Fun fact, the 1981 Depeche Mode song, “I just can’t get enough” was inspired by writer Vince Clarke’s feeling that he wasn’t doing enough Japanese language learning.
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Sorry, sorry, sorry, obvious nonsense.
The song’s actually called, “Just can’t get enough” - rest of it was true though.
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I think you are doing good! Japanese just takes such a long time to master. Me too am struggling at times, but then I pull through.
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perhaps try reading media you like to read, rather than sticking to stuff you maybe don’t want to (this is because you will feel more compelled to read it even if it’s hard as you like it. With a mouse over dictionary like yomichan + anki you can create anki cards and mine from material in a click of a button).
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Greetings @lieath !
One thing I noticed that was not on your list, and which I have recently found to be very fruitful, is doing Vocab on BunPro (to access it, you just have to opt-in to the Beta features in your Settings).
The ‘official’ Bunpro Vocab Decks follow the JLPT level system, N5 (basic) to N1 (advanced), although actually they have a lot of additional ‘unofficial’ (so far at least) vocab items available if a particular word you want to study is not within the JLPT levels.
When you start to use a Vocab Deck, for example the Bunpro JLPT N5 deck, you should go into the settings and make sure to select a sensible ordering (the default ordering is something akin to ‘alphabetical’, which is not very useful IMHO), such as according to popularity in Anime, or Novels, or something like that.
That way, you start to see the most common words right away, and you’ll really see the benefit of it as it slowly (day by day, as you add more items to your reviews) fills in the gaps in your vocab. Words that you’ve seen many times but never took the time to look up, and so you’ve never quite got the nuance, suddenly become words you’re familiar with.
Also, importantly, in my humble opinion, is to go into the settings and make sure you’re using the Review Type called “Fill-in Question / Manual Answer” or perhaps “Fill-in Question / Reveal & Grade Answer”.
The “Fill-in Question” presents what’s called a ‘Cloze’ (basically a ‘fill in the blanks’) card, which has a complete Japanese sentence, with a blank ___ where the correct vocab would go. And this is why I highly recommend this feature of Bunpro. IMHO, it’s superior to any other format I’ve tried before (admittedly, I’ve only tried a few various formats before; perhaps there are equivalent or better systems out there).
The sentences are curated by the BP team, including being checked for naturalness by native speakers. Levels N5 and N4 include the audio of the sentence, spoken by a native speaker.
Level N3 has the sentences available as Cloze, but the native-speaker audio is not yet available. However, in the meantime, they have added a very natural-sounding text-to-speech voice which reads the sentences. Sometimes it doesn’t get things right, but you can quickly submit a bug report during reviews – it is still in Beta after all.
And, they are continuing to add full sentences for N2 and N1, and they recently mentioned that support for N2 Cloze input should be available in the next few months (perhaps as late as first quarter 2024). So, they are making steady progress, and if you start at N5 and work your way up to N4 and N3, then N2 will probably be fully ready by the time you get to it.
The biggest benefit, again IMHO, is that the sentences provide:
- Context for the vocabs. So, you learn much more the nuance and usage of the vocabs, rather than just a single primary meaning like a typical SRS flashcard.
- Lots and lots of actual reading practice! True, they are isolated sentences, so there’s not as much full-context comprehension practice that you’d get from reading a full article or story, but they are written in natural Japanese, and there are a lot of them!
- They also introduce exposure to additional vocab and grammar that are incidental or secondary to the main vocab you’re practicing. You don’t need to know the meanings of these words/grammar in order to fill in the blank with the vocab-under-review, but you get a kind of ‘peek’ or ‘preview’ of additional words, and become comfortable with seeing unfamiliar common words in a sentence.
- A gradual level progression. The BP team have cultivated the sentences so that they generally only use vocab from JLPT levels at most one (or maybe two? I’m not 100% sure) above the current level you’re studying. So, you won’t get dumped into the deep end of trying to understand a sentence with complicated grammar or rare vocab until you advance through the levels.
Probably other benefits, but that’s good enough for now.
