small session:

Screenshots of all the possible states

Mobile (small session)

Mobile (large session)

Desktop (small session)

Screenshot 2024-08-02 at 12.31.52 PM

Desktop (large session) /w progress bar clicked

Finally, the Next button changes to Start Quiz, and you quiz the items you just learnt.

Hotkeys

Hotkeys remain unchanged – use the ← / → keys to progress through the items.

Hitting the → key on the last item will bring up the Quiz Time! popout.
Hitting Enter here will start the quiz.

Just like on the item’s individual pages themselves, you can use the D / E / R hotkeys to access Details / Examples / Resources respectively.

Removed the Navbar

We made a calculated decision to remove the navbar during your Learn session. This reduces distractions from the item you’re studying, and gives you slightly more vertical space while Learning.

You can return to your homepage using this lil chicken nugget (button) in the top left corner:

No Beta?

No Beta! We felt this feature was a straight up improvement over the old system, and the technical overhead of managing the two systems at once wasn’t worth the extra time.

That being said…

If you have any feedback or critiques at all, as per usual, leave them below and we’ll try to get to them ASAP.

What’s Next?

We have some other, bigger projects coming up next, so stay tuned!
Don’t touch that dial

ZenMaster · August 29, 2024, 5:35pm

Hi Everyone!

This is just a brief update post to let you all know that both the N2 and N1 vocab decks are now ready to be used as cloze/fill in the blank.

N2 and N1 together include roughly 30k sentences that you can use for immersive reading practice!

Naturally you will be able to use whichever type of review best suits your learning style, but as always, we recommend cloze style in order to get the most practice possible producing words from memory.

In addition, the audio for these sentences (Microsoft Azure AI) is now also available!

We hope that these additions make study easier for everyone, and encourage you to let us know if you have any feedback.

We will have more additional decks coming soon with extra vocabulary not usually included in the N-level tests, but nonetheless common in everyday life. Of course, they will all include the professionally written example sentences that you have all come to expect!

I hope you have all had a fantastic week, and are preparing to have an even better weekend!

All the best,
The Bunpro team

ZenMaster · September 13, 2024, 9:33pm

New Feature Roundup

Like we did last time, we’ve got a bunch of miscellaneous features we’ve released that aren’t each big enough for their own announcement.

Anyway, without further ado:

Vocab TTS audio added

We’ve added AI-generated TTS (text-to-speech) audio for all JLPT, A-list and E-list Vocab.

This means that when you are doing Translate-type reviews, you will get the audio for the individual Vocab items now.

This audio is also available in the same place as Pitch Accent on the individual Vocab pages.

Hide TTS Audio

In the same vein as us adding more TTS audio, we have also implemented this long requested feature.

You can now turn off TTS audio, which will hide it from wherever it would usually display.

This setting is called Hide TTS Audio, and can be found under Content Display on the General Settings page.

To reiterate, as the warning under the setting mentions, TTS Only applies to Vocab. Grammar sentences contain no TTS audio.

Daily Wanikani Sync

We have changed how linking your Wanikani account works here. Gone are the days of needing to periodically import the latest changes!

You now have the option to turn on “Daily Sync” which will get the latest changes with your api key.

We have additionally added a “Mark as Mastered” setting. If this is turned on, when you use the “Import once now” button or toggle on the daily sync, any imported vocab from Wanikani will be marked as mastered, otherwise it will import it for additional practice.

Vocab JLPT Progress

Another relatively common feature request we get is the addition of JLPT Progress bar support for Vocab items.

As part of our mission to increase the parity of feature support for Vocab and Grammar, this upgrade has been added to the Dashboard, in the same location as before.

So you won’t have to toggle through them each time, your last state will be preserved between sessions when toggling through the Grammar/Vocab/Mixed types.

New Search page

We’ve also added a new Search page, that replaces the old Vocab Search page (/vocabs).

This allows us to link a shared, unified Search page wherever the magnifying-glass icon buttons exist.

This is actually a stop-gap feature, of which we will drastically build upon in a future update.

The added features for this stopgap though, are as follows:

Results count and a better grid display
Filtering and sorting the results of the Search
- Tip: Filter by Grammar-only to greatly increase Grammar-only search speeds
- Sort by Relevance, JLPT and SRS levels
Storing and loading query params in the URL bar
- E.g. /search?query=ですが
- This is great for advanced users that have search integration tools that work based on URL queries
Fuzzy searching for English
More comprehensive searches when searching in both English or Japanese

Hide “Latest Community Discussions”

For those that find the Latest Community Discussions section on the Dashboard just too tantalizing when trying to study…

We have added a setting called Hide Community Discussions.
It can be found under the Dashboard section on the General Settings page.

