i’m one of those people who have rated almost everything with 5 stars. i’d find textual descriptions of what the stars mean much more useful than just the numeric value, and might well go through and reevaluate my ratings if the system were changed accordingly.
when it comes to the language-learning rating, additional guidelines on what the stars mean would be even more useful.
This raises some added complexity specific to Natively… because of the “entertainment” and “language learning” rating breakdowns, some people may incorporate those into the overall rating too. For those people, terms like “liked it” wouldn’t necessarily be sufficient. But I wouldn’t want the overall rating descriptions to include “language learning” aspects either since that could overwhelm people who just want to rate based on enjoyment. (I for one, never consider “language learning” in my overall rating.)
Hmm… 
I don’t either. I barely even use those extra ratings anymore. Pretty much only comes up when I’m full on ‘meh’ about a book but I can see it being a useful learning tool. Most recent example I can think of for that is モテ薬 | L33 which fell super flat for me, but I could see being super helpful for someone trying to expand their science vocab and get used to various different types of speech.
If it didn’t exist I don’t think I’d miss it, though. I write reviews more often than not. Do people look at those extra ratings?
I try to give a “language learning” rating for the first volume in any series I read, but it’s not like I deeply analyze it. I mostly rate it based on whether it uses reasonably normal language (so not some super niche setting with weird words) and if it seems like something that might be good for expanding one’s knowledge of grammar, kanji, or vocab. That said, since I used WaniKani and skewed my learning heavily towards kanji and reading, I’m not sure my “language learning” ratings are accurate for people coming from a more balanced learning approach.
I don’t ever look at the extra ratings since they are inconsistently filled in and at my level I read for entertainment, not language learning. Perhaps people with less reading experience do look though, I’m not sure.
The only books where I add a “language learning” rating is graded readers, and thinking about it, so far I’ve only used the 5 star rating there. A prime example where this goes into my overall rating is Japanese Short Stories for Beginners: 20 Captivating Short Stories to Learn Japanese & Grow Your Vocabulary the Fun Way! | L17, which is severely lacking on the entertainment front, but was a fantastic starter book with a nice difficulty curve and good “tooling” (dictionary, summary, translation, quiz).
I wonder how other people use it, especially on non-graded readers. I guess some books are better for certain stages or goals. I wonder what kind of books are generally bad for language learning.
In general, I feel like I see “5 star language learning” more often than anything else, and usually it just means that a star gets added to the overall score (when people do “(entertainment+language learning)/2”). I wonder how the range is there. (And yeah, it kinda makes sense; you learnt stuff while reading the book, because it was written in normal, useful Japanese. But does that really deserve an extra star on every book?)
I feel like a way to highlight why this is good for language learning or for whom it is good would be more useful.
Apart from that, not sure how you’d “solve” this, if it needs to be solved, and if it should be part of this request (because it complicates things a lot more).
(I think I’ve also seen books which were like “language learning 4, entertainment 4, overall 5”, or the other way around, and I’m like… I sure would love to know what went into that rating process.)
tbh most of the Aozora Bunko short stories I read and the occasional Very Old 
book are probably not great for most people’s reading goals which are usually:
but for me, to whom reading that stuff is part of my reason for learning anyways, they’re great! I commented on some story forever ago that most people don’t need to know words like 阿片窟 あへんくつ, opium den 
I agree it’s kind of outside the request, but discussing it is fun. I like hearing how other people approach rating and reviewing from different angles.
The reason I write reviews for the 世にも奇妙な商品カタログ (series) | L23 series is because I think the rating alone doesn’t make justice of what I want to express.
While I don’t think I’ll do it for Manga aside from the first volume sometimes, I think I’ll keep doing it for the rest of the light novels I read.
As for the plenty of 5/5 ratings, I think allowing half starts or increasing the scale to 10 would solve it. The thing with the full scales is that 3/5 is a 6/10 and then you jump to either a 8/10 or 10/10 if you base the scores in that scale. It gives you less flexibility.