Personally, starting to use BP’s vocab system has drastically improved my confidence and ability with reading.
One thing I would caution – personally, I’m prone to this issue, maybe other folks not as much – is to be careful to find an overall pace for yourself that you find comfortable, in the sense that you could imagine that “I could maintain this pace comfortably for the foreseeable future, even if significant roadblocks were to pop up in my life.”
If you’re feeling any significant amount of excess stress or feelings of ‘overwhelm’, then it’s probably a good idea to actually slow right down, reduce the number of daily new lessons you’re adding, perhaps even to the point of pausing all new lessons until you’ve got your daily reviews back to a comfortable pace.
The idea is to a) avoid burning out – burn out is awful and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone; but also b) find a pace where you are actually enjoying your Japanese studies. This enjoyment will be able to propel you forward indefinitely, and learning Japanese will not be any kind of ‘chore’, but more like a good habit and a fun hobby.
[Note: I’m assuming you’re not learning Japanese for work or class, or out of any other kind of necessity. Obviously, that kind of necessity will change how you have to approach things.]
If you’re prone to taking on too much stuff, as I am, then hopefully the above caution will be helpful to you. If it doesn’t apply to you, feel free to forget I mentioned it. 
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how good is your japanese level? If youre not atleast at n3 level stuff, i recommend ditching progressing at wanikani completly and reinforce those learned kanji. The first kanjis are the most important, and if you know 1000 kanji already,i would recommend shifting your focus to more important things. If youre grinding N2 stuff already, you can interact with more complicated stuff, which is necessary that you don t forget the majority of the kanji learned by wanikani. The most important thing is vocabulary, then basic grammar, and after depending if you want to get good at reading, or listening and speaking.
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I agree 100%. I follow a very similar routine on wanikani and bunpro and after over a year (I started learning in late October last year) here’s how I feel about it:
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Wanikani is well worth focusing on until about level 30. After that you hit severely finishing returns as you start learning more niche, lower frequency kanji.
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Similarly Bunpro grammar N5 to N3 is worth doing as fast as comfortable. It’s all things that come up all over the place all the time.
Once you’ve done this I think the focus should shift to consuming real Japanese and using that to guide your studies. I’m mostly paying games and reading manga, that’s mostly ready content with a visual element to help you through. I want to switch to light novels soon though.
In parallel I’ve also been going through the Bunpro vocab staying with N5. At this point it’s mostly words I know or at least recognize, but having to actually produce then from memory is a good way to really drill them in my brain.
As for the Bunpro N2 and N1 grammar I only add the points when I encounter them in the wild, this way I focus on things I actually need.
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Thanks everyone for your replies, you’re a big help!
Lately, I started to get tired of my everyday routine, but not to the extent of burning out. I understand that I don’t want to study Japanese for the rest of my life, I want to enjoy it. SRS systems really feel like a chore sometimes, so I guess reducing their amount would be for the better.
I will definitely try Bunpro vocab decks and maybe focus more on listening and reading native material. Thank you all again!
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You are doing more than me but skip Duolingo and use Kaniwani instead.
When I started lessons on Italki I couldn’t recall any words from Wanikani but my teacher was surprised by how much I knew when I was reading.
Kaniwani makes you recall the words better I think - reinforces Wanikani at the very least.
If your goal is to converse you probably should look at something like Italki or language exchange.
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Yeah I feel you, I see people who maintain an anki deck over the course of 10 years sometimes, it just baffles me. I’ve studied other languages before Japanese and I usually drop all SRS after ~2years because it’s just too boring and at that point I have the basics to just consume real content anyway.
Set short term objectives and try to consume content that you actually enjoy. It’s a lot easier to “study” when it’s something you actually want to do. I just spent the last hour playing a game in Japanese, I got a lot of practice that way and it felt actually fun.
As I said in my previous comment once you’ve completed N3 (both in terms of grammar, vocab and also kanji) I don’t think it’s worth doing SRS-first because it just won’t be very efficient anyway.