Notes Updates

Notes has been moved to the sidebar

As many of you may have noticed, Notes has been moved to the sidebar.

It will stick to the sidebar as you scroll down the Vocab/Grammar page, allowing you to take Notes while viewing the content

Auto-sync

Notes will automatically be saved as you edit them.
The state of the automatic saving being displayed by the cloud icon in the top right of the Note

Expanded Notes Editor

Next to the cloud icon, is another new addition.

Clicking it will expand the Note editor to fill up half of your screen, for those lengthier Notes.

Anyway, that’s it for this Quality of Life™️ update!

We hope you enjoy the new features, and, as always, please feel free to let us know your thoughts!

Have a great day and happy studying!

The Bunpro Team

taiyousea · September 13, 2024, 10:13pm

THANK YOU!!! I was looking for this the other day, you guys are always on top of it Thank you for your hard work

ZenMaster · October 2, 2024, 5:25am

Good day fellow Bun-pros.
We’ve been toiling away at a new set of features, and finally get to announce them to you lovely people!

A big part of the Bunpro Experience™️ that was in dire need of a facelift was helping new users get off to the right start when first joining.

Once you finished signing up for Bunpro, you were asked a few questions, then thrown feet first into the fire.
There was no explanation of features, and you were basically out of luck if you couldn’t read hiragana and katakana.

We have added a bunch of new features to help make those first few steps when learning with Bunpro a little less painful.

To help remedy these issues, we present the following:

Bunpro’s Complete Guide to Learning Kana

On the Kana page, you’ll find a fully-featured tool for learning Hiragana/Katakana and all their combinations and modifications!

More Screenshots

Features:

All Hiragana, Katakana, and combinations
- Split into bite-sized sections
- Complete with description, fun facts, and other info
Pronunciation and typing info
Natively recorded audio
Mark each row of kana items as ‘Read’
- Which enables…
Kana Practice Quizzes for drilling each of the items (with audio)

And…

Printable Kana charts, Bunpro-themed

You’ll find them scattered throughout the Kana page, and aggregated in the Resources section at the bottom.

Here are some direct links to them too for those curious:

Once you’ve learnt all those darned kanas, you can test your knowledge, IN THE ARENA!

Introducing…

GoKana

We recently added GoKana, to Bunpro, a neat little app originally developed by Brody Smith!

It’s a neat little kana flashcard arcade game that features a leaderboard, native audio, sound feedback, and cool animations

Compete for a high score in each of the many different hiragana/katakana combinations!

Screenshots

Onboarding & Tour

An Onboarding is a process that helps new users quickly customize the product to their needs and hit the ground running. Our goal with this update was to create a smoother experience for all the people that are completely new to Bunpro, setting up for success in record time.

If you ever wanted to invite someone to join Bunpro, now’s a great time!

Onboarding

Features…

Level select
- Select between not only N5 to N1 as your level, but also ‘Absolute Zero’ – which will take you through learning Kana before you start at N5
Optional textbook selection
- Set a textbook as your Deck right during the Onboarding, otherwise choose between Grammar, Vocab or Both as your content type.
Pace Selection
- With concrete indicator of items learned per day
Time to fnish
- A indicator of how long it will take to finish your chosen Deck/contents
Confetti upon finishing Onboarding

Screenshots

All steps included

Tour

Through the Tour you’ll receive a much overdue intro to the Learn system (both the Lesson and Quiz steps ), the Summary and the Dashboard pages (including the Learn dropdown).

Screenshots

Only a few steps from the Tours are screenshotted.

Anyway, that about wraps it up for this update!

The bad news:

Most of you are long-time users, who are well beyond benefitting from this new set of Bunpro-branded training wheels.

The good news

You get to use your battle-hardened prowess to dominate the leaderboard in GoKana.

On a more serious note, with all this beginner-focused goodness now done and dusted, we now have cleared up time again to 100% focus on features that you can all enjoy!

As always, please let us know any feedback, we read it all and it means a lot to us.

Thanks and as always, happy studying!
The Bunpro Team

PS: App versions of GoKana and Kana will be out shortly