Bunn Design Philosophy

Language learning has always been a significant challenge. While mastering one or multiple languages can open up many career opportunities and life experiences, most people find it truly difficult to master a language.

With the advent of AI, language learning efficiency has greatly improved. Various tools are much better compared to the pre-AI era, but I've noticed that current tools might only excel at one aspect without addressing the entire learning process, lacking core principles and design.

So, what is theoretically the best learning process? No one can really answer this question because there will always be better processes. However, in my view, there are several strong logical principles that must hold true:

• Learn by sentences rather than individual words
• Review should be the core action
• Context recreation, recalling the scene where sentences appeared
• Streamlined process without distracting non-core features

I couldn't find any software in the market that adheres to these basic principles, so I created Bunn. Bunn's design is centered around these points, aiming to create an elegant and complete language learning system.

That's why I created Bunn, which means "sentence" in Japanese. Bunn's core approach is reviewing sentences with context.

After entering a sentence, you immediately get accurate translations and kana annotations, practice shadow reading, and do dictation. You can also highlight unfamiliar words to add them to your vocabulary list, establishing connections between words and their usage contexts.

Generally, you have three ways to input sentences:

In the future, we'll also support image input, allowing you to upload images containing Japanese text. Bunn will identify all Japanese sentences and let you choose which ones to review.

Here's how a sentence memory card looks:

Another core logic of Bunn is review. We all know repetition is necessary for memory, but often we're reluctant to review what we've learned.

A key reason for this reluctance is that it's not engaging enough - your recorded content lacks interactivity and context, or the platform distracts you with other new content.

These issues don't exist in Bunn. Bunn won't push any distracting content - everything is what you've input yourself, like anime you've watched, technical articles you've read, or interesting news you've seen. This ensures you're interested in or at least genuinely care about the content you're reviewing.

Plus, you can interact with each sentence - view context, practice shadow reading, and do dictation. These interactive actions make reviewing as engaging as browsing through your personal collection.

Think about how we mastered our native language. Many of us often mentally simulate scenarios - what we would say to others and how they might respond. The language used in these scenarios is what we absolutely remember.

While it's hard to remember language elements in isolation, it's easy to remember contexts. Once we grasp the connection between context and expressions, we're more likely to remember those expressions. Sentences provide context for words, and sentences themselves exist within larger contexts.

Bunn offers a browser extension to help you record sentence contexts and provides one-click context recovery for scene recreation, helping you create your personalized memory experience.

While you're free to choose your sentence sources, I strongly recommend trying this workflow:

When reviewing, you can click the button in the top right of each card to instantly return to the original context and pronunciation. This feature helps you better understand how the sentence is used in its original context and ensures you practice accurate pronunciation.

I personally recommend Mary's YouTube channel for these reasons:

• • Perfect sentence breaks with built-in subtitles
• • Seamless shadow reading experience when used with our extension and app
• • Modern, practical Japanese that you can use in daily life
• • Content interesting enough to make learning enjoyable

Of course, if you prefer anime, you can find Japanese anime with Japanese subtitles on Netflix. Netflix's subtitle feature provides natural sentence breaks that work perfectly with Bunn's workflow.

When copying text from websites, press the "c" key twice after selecting text to record both the website URL and scroll position in your clipboard. When pasted into Bunn, it will look like this: