Bunpro Core 4K vocab deck vs Bunpro JLPT decks

Bunpro
#1

I’m curious to know how many of you are using Bunpro’s Core 4K deck relative to their JLPT vocab decks. I’m not necessarily looking for a debate on which is “better”, just interested in seeing which people use and why.

For me personally, I’ve been flipping back and forth between the two. I figure there’s a solid amount of overlap between them. The Core 4K deck probably makes more sense for me given that my goal is to consume native content, along with the fact that I’m not terribly interested in taking a JLPT exam. However, it is kinda nice targeting the JLPT levels one by one for the gamification aspect of seeing the progress bars fill up.

Part of what influenced me to ask this is that Bunpro’s Core 4K deck has substantially less users than their JLPT vocab decks. Not sure how much of this is due to a perceived lack of quality or just people not being aware that it exists.

#2

They’re different decks with different goals. One reason the N4 Vocab deck might have more users is because it’s offered as a natural graduation step from the N5 one, which is the starting point for many users.

One good thing to keep in mind is that, regardless of which one you pick, you can always “backfill” with the other, as decks are really just pointing at the same final word ID. Any overlap is automatically skipped.

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#3

I did the JLPT N5 deck, a bit of the JPLT N4 deck, tried the Core 4K deck for a little while before swapping back to and finishing the N4 deck. This was mainly for 3 reasons

  1. The Core 4k deck had quite a few words without sentences
  2. The words that did have sentences but a where higher level then N4 had a lot of words I didn’t know in them which made it a little frustrating when doing reviews
  3. I wanted the N4 vocab badge :sweat_smile:

I saw that someone made a Core Deck that only includes sentence words, so I think I’ll try that one once I make it a little further into the N3 deck

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#4

I’m only using the JLPT deck because I’m working with reading mode, and outside of JLPT words only the A1 ones have example sentences compatible with reading mode, making a good chunk of the non-JLPT decks irrelevant. But tbh if it wasn’t an issue I would probably be using the core deck instead

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#5

I use the community core deck that excludes everything without sentences that was mentioned. However, what I actually do is make decks out of the immersion in which I am actually doing and doing a few words from those sometimes. I only add words that come up a lot so they get reinforced and are significant enough to understanding the content. The JLPT decks level into each other better, but frequency is more important to me since I’m not doing JLPT, but even more so is the frequency that I run into words in the actual content I’m consuming, cause the words aren’t reinforced well at this early stage of immersion unless I’m running into it a lot in context. Especially since they’ll tend to be words that I’m not running into a lot in any other random reading. For context I’ve only finished one game in Japanese, a bunch of children’s books, and some random other stuff, so very early in immersion.

#6

The main reason I use vocab cards on Bunpro is the sentences. And the JLPT cards have example sentences which is invaluable for gaining the context and nuance of words.