Confused about lesson amounts and starting out

Bunpro
#1

Hi! I started literally today and am really confused about some things. Sorry if this is a boring question/won’t help others.

  • How many lessons am I supposed to do in a day? I’ve been studying Japanese for some time now so a lot of the points I already know, but after doing a good 30 points today (already knew 28) I realized it was not slowing me down in any way and stopped.

  • I selected a learning goal before starting and chose “extreme” or whatever the rightmost option was called. What did it do? I did mess up some things and reset my (N5) progress in the settings, did it mess with that?

  • Lots of people in the forums are talking about vocab cards. I’m not seeing them, but is there a way to permanently avoid them? Already have Anki for that (not saying it’s better or worse than Bunpro, it’s just something I already use and switching would be hard)

Thanks

8 Likes
#2

If you truly know them, you can mark them as known. Though often bunpro surfaces misconceptions that one may have about grammar they think they know. It’s worth just starting from scratch and while there is not exact number the community generally agrees that somewhere between 1-5 points a day a good pace. If you have 2 hours to spare in 1 month from now closer to 5. Less than an hour in one month, then closer to 1.

The learning goal is just how many grammar points you queue up to learn each time you do a learning session, it does not reset anything. The reseting buried in the settings does that. It is obvious when you do a reset.

As far as vocab cards, those are currently in beta, and yes you can avoid them.

10 Likes
#3

Exactly. I plan to mark NOTHING as known. It’s what I signed up for.

That’s why it’s at 5 right now? It would be less?

Awesome! Although I’m willing to give it a try if they add importing words fom Anki.

5 Likes
#4

Pretty much what happens is they all build up over time, so you might wake up one morning with a huge mountain of reviews, so usually most people add more in slowly so the amount of reviews are spread out more. I think it’s fine to add a decent amount at the start, especially if they are easy stuff that you know.

5 Likes
#5

Like has already been said, if you already know them then it kinda doesn’t matter how many you add since you won’t be really learning it’ll be more like a review. BUT once you do get things you don’t fully know adding a lot will obviously be a bad idea. When I’m adding new vocab I like to add 3-6 whenever I notice my daily review pile goes down to a point where I have a lot more time available then what the site is giving me in reviews. And for vocab points I will add 10-15 when adding since they’re just easier.
That being said since you are new here this website uses SRS which I will assume you are familiar with since it’s pretty common. I will post a picture which shows the time table they use.

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If you ever have issues I’ve noticed mixed results on reaching out through the official channels. Normally just yelling in any forum post works though.

Welcome to the club. Our official mascot is possums and we all agree that catsup with french fries is the best food btw.

10 Likes
#6

Just a minor correction warranted here …

Our official mascot is a bunny :rabbit: and we all agree that フライドポテト with ketchup is the best food :wink:

11 Likes
#7

You mean foxes are the mascot and chips with curry sauce is the best food, right?

8 Likes
#8

I know I previously said I would mark nothing as known, but a lot (the majority) of the N5 grammar I already know, so I go through it really fast and if I conclude there are no misunderstandings about what it is inside my head I mark it as known to prevent this kind of situation.

What’s the difference between a grammar point and a word?
No, seriously. Why is 来る a grammar point?

I just now realized that many of the words I know in English could be considered gramar points. Like “would”. That’s a word. But also a grammar point with specific usage.
‎ ‎
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Also I still don’t understand what that “intensity” meter I maxed out did. I can do as many lessons as I want, and it’s not like it’s gonna give me more reviews - that’s not how SRS works, you get the amount of reviews that correlates to your learned items.

One of the best animals to have around. They eat pests like roaches, scorpions etc and are rarely ever a threat to humans (literally just don’t threaten it on purpose)
My favourite animals are possums, spiders and geckos. Super useful guys to have around

4 Likes
#9

来る has irregular conjugation and is taught as its own grammar point in beginner textbooks due to this (and as it is one of the first verbs people are introduced to so time is spent discussing what exactly a verb is and isn’t in Japanese; consider the fact that Japanese tense is past and non-past only, etc.).