The path to Japanese fluency (or any language, really) is a very long one, but it doesn’t mean that it has to be a boring and tedious. Bunpro, Wanikani & friends are great to bootstrap the basics but eventually they necessarily turn into an hindrance IMO. Not because they’re bad tools, just because at some point the training wheels necessarily become counterproductive.
EDIT: Just to be clear because I think what I said here could be interpreted in a wrong way: when I say that after N3 I wouldn’t advise going “SRS-first” I don’t mean that you should drop SRS when you finish N3, for one thing it’s well worth going through the reviews until you’ve mastered the existing point, and also you can still add more lessons to your SRS but instead of just picking the next lesson in the bunpro pile you pick a lesson that corresponds to something you encountered in the wild and you want to practice.
For instance today I added the せめて N2 grammar point to my Bunpro SRS because I encountered it in the aforementioned videogame.
This way you don’t learn grammar and vocab that you won’t actually use and forget by the time you actually need them.
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too much
Entirely agree. This is how I use Bunpro (and colelct vocab) and it is very effective.
To offer a different perspecitve, I think doing cloze style cards or a style where you need to input the answer for vocab is overkill. I am certain it leads to burnout for most people (or just a very slow pace). Better to get the gist of vocab from non-cloze style flashcards and then get lots of reading and listening in. If you absolutely need to cram the ability to output certain words then maybe it is fine (although just having conversations that use the words is probably better anyway) but for long-term learning it just seems like another timesink that takes away from interacting with the language itself. It is perfectly natural to be able to read a word but not be able to recall it when speaking. If I had to guess my passive vocab has basically always consistently been twice as large as my active vocab since I started outputting.
Equally, the Wanikani word list is not that useful for conversation (there are thousands of words you should learn to use in conversation before some of those words) and the Bunpro list is focused on the JLPT (it is more useful than Wanikani though, for sure). You need to ask yourself what you are learning Japanese for and what you need to be able to output. Things you need to be able to say often will just naturally become automatic in the same way as things you read a lot will become easy to read.
(Note: Obviously this is all personal preference but just offering a different opinion so OP doesn’t feel like there is only one path)
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I think that’s a good routine, overall, except for duolingo.
Personally I felt duolingo was only holding me back. It takes ages to introduce anything new, so you can be N3 and be using only grammar introduced before て form. I’m my opinion it harms more than is useful, at least for Japanese. My progress really improved after I used that time on other resources.
It may not be much for you, but even if you don’t gain all that much time or progress, you still reduce your daily routine chores one bit, and you don’t lose much of anything.
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It isn’t about doing a lot, it’s about doing it well. Your personal goal doesn’t really matter much, all that’s important is the parts you get good at.
If you are doing all that amount there and doing it all well, not just simply doing it to do it, then that is that. But if you are just doing it because those are the amounts you said you’d do instead of doing it because that is what you can do well then I’d say it’s a bad method.
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let me start out by saying that you’re doing way more than the vast majority of language learners. My 1st year of japanese (just hit year 2 lol) I think I did a similar learning pattern to you, you’re probably doing even more, and didn’t quite realize how much more progress I was making, especially compared to other people. Once I got into the real world with my japanese and met other learners, turns out I was just as good as a lot of people that had been studying for 6 years. (not to say those people weren’t studying hard- they were doing great and definitely had a passion for it)
Anyways what I’m saying is it’s easy to see all these amazing people on the internet and not realize that most people don’t actually study 25 hours a day, so first off give yourself a pat on the back for how great you’re already doing 
Now here’s what I have to say about your routine:
- I really don’t believe in duolingo…
I started out as an avid duolingo user but honestly I’ve seen so many weird
translations and I’m not the biggest fan of the way they teach either so I
stopped using it. Sometimes I like to do the level skip tests though, it’s kinda
fun to see your level (and you can brag to your friends that you beat duolingo
lol) but I bet that you already know all the grammar from bunpro so I think at
that point you can go a lot faster if you spend that time doing something else.
Ofc, if that’s something you do on your phone when you can’t use a desktop
I’m all for it, most of the japanese programs I use don’t really have the best
mobile versions. - Add vocab. Wanikani is great and I know they advertise that they’re teaching you vocab through the program but a lot of it is very formal and it’s hard to know what situations to use it in. I bet you’ve been getting most of your vocab from duolingo so far, so if I’m right then I highly recommend downloading anki (it’s free on desktop) and a vocab deck at around your level. (Look for ones with audio files- I think it’s very helpful) There’s probably a duolingo deck and maybe you can play around with the tool and set those words that you know to learned, so if you decide to stop duolingo you still review those. Anki has hands down been the number 1 mvp in my japanese learning, would still be n5without it.
- find a way to practice speaking. Otherwise you’ll go to talk to someone and the words won’t word anymore trust me. Even if you can think in your head, at least in my case it’s just way harder to talk to real people. This can be shadowing those videos, doing some kind of language exchange or maybe finding a tutor online if your budget allows it.
Those are just my recommendations so if your goals are different or you don’t want to do these things then you’ll definitely still be fine. In reality you really only need to get like 20% there with the routine and the rest is just hard work.
And finally, since you asked, here’s my routine:
- 1 review on bunpro for the streak
- Wanikani- as many lessons as I can keeping apprentice under 100 + all my reviews
- go back and do the rest of the bunpro reviews + 2 grammar points
- All my anki cards. Right now I have it set to 10 new cards a day but I have had it as much as 60, I just don’t reccomend if you have a job/school and want to do other things with your life cuz it takes so much time
- get home and read/watch videos/lesson with a tutor depending on mood, to do list and day of the week.
My routine hasn’t really changed except for the amounts, usually takes like 45 min but if you want more it has taken me up to 4 hours if I change the new cards and new grammar points.
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If you would so far as to add Anki, I need to recommend jpdb.io as well. It doesn’t seems like much people know or use it here all that much, but I’m not joking if i say it’s pretty much the most important thing for me along Bunpro. It can replace Anki, Wanikani and Jisho with relative ease, and is donation based.
I fell I’m repeating myself a little much on jpdb through the forums here… maybe I should create a post on it already and link it when necessary…
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I’ve heard about jpdb.io before but got the impression that it’s just an Anki deck generator for various Japanese media.
I would love to read your post about it if it’s far more than that.
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Okay I didn’t read this entire thread. But the simple answer you should have got was, “yes”. Okay, we can close the thread now.
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And I thought it was just a worse Jisho and a media difficulty database; jpdb.io doesn’t advertise itself very well on the front page.
It can’t export Anki decks, but it can import them.
Well, for anyone that’s curious about it and don’t want to wait until I possibly make a better post someday, I recommend:
- Create an account
- Add a Prebuilt deck or import a Anki deck
- Start a review to see how they work
- Read the settings page - there’s tons of settings to match your tastes
- Read the FAQ
- Paste a japanese phrase into the search bar. It serves as a text parser like Jisho and company, but you can add new words to your decks instantly if needed.
For a quick list of what it can do: you can create new a deck from a bunch of text (also satori reader and shirabe jisho) instantly, it will teach you all the vocabulary used, all subvocabulary (国際関係 = 国際 + 関係), all kanji used in the vocabulary, all kanji used inside the kanji, and components used in those kanji. You can change mnemonics, keywords, example sentences, add or deactivate word meanings. You can remove any part of the process, and learn in the order you want (local frequency, global frequency, chronological), and in any amount as well. You can see how hard it would be to watch/read something that’s included in the database, by how much of the vocabulary you already know.
It’s not a hassle to setup (and create new decks) as Anki, but it’s not as infinitely costumizable. It doesn’t hold your hand as Wanikani and you can learn in any pace or order, but it doesn’t have a clear direct path. It doesn’t have all features as other dictionaries but it connect very well with your actual knowledge base (and you can just use them when needed).
It’s not for everyone, but for me it’s all I need.
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I am trying it based on your recommendation. I gotta say, it looks really promising!
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