新着情報

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!

Hi all! As you may have guessed by this title, this is an announcement post about the onomatopoeia deck that we have just released here on Bunpro. You can find the deck under the Non-JLPT category in our deck library. Click here to visit the deck page directly. onomatopoeia-deck1280×720 106 KB 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. Example Sentences With onomatopoeia moreso than other types of words, it is absolutely essential to see many examples of how they are used to be able to truly understand what the underlying meanings or the ‘feelings’ of the words are when compared to similar words. That is why we have put the creation of example sentences for all entries in our onomatopoeia deck at top priority. While many of the entries already have example sentences written by native speakers, we are going to endeavor to have a full set of example sentences for all entries within the deck within 2 weeks. This will be taking priority over our usual vocab sentence creation order, as we feel that the difficulty of the topic as a whole to students warrants it. 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! Thank you all again for encouraging us to create new and engaging material that break down the barriers to learning Japanese one by one. Hope everyone is having a fantastic week!

Hey All! It has been a little while since our last update. However, we have been super busy working behind the scenes on the new Daily Goal System that we teased here, a bit over a month ago. What is the Daily Goal System? Daily Goal is our answer to the two questions many learners on Bunpro have: "How much should I be learning each day?" and "What should I learn next?" The new Learn button will now let you build a queue, where you combine and study a set amount of items daily from any Deck(s). quicklinks-dropdown1147×717 81.6 KB Read on to see how you can make use of this new system! Wait a minute, there are Decks on Bunpro? image1419×579 101 KB For those unaware, we have had a long-running beta for Vocab and Decks inside of Bunpro. These are now fully released, and you can check them out here! image1417×883 108 KB Decks is a new system that allows us to better organize and scale content on Bunpro. There is a Deck equivalent for all previous methods of study on Bunpro, and you’ll be able to find Textbook and JLPT Decks to replace the old Textbook system and/or the old targeted JLPT system. In addition to just replacement Grammar Decks, we also added: New Textbook Decks Extra Content, Like Kansai Dialect Decks Vocab Decks Mixed Learning Decks Use the new Decks home page to quickly browse Grammar, Vocab, and Textbook Decks, or search for a specific Deck and choose whatever Decks you like! Some more Deck-tails: An additional change to Decks is that now, each Deck groups its content within units. If you set the Deck sorting order to ‘Default’ you will see the following: image667×605 31.5 KB Each unit is collapsible, and made up of the content related to that unit. For textbook-based Decks, you will see them broken down into their relevant chapters. image489×568 22.6 KB Note: Textbook based decks are currently undergoing an overhaul to check for accuracy and completeness. Not all have migrated to the new unit based system yet. Learn Button & Learn Queue In the past, the Learn button on your dashboard and ‘Learn’ link in the navbar acted differently depending on whether you were using a textbook, studying Decks or using the default Bunpro path. Furthermore it was impossible to easily mix and match a variety of Decks and study a little from each, each day. Now the Learn button and navbar link will always do one thing and one thing only: get the next relevant material from your Learn Queue. Daily Goal System The new Daily Goal system represents the number of new items you aim to learn from each specific Deck, each day. You can add any number of Decks to your Learn Queue, order them however you like and also set a daily goal number and individual batch size per Deck. For example, you can set up your Daily Goal to study 10 items of Genki II Vocab a day, together with 3 Grammar Points each day. It will look like this: image987×790 66.7 KB Then, when you click on the Learn button or navbar link, Bunpro will calculate which Deck is next and get the relevant content based on your settings. It goes top-down from your first until your last Deck inside of your Queue. Each time you press the Learn button anywhere on Bunpro, you’ll start a new session from your next Deck. image932×613 53.1 KB If you are feeling up for learning more on any given day, clicking the Learn button will let you start an Extra Study session. image927×844 102 KB This will have you choose a Deck that you want to learn more content from, and go past your goal for that day. We won’t ever prevent you from learning as much as you want, but we do encourage you to take steps to avoid burnout! Setting Your Daily Goal Use the three dot menu to the right of any deck in the dropdown to open the settings for that Deck. Inside the Deck settings, you have the option to set your Daily Goal and Batch Size along with other Deck based settings. How to Add & Manage Decks Just use the ‘Learn Queue Settings’ button at the bottom of your Learn Button… …and you’ll be able to reorder, delete or add new Decks from there! image937×845 44.8 KB Extra Features No Daily Goal (setting your Daily Goal to zero) We also built in a system where you can add a Deck but set the Daily Goal to zero. This Deck will still show up in your Learn Queue but will be skipped as part of the Daily Goal System. This is particularly useful for users who want to add a Deck that they don’t regularly study from, but still want it close on hand. Progress & Deck Setting Access Your progress and settings for each Deck in your queue are now accessible behind the three dot ellipse menu inside of the Learn dropdown. Reminders When going into Extra Study, we provide a gentle reminder if you have reviews due or if you’ve unstudied Decks. Ultimately you’ll always have control over what you study, but this is a way for us to help you have a more effective Bunpro experience. image797×668 65.4 KB image850×746 67.1 KB Confetti When completing your Daily Goal or removing a completed Deck from your Learn Queue you will get a little explosion of theme-relevant confetti. This one is really cool so we don’t want to spoil it. Post below a picture of how it looks if you’ve found it! Usually for a large update like this, we would put it into Beta before it goes live, but due to technical constraints surrounding completely switching to Decks, a Beta wasn’t possible. We know large updates to core features like this can sometimes be scary, but all of the above implementations were taken directly from feedback collected from both new and experienced Bunpro users. We are running a script behind-the-scenes to automatically add the relevant Deck(s) to your learn queue based off of what you were studying before the change to make for a smooth transition. If there’s any hiccups with this, please reach out! As always, we welcome any and all questions, comments and/or suggestions. We are always striving to make Bunpro as user-friendly and intuitive as possible, and we hope this is just another step towards reaching that goal. Thank you! The Bunpro Team

