@searls We are sorry to hear that you have been experiencing such slow and responsive load times on Bunpro. We do get the occasional report that people are running into latency issues, but we have not been able to find a way to consistently reproduce them on our end. We are constantly trying to improve performance on Bunpro and would appreciate any suggestions that you might have! @anon3564849 and @afunian Thank you for chiming in! Please let us know if you experience any of these issues on specific pages and we will look into ways that we can improve them. Cheers!
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I’m far from being N1 ready for grammar, but I’m wondering if there’s any kind of schedule for expanding N1, or is it just as your team can? Either way is okay, of course the most important thing is that you keep on providing quality grammar content. Just started the trial a few days ago, and I’m really enjoying this site. 感謝しています！
Can anyone recommend for Bunpro, I tried the 30day trial, even though I can see the benefit of the SRS, I didn’t get on that well with the system, but maybe I didn’t give it enough time? I struggle to retain grammar points, even though I may have studied them tens of times, when it comes to practice questions or exam time, I cannot retain the info. I am tempted to give it another go, but wanted to hear from others who love it. Thanks
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I really like it! I was the worst with grammar, but Bunpro really does help me understand and reinforce what I’m meant to know. I was always the person who slowed down a class or tutoring lesson because I couldn’t grasp the grammar point being explained – now I refer to Bunpro and the example sentences and that usually clears up most things for me! I also use it in my self-study in conjunction with a textbook, and I read with the book clubs around here.
I fail a lot on Bunpro, but when I set ghost reviews to minimal in the settings, it all got a whole lot less painful! Some of the trickier grammar points take me quite a while to get consistently right, but over time I’ve found they usually come right.
It’s not quite as “fun” for me as WK, but that’s mostly because it takes me more brainpower to get through reviews. But I think it is totally worth it! If you’re hesitating you could just get 1 paid month to see if you’re getting much out of the system, the prices are quite affordable…
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Excellent thanks for the advice and comments, I’ll definitely look into the monthly sub to begin with
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I like it…how fast did you go? I came to Bunpro with almost zero Japanese grammar, so I went quite slow, or I think I’d have drowned in reviews!
I also stopped new lessons when I got to the end of the N5 grammar for a while, to reinforce it a bit.
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Two weeks ago I started an annual subscription of bunpro. I thought I could learn grammar through reading, but after learning the first 100 items in bunpro I realize that grammar can’t be learned with just ‘learning by doing’. It’s a very large field …
The SRS system is quite different from WK’s. You can freely choose what and when to learn, although there are recommended paths. I normally follow the Tae Kim path, but I also have inserted some items directly from the N5 path.
There is a two level SRS system with ghost reviews for the most reluctant items.
Somtimes it is extremely slow to load. I have also had connection losses.
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At the start, I found it really helpful to turn off the English glosses and then read every example during lessons, guessing the meanings before looking at the English. It makes lessons really slow, but gives you some practice/exposes you to all the examples so that they don’t come as a shock during reviews.
By the time it started getting really tedious, I found I’d gotten used to things enough that I didn’t need it so much.
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thanks for all the comments
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It’s funny about how this is pretty much exactly the opposite of my experience…I guess it goes to show how important the trial is.
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You may find this thread helpful.
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Same, I’ve been loving bunpro so far! While I’m not one of the people that say that immersion is all you need to acquire a language, I don’t think that doing drills over and over is actually going to be as useful for acquiring grammar as some might think.
Ultimately we don’t want to think “Alright 泳ぐ ends with ぐ, so that means it that it’s not 泳ぐて but 泳いで”, we just want to be able to use that knowledge spontaneously, we want to say what feels right and not think about it too much. And I think in that regards, to get a feeling on what’s right and what’s not, exposure / immersion is the best way.