While giving stars from 1 to 5 without halves might be fine to a customer rep that replied to your email, a book is more complex than rate it from 1 to 5, and way more subjective.
I quite like this scale, too. GR veteran here, too. Most of my ratings are 3 stars… a decent book, but nothing special for me. I might still recommend it, if someone is looking for a specific type of book. 4 stars were books I really liked and 5 stars are basically books I absolutely adore. 2 stars is literally an OK book. Something I didn’t like but didn’t dislike either. Just something I feel meh about for whatever reason. 1 star is usually if the book is extremely bad (rare) or has problematic content (my typical reason).
I would very much like half-star ratings, though…
Regarding the entertainment/learning ratings: I am pretty sure I have given a book 3 stars before but gave higher ratings on entertainment and learning. I don’t think a good book is necessarily entertaining… nor is an entertaining book necessarily good. 
I don’t know if these ratings are needed but I don’t think they hurt.
I haven’t used Natively ratings much yet, but I don’t think adding descriptions to reach number would change how I rate anything, or how I view other’s ratings.
Expanding the ratings to half-values or out of 10 would be nice, though.
That said, I definitely err on the side of rating high/middle. I checked my anime ratings on anilist.co and of the 206 anime I’ve marked as watched I only rated 7 below a 4. However, I also generally feel its unfair of me to rate an anime with out finishing it or at least giving it a decent chance, since there a lot that just don’t fit my tastes, so the ones left on my list with low ratings are ones that started out promising and then I ended up disliking after watching at least 5-6 episodes.
There has been some interesting suggestions in this thread.
Maybe we can get the input of what @brandon thinks.
Thanks for the ping @Megumin and for the topic @Legato.
I get the desire for consistency in ratings… but I do think it’s a bit difficult. We could have guidelines like GoodReads has, but would they actually be abided by? For example, if we specify 3 stars = ‘liked’ vs imo the more commonly 3 stars = ‘OK’, would people actually do it?
Honestly, I somewhat doubt it. I’m totally fine with implementing a soft guidelines like GoodReads though (surface the guidelines as a hover over in some places, maybe a FAQ, stipulate it’s a soft suggestion… etc), but I don’t think we should expect much impact from it, it’d just be a nicety.
As for the guidelines, here’s my humble suggestion, mostly in the context of ‘recommendation’ 
For your absolute favorites, I think having favorite functionalities distinguishes those books from other 5 stars.
Half stars
I guess this is just a matter of preference. I don’t like half stars (it’s essentially just a 10 pt rating system) and I think 10 pt systems are less common & more stressful and potentially more noisy. I think people mostly like it to distinguish their favorites vs their loved books, but I think a favorites functionality is best for that, not complicating the rating system.
But, it’s a somewhat arbitrary decision. I don’t particularly imagine I’ll change it soon 
Extra Ratings (Language Learning / Entertainment)
Yeah I don’t imagine everyone will use these or use these consistently. However, when reading a review I think it provides helpful quick context - there are some books (especially easier books) which people find boring but very useful. The extra ratings simply allow you to give a quick clarifier on your overall rating.
They aren’t particularly useful, but I thought they were a nice, interesting addition
Happy to hear reactions to all that 
Yeah, we discussed this earlier, leading to the same nuances as the suggestion you post later instead of the Goodreads one.
Sounds good!
Aw, that’s a shame. Because the current system is the one stressful for me. “Hmmm, this is better than my usual 3, but not quite a 4. Which one should I choose?” I imagine this will only get worse the more books I rate.
And, is it less common? For example, IMDB and all the anime rating sites I know either have 10 pt rating or 5 pt with half-stars. Goodreads doesn’t, but has 3 “positive” ratings instead of just 2. Personally, I agree that 10 pt rating systems are more stressful, but 5 pt with halfs feels like the perfect compromise, because you can still use it like a 5 star system, adding a bit more nuance if you feel like neither a nor b quite fits.