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. Screen Shot 2024-02-01 at 12.31.37 PM1966×864 44.7 KB 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. Screen Shot 2024-02-01 at 12.31.52 PM1980×842 148 KB 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. share1920×5064 406 KB 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!

Hey everyone! Over the years the team has come up with lots of ideas for new features, types of content and even small side-projects. After discussing those ideas and exploring any interesting aspects of them further, we either earmark them for further consideration or put them into cold storage to maybe be reexplored again one day. As is natural in most companies, very, very few of the ideas see the light of day. One idea that emerged and took shape was Bunpro for Teachers. The idea behind this project was built around a couple key factors: Users have asked us both publicly and privately how they could share their Bunpro progress with their teacher/tutor to get the best in-class experience. Our own shared experience taking language classes in college/university and feeling that there was room for improvement. Lastly, many teachers have told us that they recommend Bunpro to their students. While simply having students use Bunpro is good, the insights the teacher dashboard can give makes the learning process so much better. While learning languages has evolved as technology has progressed, we understand that physical textbooks still play a large and crucial role for students all across the world. This is why we’ve always put emphasis on supporting users in choosing to learn in any way the want. Our goal isn’t to replace textbooks, but to make it easy to use Bunpro alongside a textbook to help reinforce what you are learning. For those of you who currently use your preferred textbook and Bunpro at the same time, you already understand how powerful this synergy is. Let’s take a look at the project! Background We initially released the secret teacher dashboard alpha almost 2 years ago, to test if it was feasible as well as whether or not the insights were actionable and relevant. At that juncture, we realized we still had a lot we wanted to do content wise (both in terms of quality and quantity) before we officially released something for teachers. We ended up putting this project on the back burner, collecting feedback and data before eventually overhauling it completely. Bunpro for Teachers is certainly still in its infancy but we’re really excited about the potential it has to help both teachers and students. Teacher Dashboard 2.0 Teachers get access to a new Teacher Dashboard where they can create, manage and monitor their courses/classes. They are provided with a link to their course that they can then send to students in their class. Each course can have a deck that it follows (textbook or Bunpro based). However, students still have the ability to freely learn anything they like on Bunpro. Insights While the course level dashboard gives instructors real time insights for all the students in the class, teachers also have the ability to quickly see how individual students are holding up. This information on their students’ progress can be a powerful tool for teachers, allowing them to more accurately access what material needs extra focus, making it possible for the teacher to speed up or slow down their lesson plans depending on how their students are doing. There are many more aspects of the project that we are proud of and feel will be very beneficial to teachers but since they don’t particularly pertain to those reading this right now, we’ll leave them aside. More Info If you would like to see more about it, including a walk through video you can checkout the Landing page we put together specifically for teachers. If you are currently enrolled in a class of any type and feel like your teacher could benefit from this project, we would love it if you would please share the teacher landing page with your instructor! Alternatively, you can send us a private message here on the forums or shoot us an email. New marketing pages While the teacher landing page really put our teeny tiny marketing brains to their limit, we also used this opportunity to redo the static pages of our website with the latest Bunpro branding and colors. Introducing the revamped Landing, About, Pricing, News, Contact and Careers pages! Lastly, a big, big special thanks to all our lovely users that answered the call and provided us with testimonials! They have been converted into HTML, and are now on the new Testimonials page. We greatly appreciate all the responses, and whether your testimonial was used on the new landing pages or not, know that we will be using your kind words as pure inspiration to make a big dent in 2024 too! That’s all, thanks for reading! TL;DR - Bunpro will be (eventually) coming to a classroom near you!