Now, I don’t want to get into this too much since this is a whole other topic, but I just wanted to say that this is one of the reasons I love using bunpro. I use it not to perfect my grammar, but to get familiar with lots of different grammar points in an efficient way. I’m not trying to get everything correct all the time in the SRS, feeling bad for every mistake I make but instead I use it to build somewhat of an understanding of different grammatical structures which is regularly reinforced by the well thought-out SRS. Cause guess what: you don’t need to know everything perfectly in order to understand someone. I’ve heard that the ‘s’ that gets attached to some verbs is something that most foreign learners of English struggle with during early stages of acquiring the language - but even if someone might say ‘she dos’ instead of ‘she does’ that wouldn’t mean they would have trouble understanding a native person using that grammar correctly. But I think I’m about to drift off topic again, so I’ll just stop for now. 
Keep up the great work, I love the website!
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@Buscadon Thank you for your question and for your kind words! We are trying to stick to releasing new N1 lessons weekly or bi-weekly. Currently, boosting performance, fixing bugs, and expanding N1 are our priorities, so we should be able to stick pretty closely to that schedule. Cheers!
@skymaiden, @Cathm2, @2000kanji, @theghostofdenzo, @xplo, @s1212z, and @kerehat Thank you all for your replies to @dispense. We are constantly trying to find ways to boost the performance of the site, including speeding up load times, and enhance your experience with Bunpro. Your comments, feedback, and suggestions help us determine what our priorities should be and how to move forward with Bunpro. Cheers!
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Update! - June 3, 2020
The first five lessons of N1, Lesson 2 are here!
からする - about, or more, over, starts at
にして① - at, over, in, only (after/when/because)
ものを - but, although, if only, I wish I had
であれ - even if, even, no matter
をおいてほかに〜ない - no…but, nothing else but, none other than
We hope that everyone is staying safe.
Cheers!
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I have been trying Bunpro for like 2 weeks now and there is one thing that I find quite annoying. I can’t really use it on my phone (iOS).
The website seems slow and the app (I know still beta) seems to be mainly consisted of a web view. I think if it was build entirely natively (instead of a web view) it would have been nicer to interact with.
The whole experience does not seem very optimized for a mobile device.
I would be fine with it when the whole app experience has a overall different UX than the web app as phone users have different needs to consider as the whole app is navigated with a touchscreen and not a mouse and keyboard so this gap results in confusion for first-time users.
I mean, it’s usable but its not a good user experience yet.
Also, generally an improvement would be to make the whole experience more engaging and gamified. I know it is a grammar program, but currently it feels quite boring. I would advise to look at some other language learning apps and their approaches and get some inspiration - if done well, the userbase will grow and users will be also more sticked to the program (and actually using it more often). I would advise to look at other language learning apps of how they make the experience engaging. Duolingo is a great example of a very engaging UX (and it is not the content or sentences, it’s how they motivate users).
I really like the general approach and the construction of example sentences and I think it is a great resource for learning. Thank you for that^^ But I think there is still a lot that can be improved UX-wise
@esutasan Thank you for your feedback and suggestions. The iOS developer is working on getting native reviews up and running in the app. We do not currently have any plans to further gamify Bunpro. However, we may expand on the XP system and add more badges in the near future. Cheers!
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Audio Update! June 9, 2020
Hey all! @Asher and Haruna have recorded, edited, and uploaded another huge batch of Bunpro sentences!
New N3 audio is now available up to Lesson 5’s しかない.
Big thanks again to @Asher and Haruna!
Cheers!
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Hello! Sorry to cross-post, but I haven’t heard back in the Bunpro community so I thought I’d post here.
Is the Android app supposed to be giving me push notifications? I haven’t been getting any and I’d really like to. It’s the only way I’m able to keep up with reviews within any sort of reasonable timeframe.
Thanks!
@Jamuko Hey! Unfortunately, the Android developer is no longer actively developing the app. Recently, a member of the Bunpro Community started development on BunPyro which might interest you. I apologize for the inconvenience. Cheers!
Ah, thanks for letting me know. Were notifications never implemented? I wasn’t sure if it was just a problem on my end or if the app didn’t support it.
I have downloaded BunPyro but reviews aren’t implemented yet, let alone review notifications. Here’s hoping it gets there soon! 