6 Likes
#10

Reviews are like a hamster wheel. The faster you run, the quicker the wheel speeds up. Go at a steady pace and things will be okay. If you flip the question around and ask ‘how long each day do I want to be spending doing grammar reviews?’ - it’s an easier question to answer. Then add new lessons until you find that you have more reviews than you can do in that time (like spinning the wheel to make it speed up). Then stop adding new lessons until you reach zero reviews in your alloted time, then you can add again.

Otherwise you’ll end up like:


12 Likes
#11

黙れ冒涜者

4 Likes
#12

I know I previously said I would mark nothing as known, but a lot (the majority) of the N5 grammar I already know, so I go through it really fast and if I conclude there are no misunderstandings about what it is inside my head I mark it as known to prevent this kind of situation.

I started with knowing most of N5 and N4 but still went through it with 20-30 new cards/topics per day.

I deeply regretted that later. :slight_smile: The amount of review you get in the next weeks is just incredibly annoying, even if you can go through them fast. It still costs a lot of time.
But you can’t do much wrong, if you get annoyed by the amount of reviews just don’t learn new ones for two week and it will calm down. Not immediately but after a while the reviews will drop very rapidly and everything is normal again. Better learning it the hard way in N5 and N4 instead of N3, N2 or N1.

If you’re used to piled up reviews from Anki, be careful. In Bunpro it is far worse after my experience. I could handle 500 per day in Anki with ease but 150 reviews per day in Bunpro is a depression causing nightmare that creates frustration on a level I rarely experienced while learning Japanese.

For N3 I would recommend 5 per day as maximum (I went for 4 after a while). And for N2 maybe 2 (that’s my current rate and I’m thinking about going down to 1 per day). If you learn too much cards per day on these levels it will get really brutal because you’re basically learning a lot synonyms to already learned topics and your error rate will increase a lot. At least that was the case for me.

6 Likes
#13

I did do this, but once I realized I knew most of it by heart I marked the points as known so they never show up in reviews. If you count only what I didn’t mark as known afterwards, I think I did 5 per day indeed.

I’m not, because I have yet to miss a day of Anki. Sometimes I can barely stand right but I still do them before going to bed and bury new cards I just can’t possibly learn. Better to have 26 instead of 20 new cards the next day than have 40 new cards and a ridiculous amount of reviews.

o.O I have yet to tackle more than 100

We’ll see! Thanks for the tips.

1 Like
#14

Oh Sweet summer child

6 Likes
#15

The pace that worked best for me was ~10 new grammar points per day for stuff that I already “knew” and felt familiar with, but only ~2-3 new points for brand new stuff.

When adding new grammar to my reviews, I’d just browse here and pick whatever looked easiest. This way, the new stuff always felt “easy” even though the grammar I was adding on day 50 probably would’ve looked really intimidating to me on day 1.

2 Likes
#16

Thanks, didn’t realize I could just chose what to learn

1 Like
#17

Just another tips, instead of looking to add every day a fix amount of new cards, try to stick at a certain amount of review.
I decide to do 10 review per day, at least. So every day i’m under 10, I add 1-2-3 or more cards to reach 10 review.
With this, i’ll will never struggle with the amount to do.

I do the same with Anki, 200 review per day as a target. It works pretty well since 7 month, so maybe you should give it a try for bunpro.

Good luck on your journey

3 Likes
#18

Lots of people are saying Bunpro reviews are very taxing and 20 a day is a lot. I just did 70 today and it was perfectly fine… am I missing something?

1 Like
#19

Just do it again one or two weeks, you will understand :wink:

The big problem you’ll soon face is the “nice guess”.
And remember that it’s not a run for many of us, so 20 is a lot if you don’t want to spend too much time on doing grammar !
Find your own pace, and you will find it after burning your head with too much reviews, as we all done before ahah

3 Likes
#20

それは僕が引きこもりだからだと思う :sweat_smile:

Actually, I think I mangled the grammar there. Maybe don’t use the second だ