On top of that, it’s very easy to understand for people who are already using to 5 star rating systems, as they are already used to half-stars when looking at the average ratings. It would fit perfectly into the current system.
For me it’s harder to rate something out of 5 than out of 10, but I guess giving a favourite would help reduce the stress on what I rate 5 starts, while I really loved it I woudn’t call it a favourite.
BTW if anyone hasn’t seen the manual favourite topics, it’s over here:
I use a 20 point scale on AniList (1-10 with half points). 
That said, I wouldn’t want a 10 point scale here. 5 with half star options (as you mentioned) would be fine since I’d just give full stars 99% of the time (I think there’s only one book so far that I would have given a half star to). Also, to give a counter example, Amazon uses a full star 5 point scale, which I think works fine.
There are a handful of anime I gave 10/10 on AniList that are not in my favorites list, and I’ve added several that I gave 9/10 or 9.5/10 to my favorites list. I can’t really explain why since it’s not like I’m even trying to rate objectively, but to me giving the highest possible score doesn’t imply favorite and favorite doesn’t imply that it gets the highest possible score.
Yeah, I have a few like that as well… Flying Witch wasn’t really a favorite for me, but I still rated it 9/10 because it was super cute and well-written and I’d happily recommend it to anyone (bonus: it’s great listening practice for rural accents).
Late to the party, but I’m I’m the Goodreads ranking camp here. Only having two levels of liking isn’t enough imo, and having two levels of dislike is overkill if there are only 5 ratings. (It is incredibly rare that I actually manage to read anything I dislike since I avoid things I know I will, let alone have enough of them I need to distinguish)
I’ve been grading all of mine so far according to 3=like, 2=okay. Since that’s how I’ve done my 5 star ratings elsewhere
I find it kind of intimidating to rate books I’ve read in Japanese.
I don’t want to risk giving a book a bad rating as a fault of my comprehension, or my slow pace of reading made the book seem to drag, or I intentionally chose a book not because it was something I wanted to read but because it seemed level appropriate.
I think that might be the case for a lot of people using Natively.
We’re not necessarily reading books because we enjoy reading, but rather using books as a learning tool.
That makes it difficult to rate enjoyment when while reading it was never really a consideration in the first place.
Looking back I rarely ever enjoyed my time reading through Harry Potter in Japanese, it wasn’t miserable or anything, it was just study in the form of a story.
If I had to base my rating on my enjoyment I’d give it a 1 or a 2, but I don’t think that’s a fair rating considering how I consumed the book.
It’d be like giving a textbook a poor rating because you read it as if it were a novel.
And that goes for pretty much everything I’ve read in Japanese up until recently when I started reading 本好きの下克上, that was the first time that I found myself reading for pleasure.
Ratings are a nice feature to have but I think one has to take the userbase into account.
Not everyone on Natively is reading for pleasure and that’s going to reflect in the ratings.
If possible I think it’d be nice if along side the Natively’s userbase ratings there could be the Amazon/GoodReads ratings.
Gotta say it never occurred to me that some people weren’t enjoying their reading material. To me part of the reason for getting into reading was to do something fun with the language finally. I have totally forced myself through stories I hated for the learning gains (Dear Friends | L25 I’m looking at you) but it was still a case of I knew why I hated the book, and it was plot and characters, not language, problems.
To me this kind of means users should be able to leave reviews without star ratings, because the star ratings (overall, rather than the learning one) don’t really apply to them.
Also I also read HP as my first book and I enjoyed it
Just in case you (and others) are not aware, you can split your rating into “language learning” and “enjoyment”. You need to go to the page of the book and then click on “write a review”, so it’s slightly less convenient, though.
(You do not need to actually write a review, you can leave the rest blank; you do need to press save, though)
To wrap this up, I think there are two requests in here, which I will approve:
wrt to the rating disclaimer, I’d probably would do 3 stars as ‘liked with reservations’:
