Are BunPro and WaniKani the perfect match?

Japanese
#27

I’m currently doing the 10k deck along with Wanikani and Bunpro right now, so I can speak for doing three SRS at once; frankly, I think I’m only able to do it because I have a lot of free time, and I’ve purposefully bottlenecked the amount of lessons each day I get from both Kitsun and Bunpro (six hiragana words from Kitsun, and two grammar points from Bunpro). It’s not for everyone, but I enjoy it.

edit: also, the 10k deck gets SIGNIFICANTLY easier the more kanji from wanikani you learn, and it’s not like you need to learn the whole deck, either. At some point you’d probably want to start mining (i.e, looking up words as you go and making flashcards from them) instead.

#28

MNN2 is Minna no Nihongo 2, a commonly used textbook.

#29

It’s a 3 week trial. There are many options so feel free to use their message board for questions.

10k deck

#30

There are still a lot of very common words that don’t use kanji and a few grammatical stuctures that aren’t taught on Bunpro. You could probably get pretty far using only Wanikani and Bunpro, but there would be huge gaps in your vocabulary.

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#31

So far it’s worked well for me but I have 2 years of Japanese classes so far at college too, so some of this is review. I think both are an excellent additional tool to have in your belt if your goal is N3+ or fluency. Good luck!

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#32

Wanikani with Bunpro is just barely enough content pass N2, so in that sense completing both would offer a good step to understanding basic Japanese, but neither are the be all and end all of learning Japanese.

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#33

I agree with those above and would add that I’ve also felt that Busuu.com (1 month free link) has helped me more with listening, speaking, and writing than anything else. I don’t find it effective for kanji, but it has made all the difference for my understanding of verb conjugations. It’s very good at only including words in the example sentences and audio files that you’ve already learned.

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#35

Extra vocab decks are a neat idea, but nowadays i prefer to make my own deck in Anki. Whenever i encounter a new word in some material, i check the frequency, and if it’s common or interesting enough i add it.

I used Torii for a while, which is great in principle. It has the 10k most common words, and
you can let it automatically filter out words you already know from WK.

But i feel like i should check each word in the dictionary anyways in case there are errors in pre-made decks or i can add a nuance that i find important, and i prefer to have my cards in an open open platform like Anki rather than some web app that may become inaccessible.
(Bunpro is different because of the review format, small number of items, lack of alternative, etc.)

and i still don’t regret doing Wanikani until level 60, though i did skip vocabulary lessons later on. WK is for learning kanji, after all.

#36

By the way, obviously only Bunpro+Wanikani isn’t enough to get to a high level of Japanese. You need to practice with native material and get more vocabulary (perhaps in combination). But with that addition, i believe N2 is easily achievable (which is a purely passive test by the way, reading+listening).

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#37

I used WaniKani up to level 60 (got to level 60 couple months ago) and I am practicing N2 grammar on Bunpro. I have to say both were very useful in improving those areas. However, as others have said, you will have to at some point do some reading in order to see those grammar and Kanji in context and how it is used. That is the part where I feel you will improve the most.

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#38

I watch japanese reality TV. There is so much terrace house on netflix

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#39

Do you watch with subtitles? English or Japanese. I feel like with my current level I can use Japanese subtitles and not understand a lot, or use English subtitles and feel like I’m not learning a lot.

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#40

even though i still don’t understand 99% of what’s being said, i rather immerse using japanese subtitles, it makes me pay more attention and try to figure out what’s going on.

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#41

100% immersion in the start with songs and videos you don’t understand over 90% of is a proven recipe for burn out, and not recommended by teachers.

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#42

Everyone learns in a different way man…saying that its a proven recipe for disaster because it didn’t worked for you is wrong, because it might work with someone else.
Some people like to learn in a classroom, others like to study by themselves, some people like to use apps like Bunpro and wanikani, other like to use only books.

I’m not a native english speaker (i am a native portuguese speaker) and i never took english classes, learned purely by immersing in the language with music, games, movies and TV Shows, never burnt out, and that gave me a fluent english level that i use for my work everyday.

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#43

If you study pedagogy of language teaching, it’s not an opinion but qualified objective fact. 100% immersion at the start is not good for students. In one ear and out the other, and thus terrible advice for beginners. A method proven to take longer, and why it’s no longer taught.

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#44

Perhaps a more productive way to present these ideas would be to mention sources. There’s far too many immersion myths across the Japanese learning communities you find on the internet, and the amount of resources that point to immersion as the end-all of methodologies is certainly big. The myth is so pervasive that you can find views contrary to this belief deemed unpopular opinions.
Luckily for us, this forum is usually both useful and friendly (and not constrained by space!), which means that this is a place for people to expound upon their views instead of making blanket statements that are not of much help.
@NicolasCoutinho does mention an interesting point that many seem to be familiar with: When acquiring English as an L2, there seemed to be a process of immersion that led them to acquiring English at a high degree of proficiency. There is probably a couple of good reasons for that, though: Portuguese and English display high lexical similarity, and their genetic relationship makes English syntax much easier to understand for a Portuguese (or French, Spanish, German, etc.) speaker. Japanese, however, has a much higher entry fee in terms of vocabulary and grammar, if you come from English or any other IE language.
In Japanese learning circles, people seem to advocate for immersion plus mining: Mining is, however, part of the process of building vocabulary. In other words, mining is what does the bridging between immersion and acquisition. If the notion of immersion used for attempting to learn Japanese doesn’t come with the caveat that consumption must be done by building intelligibility, then it seems doomed to fail. On the other hand, when people advocate for immersion, they usually do so in the context of using methods for building intelligibility, such as flashcards.
Anyway, because of the popularity of Anki within said circles, I think that most people who do immersion do so in a semi-structured fashion, not purely through consumption but also through vocabulary building and grammar pattern studies (hence the popularity of lay grammar guides like Tae Kim’s). The real question–as its answer would prove useful for people in the process of learning–is what current pedagogical methods in language education can say about the grammar acquisition process (considering we’re on the Bunpro website).

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#45

Hm, I didn’t know that. Immersion practice is something I deeply regret not doing while I was taking Japanese in college. But then, I didn’t think to and it wasn’t easy to use the Internet to simulate immersion back in the early aughts.

If you do know of any books or studies to this effect, I’d be interested to read them. I mean that sincerely, not in a sealioning way. I’m trying to learn more about metacognition for my job anyway.

#46

Having used these two as my sole learning resources (and a couple of podcasts here and there) I can say: definitely yes, as far as reading is concerned.

All the usual hedging statements apply. You need to consume native content, different people have different learning styles, and if your goals are more about listening/speaking that’s a bit of a different animal (you never have to ask a book to slow down).

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#47

I think forcing immersion into content where you are barely able to understand anything is probably not a great idea? It depends on where your frustration level is.

However, pushing immersion into content where you can understand at least 80-90% is a great idea imo and I found that to be far more rewarding than WK, as well as… honestly just much faster in getting me into reading native content.

A lot of folks recommend things like Yotsubato, or NHK Easy, and I strongly feel that these are not accessible first-reads for people. Thus, I continue to incessantly beat my drum on comprehensible input:

This site provided a surprisingly (not perfectly, but pretty close) smooth on-ramp to native content for me, and if you know to look for “graded readers” and “comprehensible input” you can find all sorts of stuff all over the Internet to meet your own study tastes and needs, that doesn’t leave you wondering what the heck you’re looking at/listening to.

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