掲示板 Forums - Grammar question: basic sentence option

I will be blunt here but I don't use the grammar schedule at all. Like I tried in the past but it never worked. First, I though it was because it was far too quick for me to really process that correctly. So I just froze them and start studying sentences instead. After that, I retried once but gave up again. Why? Because my brain found countless way to cheat and not learn properly. Like deducing the correct answer because the other are obviously wrong. Or because I activated the multiple question setting and I know that correct will be the same at the previous question.

Anyway, for those kind of reasons, I don't use it at all. Instead, I switch that to the basic sentences question (The Yes, a little, no). It doesn't allow me to work on a specific on a specific grammar pattern but it's quick (which is one of the main selling point of Space repetition system imo). And also, it doesn't ask me to "skillfully" answer a question. It's just asking me a basic understanding of the sentence. And the more I see it in different context, the more I'm able to understand the nuance. To sum up, start with a rough sketch and work progressively on the detail. I don't have to think, and even I shouldn't think. I just need to check if my rough understanding is correct and then go to the next question. It also prevent me to develop too much wrong idea about a specific grammar pattern. I just have to accumulate enough example and at some point, I will get a grasp of the particular nuance of that grammar. That's what helped me on the は/が particle. I start noticing that は was always used in a very particular situation. Or at least 70% of the time. And by accumulating enough of those very particular case, I was able to somewhat understand the extreme cases where the particle were almost always used and grind my way up to the more nuanced cases where it's more blurry. At that point, I could finally return to the more classical grammar explanation and understand why they said that the particle は or が is like that (even if I don't like the words they used :v). And that's like the last touch before I'm done with a particular pattern. That's why I think basic sentence question could be useful in the grammar schedule (or a option in the sentences schedule to work on specific grammar).

That's for the feature request. But since I'm here, might as well give more feedback on why it didn't work at all for me. First is probably the pacing. It just doesn't work (at least for me). If you have to learn at least 10 words per kanji to start to get a rough knowledge of them and if you have to read at 100 sentences per word to also get a rough knowledge of them, well, for grammar, it should be a 1000 sentences. Of course, I'm exaggerating a bit there but the grammar should just have a different pacing from the other. It's not a problem for the sentence schedules because you can just add more sentences. And if you only use the basic question, it's even better because it doesn't feel as heavy as other questions. But for grammar, well, it didn't work for me. I learned too much things too quickly and I just ended up with broken grammar concepts that confused me more than anything else. Also that's why I suggested the basic question. Because you can take full advantage of the SRS. Because those are really short. I can't see myself doing that much "exercises" with other types of questions but with the basic question, yeah.

The second problem that I have is "skillfully answering a question". What I mean by that is simply basic grammar where you mobilized your knowledge to answer the question. I just don't think it can work with the current grammar schedule. Like it's not that bad but seriously, I found too many way to "cheat". Or at least, my brain did. I may be a bit outdated since it's been like 8 month that I didn't use the grammar schedule. But if we take the sentence jumble question for example. At first, it was okay. But after I just deduce the correct answer from the sentence order and not from the particular grammar pattern. Like before, I could think about the meaning, I already knew the correct answer. Same for star selection to a certain degree. As for multichoice, well it's the same problem. I just deduced the correct answer because the other were "too" incorrect. I know there has been some work on that but right now, I just think it can't really work with an universal schedule for all type of grammar. The best would other specific type of schedule like the conjugation one. I really love that one. But I know at the same time that it's close to impossible to do that for every other grammar. Like what I would really like, if I were to study grammar that way, would be some specific question. Like, to take a basic example, a question that oppose へ and に specifically. That would force my brain to think and not use cheap trick. But that in the opposite direction of renshuu and SRS in general. It's more like the textbook approach. It's bit exaggerated but yeah. In my case, I found too many way to "cheat" even if I don't want too...

