Noticias

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! kana-12402×1334 496 KB More Screenshots kana-22746×1106 263 KB kana-32438×1495 147 KB kana-41664×1424 318 KB kana-51660×1424 231 KB kana-61672×1348 223 KB 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 kana-41256×489 17.3 KB 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: Full Hiragana Chart Full Katakana Chart Hiragana Writing Practice Katakana Writing Practice Free Writing Practice Once you’ve learnt all those darned kanas, you can test your knowledge, IN THE ARENA! Introducing… GoKana image1280×720 79.8 KB 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 gokana-11686×1286 96.8 KB gokana-21686×1286 77.2 KB gokana-31686×1286 116 KB gokana-51686×1286 115 KB gokana-61684×1286 141 KB 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 onboarding-12434×1592 192 KB onboarding-22438×1594 262 KB onboarding-31920×1255 103 KB onboarding-42438×1594 214 KB onboarding-52438×1594 276 KB onboarding-62438×1594 319 KB 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. tour-12438×1594 404 KB tour-22438×1590 196 KB tour-32436×1592 216 KB tour-42436×1590 348 KB tour-52436×1590 385 KB tour-72434×1588 415 KB Unfortunately while the Onboarding cannot be re-accessed by existing users, the Tour can! Links to re-access the Tour for those that are curious NOTE: Some parts of the Tour may be broken for existing (post-onboarding) users. https://bunpro.jp/onboarding/tour/learn https://bunpro.jp/onboarding/tour/summary https://bunpro.jp/onboarding/tour/dashboard 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 or bugs you find with this or any of our services, 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 🙇‍♂️

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. vocab-tts-22192×1106 106 KB 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. image889×399 26.6 KB 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. jlpt-mixed850×334 12.3 KB jlpt-grammar726×328 9.57 KB jlpt-vocab728×326 9.6 KB 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). search-12794×1352 241 KB 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 search-21390×718 32.5 KB 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. Screenshot 2024-09-11 at 6.33.52 PM1920×628 91.3 KB 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 notes-12436×1126 248 KB notes-32434×1112 284 KB 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 notes-4886×380 20.6 KB Expanded Notes Editor Next to the cloud icon, is another new addition. notes-5882×384 21.4 KB Clicking it will expand the Note editor to fill up half of your screen, for those lengthier Notes. notes-62434×818 113 KB Anyway, that’s it for this Quality of Life™️ update! We hope you enjoy the new features, and, as always, if you notice anything bugged or sub-optimal, please leave us a reply below and we’ll look into it ASAP. Have a great day and happy studying! The Bunpro Team

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/manual-fill-in. Naturally you will be able to use whichever type of review best suits your learning style, but as always, we recommend the manual style in order to get the most practice possible producing words from memory. Remember, there are two ways to change your review settings. The first is within your profile settings. スクリーンショット 2024-08-30 0045102032×852 114 KB Selecting both Manual and Fill In will enable cloze. However, as the note at the bottom of this screenshot states, settings within your individual decks will take precedence. To alter individual deck settings, you can do it from within the deck page itself. スクリーンショット 2024-08-30 0042572085×1018 201 KB 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 through either the forums or official feedback avenues if you notice anything strange with any of the sentences! 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

Learn 3.0 – Navigation Evolved This feature update includes some TLC to the Learn system. Screenshot 2024-08-02 at 11.30.06 AM2938×1596 248 KB 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. Small session: Screenshot 2024-08-02 at 12.35.30 PM1908×1434 229 KB Large session: localhost_4000_learn_deck_id=261582×108 7.02 KB Screenshots of all the possible states Mobile (small session) localhost_4000_learn_deck_id=26(iPhone SE)750×1334 63.4 KB Mobile (large session) localhost_4000_learn_deck_id=26(iPhone SE) (1)750×1334 61.6 KB Desktop (small session) Screenshot 2024-08-02 at 12.31.52 PM2436×1594 262 KB Desktop (large session) /w progress bar clicked Screenshot 2024-08-02 at 12.33.19 PM2436×1596 272 KB 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? With this published, we’re going to continue to monitor for bugs and other feedback. We have some other, bigger projects coming up next, so stay tuned! Don’t touch that dial

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!

Hey Everyone! Today we would like to announce that we have updated the Search metadata (terms used to return results in search) to make the Search feature far more useful! Searching for Grammar points Up until this update, searching for a grammar point on Bunpro may have not been the best experience, since you had to know exactly what you were searching for, such as まえに, あとで, なきゃ, etc. There may have been times where you weren’t able to find the grammar point you were looking for, or the style of grammar that you were wanting to learn. However, as of now, you can search for grammar points simply by typing in relevant terms. Let’s take a look below for some examples of what we mean by relevant terms. New metadata Relevant terms are what we would usually classify things with by category, such as conjecture, politeness, hearsay, desire, counters, and even parts of speech such as particles and auxiliary verbs. Here are some examples of what this means! BEFORE Before, if you wanted to find the grammar point みたい, you had to search みたい or mitai to pull up the grammar point みたい. Screenshot 2024-06-28 at 15-43-47 Grammar Points Bunpro1102×635 31.9 KB AFTER Now, as long as you know the usage, the part of speech, translation, or the politeness of a grammar point, you can not only find the grammar point you are looking for, but also other grammar points that share some common meaning with the grammar point you are searching for! Typing ‘Counter’ will bring up all grammar points that are used in relation to numbers. Screenshot 2024-06-28 at 15-51-53 Grammar Points Bunpro1028×695 19.6 KB Typing ‘Emphasis’ will bring up all emphatic grammar points. Screenshot 2024-06-28 at 15-50-42 Grammar Points Bunpro1044×732 26.4 KB Typing ‘Particle’ will bring up all particles (you can even go further than this and search by type of particle as well!). Screenshot 2024-06-28 at 15-49-15 Grammar Points Bunpro1051×735 57.7 KB Typing common translations of the grammar points in English will also bring up results! Screenshot 2024-06-28 at 16-16-01 Grammar Points Bunpro1063×664 15.4 KB This is just a few small examples, but there are many things that will now bring up great results! We will also be continuing to add more search terms in the future and fill out any ones that we may have missed in the first place. Thank you! We hope that you find this update useful! We believe that it will make searching for grammar points and finding similar grammar points much easier! We would appreciate any and all feedback about this feature so that we can keep improving it over time. As always thank you for your continuous support! This update is part of a larger ongoing overhaul we are doing to ‘Search’ on Bunpro, and you can expect even more quality of life improvements in the near future! I hope that every one has an amazing day! Fuga

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. See that post here: N5 Reading Practice Update May 31st 2024 All existing passages have been updated to be more level appropriate and natural and we’ve also added a few new reading passages for each lesson. New discussion posts on the forum are also open for each lesson so discuss to your heart’s content! As stated before, updates to the other levels are already underway and will be coming out when they’re complete. As always, we welcome and ecourage any questions or comments you may have about the reading updates! Keep up the hard work everyone!

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 adjustements 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! As always, if you have any questions or comments, ask away and don’t hesistate to tag me! Keep up the hard work everyone!

The long awaited time has come… A certain feature has been requested by the Community for quite a while (c.f. this thread), and we’re happy to announce: Decks, and more importantly Vocab, are now available for practicing inside of Cram! cram-select2322×1358 258 KB 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. gramm-flash-22300×1060 88.8 KB We’re sorry for the wait everyone! 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! As always, this is a new feature, so if you notice any bugs or have any feedback, please leave them as a reply in this thread down below ↓ Anyway, happy studying! The team at Bunpro

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!