I’ve been using Bunpro to supplement and practice GENKI I grammar. It’s been great!
But on my Dashboard’s review forecast, I see Grammar and Vocab categories. Where can I study vocabulary? Are there vocabulary sections that match GENKI chapters?
Apologies for the simple question. I find Bunpro is an amazing resource, but a little difficult to navigate all the options and possibilities. Thanks in advance!
I don’t use it myself, but I think to access it you have to enable Beta features in the settings. Then you will have access to the vocabulary decks.
To add, you can find the vocab decks here: Decks - Japanese Grammar Explained | Bunpro
Even if you didn’t enable the beta feature.
Yes it does and I use it. There is a bunch of vocab in there too, all separated by JLPT levels. The vocab is only given in one format currently and I don’t know if they’re working on adding more. They go alongside you grammar reviews and it shows you the vocab and you input the english meaning. I don’t think any of them have sound yet either.
I do think they have decks made to match grammar and subjects of books and it’s under deck like said above. If you can’t find them try enabling beta under account settings.
We do have Vocab!
As the others have mentioned, you’ll need to:
Hope this helps!
The process for Decks/Vocab is a bit clunky at the moment, but we have big changes for it on the horizon.
Yeah, they have a Genki 1 deck too!
I’ve actually learned a lot of vocabulary over time just by doing the grammar reviews. After guessing the meaning of each word from the sentence and seeing the furigana a few times, I can remember the word in other contexts. In fact, this method has been far more effective for me than using vocab flashcards.
With BunPro and mining from media, I’ve gained a lot of traction so far.
Honestly, I love the vocab decks on bunpro. I’ve learned more words in 1 week than like 5 months on Wanikani or 8 months through text books. how they have it setup especially using the CLOZE (it’s unbelievably hard, though) methods, it helps a lot in retention and remembering words.
Why is it different from your experience with wanikani? just curious
So wanikani does not really teach vocabulary, and it leaves a ton of gaps especially in terms of knowledge and usefulness in the words. for example, it teaches you stuff like 国宝 before words like 僕 and I am aware that wanikani is for specifically kanji first, but the lack of nuance and word order is not very good when it comes to trying to piece the language together. as well, Wanikani offers 0 information of hiragana only words which is much more of low level japanese than one may initially think.
Wanikani should not really be advertized as a vocabulary application, but soley as a kanji application with some vocab. At least in my opinion. there’s locking most of the actually useful kanji behind potentially months of work is not very advantageous to low level learners and the time it takes to reach the high level kanji is detrimental to the people that could actually stand to benefit from the website.
So coming from someone who has spent a fair amount of time with wanikani, i can’t really justify it past level 10 or so.
I understand that pov but you have to learn all those 常用漢字 anyway, I don’t personally see the rush for practical vocabulary. I agree thought that you have to do a lot of studying outside of wanikani for vocab, but no site is going to cover all the random stuff youll come across
I don’t personally see the rush for practical vocabulary.
I think the two main scenarios for there to be a “rush” are:
You want to engage with media/actual Japanese as soon as possible so you don’t want to frontload less frequent vocab or kanji.
You live in Japan (or have some pressing need to use Japanese in your life).
I don’t use Wanikani but it certainly seems like it is not enough on its own to learn vocab and it seems like a massive timesink if you actually want to start using Japanese sooner rather than later. But some people love it and it does seem to suit some situations.
while yes, you do eventually need to know the kanji, learning them in isolation may not be ideal either, like you would in wanikani. not to mention you should eventually start recognizing kanji in words and slowly start to piece the words together yourself, similar to how you see an unfamiliar word in english. there aren’t too many “super advanced” 1 kanji words in that I’ve seen so you should be able to get away with knowing most of thekanji and piecing it together.
I have a different, but related question. How do you stop doing vocab reviews. I started, decided I don’t want to, but don’t seem to be able to turn it off.
Thanks in advance
— Dave
I had this question as well, since I tested it out and decided not to use the vocab feature!
You can go into your stats and click onto the “reset” tab, and there you can reset each vocab deck you used specifically.
I hope this is helpful to you! Let me know if you can’t find it.
Thanks!
On my reset page, I only have the option to reset grammar — no mention of vocab anywhere there.
— Dave
you may have to individually remove vocabulary from your cycle. Next time you see it in review, just answer right or wrong then go to the bottom and click “remove from review.”
Hmm, weird. I have it on mine, pic related.
I used it to remove N5-N3 vocab from my reviews when I decided they weren’t working out for me at all.
I think one of the main benefits of WK is that the learning of the kanji is very structured and incremental. This may be ‘slow’ if you’re looking for vocab or for something like verbal/conversational Japanese, but it is (IMHO, and in my experience so far) much ‘faster’ for learning how to read Japanese – and, in particular, kanji (of course!).
Having the ‘scaffolding’ of WK’s level system, with its building up new kanji from previously-learned kanji and radicals, makes the learning curve of kanji much more smooth and steady, IMO. In this way, one can learn kanji faster than acquiring them through raw exposure or through dictionary look-ups, or by building one’s own Anki deck (or even using an existing one which is not as ‘structured’ as WK’s system is).
But of course, different people are different and some (maybe many) people will prefer a different way of learning kanji.
As for learning vocab, as others have said, WK’s vocab is primarily as a support (part of the ‘scaffolding’) for learning kanji.
So, if one’s main interest is learning vocab, WK is not ideal. Not useless, but certainly other tools would be better. Certainly BunPro’s vocab system is quite good for my own needs.
I think most people’s issue with wanikani is it teaches poor vocabulary, most of which is pretty niche or unused for the sake of teaching a kanji. it’s like if you take a class to learn the sounds for TH and the first word you learn is Therizinosaurus. like yeah, it’s there, but the usefulness of the word is very questionable.