To conclude, I still love your app and think it's one of the best app on the internet on all other aspects. But for grammar specifically, and for me specifically, it's a pass. Except for the conjugation one. Pretty sure, it's not that much of a problem for other people but I hope there will be at least some useful feedback in there.
Also, even if I don't use the grammar schedule, I still use renshuu for grammar with the basic sentence schedule. So anyway, I have all I need. Renshuu for the win

Thanks for the feedback - I don't expect any system in renshuu to be 100% for anyone's needs, and as you pointed out, grammar has the most "depth" required to understand it.

A number of the issues you brought up are going to be unavoidable, as they are based on how the user interacts with the system. There are always going to be ways to "cheat" the system and avoid a clean check for comprehension and/or recall, and while I've done what I can to avoid most of them (or allow settings to help prevent this, such as hiding multiple choice answers by default), it's never going to be a 100% solution.

(By the way, there is a good way to do multi choice questions -something I've recommended to many users:

1. Have them hidden by default.

2. Choose the answer in your head BEFORE revealing them.

3. Only choose the answer that was in your head, and skip if it's not found.

This works extremely well. However, if you are still tempted to switch answers at that point, I am not sure what else I could do from my end.)

The reality is that both of what you're looking for/suggesting for renshuu is simply impossible from a logistics standpoint. I wish that wasn't the case, but it is.

1. Content size: renshuu currently has quizzing available for roughly 1,000 different grammar "expressions", and each expression (a few gaps aside) has 3-4 questions for free users, 12-14 for pro users. That's well over 10,000 sentences that have been made available as questions. Putting aside the actual creation of the original Japanese text (which is done by native speakers, and not me), it can take 3-4 minutes per sentence to turn it into an actual question - this involves binding to the dictionary, adding English text, verifying these two steps in another pass, marking the grammar elements in the sentence for the question to find them, and with some questions, adding incorrect answers (which would probably push it closer to 5-6 minutes), then verifying those incorrect sentences.

To double the current question level would take, on the low end, 1,000 hours of work. As I am the sole developer and maintainer of renshuu, that's simply unfeasible when considering all the other support, development, and maintenance that I'm involved in.

2. I'm strictly against AI, and I'm also against just scraping the sentence library of renshuu and doing, for example, a rough matching for grammar elements and throwing them into the grammar question system - the quality would simply not be where I'm comfortable with.

3. My wife and I have chosen a financial path for renshuu that allows the overwhelming majority of people to study for free, and for those that support us financially to get a, frankly, ridiculous amount of content for a price far below any competitor that I'm aware of. We're not particularly found of the "an ideal business extracts 100% of the money that it can from its customers" mindset. This does result us in being unable to go after more ambitious expansions of functionality and content, but I'm pretty happy with the balance we've reached.

4. As to the "rearrange the whole sentence" - that would be a nightmare to program. It would either require me to a)be overly strict with accepting correct answers and have to deal with a significant influx of "I think this answer is also correct", or allow a much wider range of answers, increasing the acceptance of orderings that don't make any sense. Even with 4 blocks, there is still more ambiguity in answering than you might expect.

But, just to give you a simple example, let's say you have the sentence:

彼は彼女とおいしいレストランでたくさんのピザを食べました。

Knowing each word in the sentence, think about how many variations could be made. Is it lots of pizza, or lots of girls? is the restaurant good, or is it the pizza?

Then, if you step back and analyze it from a computer's perspective, you get even less clarity, because it's no longer "pizza or girl", but "noun or noun".

I may allow a basic question type in the future, but I do not have plans for the time being. This is a personal opinion, but I am of the feeling that "straight up" SRS (do you know this or not) is the least effective because the ability to "cheat" is highest. I was extremely hesitant in adding that to the sentence schedules originally (and am still not a fan of them today, but I'm glad that some people like them)

Since the topic was brought up, I tried to cover all the elements that I feel feed into this - not all points will necessarily be a response to comments made above, but I hope this will help clarify things for anyone that reads it in the future :)

I guess I thought every sentence already had that question type, but I guess that doesn't make much sense as you said.