Does Bunpro teach vocabulary?

Bunpro
#30

Disagree, I’m only level 14 on WK and have about 95% of N5 and N4 kanji covered (+ almost half of N3 and some more from higher levels), and about 60% of vocab for N5 and N4 (after synching here on bunpro).

As someone who completely gave up on Japanese before after several years because I couldn’t get beyond the first ~100 kanji, I don’t understand most of the complaints about WK. Maybe that’s because I use several other resources and it’s really just about the kanji for me. It’s not slow at all imo, I’m further along in my kanji knowledge than the rest of my Japanese class, and I’m going super slow on WK already, and most of the mnemonics really work for me - I’m glad I got lifetime btw, takes the pressure off, and probably helps with the feeling of WK not being slow/trying to slow you down? And I guess I’m also a bit unusual in that I don’t mind going through the basics again and again, I’ve started at 0 on bunpro and am doing it again on marumori (both for grammar and for kanji/vocab). It’s nice to reinforce that knowledge, and maybe discover some gaps here and there. So going through some of what I already knew on WK didn’t bother me at all.

More on topic: Bunpro adding vocab decks was super great and it’s helping me a lot, especially the decks for more books than they have grammar paths for (we use Marugoto in class, so now I can actually add some of it on here as we’re going through the material in class - unfortunately the decks are still a bit incomplete concerning vocab, and we’re almost done with the last book bunpro has)

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#31

It might have changed or it might just be that it wasn’t for me.

I dropped WK years ago, I was way past level 2X, and I couldn’t read anything aimed to low school graders comfortably at all. Some very basic Kanji that you find everyday would be buried on higher levels, probably just because the amount of radicals or strokes would scare off a beginner.

In the end WK is not for everyone, like any other learning tools.
Obviously it works for a lot of people and that you can see in their success and worth of mouth, but yeah… not for me, and sadly I think I realized too late in my opinion.

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#32

They do adjust things pretty regularly, so after several years of refinement maybe their order is more beginner friendly - I definitely notice how I recognize more and more and am able to just “read” a non-textbook sentence sometimes instead of deciphering it character by character. That said, if the system doesn’t work for you, that’s fine too. Just wanted to clarify that point for any passersby who might be scared away from WK even though it might be right for them. If you’re fast you can reach close to 100% of the N5/4 kanji and 50% of N3 in ~4 months (I’m not fast).

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#33

At around WaniKani Level 30, you should be able to read about 80% of almost everything you see online (unless it’s some technical paper or something like that, of course), which is not as bad as some people may think. It would take about 6 months to achieve this at the fastest speed, which I did and do not recommend.

Doing WaniKani in 2 years is a much better pace, in my experience. It’s because learning 30-40 Kanji every week, and maintaining that pace for a year, is VERY time consuming. You’ll also forget a significant number of them overtime unless you’re reading everyday. Unless you have a ton of free time, and you don’t think you’ll burn out, it really is not worth it. Every level 60 who did it at the fastest pace will tell you the same as I am.

Just think that Japanese people take 9 years to learn all of these Kanji, so even if it takes you 4 years to do the same, that’s still fast.

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#34

80% is still very low, honestly. A standard page in a Japanese novel is about 400 characters and we can say, for the sake of the example, 60% of those are kanji meaning that there are something like 240 kanji on any given page of a normal novel. If we say that you can recognise a rough meaning and possibly a reading of 90% of those kanji then you are still looking at over 20 kanji on every page that you don’t know. This is also ignoring grammar and the actual nuance of vocabulary. Maybe it is personal but that is still pretty low comprehension, in my opinion. And this is assuming you are learning kanji purely by frequency.

The main issue with kanji is that the returns diminish greatly past the first 800ish and then even more so after 1500ish. Even at 99% coverage of kanji you are still looking at not knowing roughly 2 kanji on any given page of a novel.

Also, regarding the fact that Japanese people take 9 years to learn kanji - this is kind of misleading, in my opinion, since they take 9 years to learn to write and read kanji amongst also learning like how to do basic maths and what the difference between a bird and a mammal is etc since they are literally children when they do this. They do not spend that much time in their day doing it. And one massive difference is that they are already able to speak and understand Japanese (to the level that children can) which means that they almost always are not learning to attach meaning or seemingly nonsensical readings to a kanji but, rather, they are just learning to associate something very meaningful (a word) with a symbol. Whether this makes it more impressive or less impressive that L2s, in the fastest cases, can learn tens of thousands of words and thousands of kanji in a few years, I don’t know.

I am sure I am preaching to the choir with all this anyway （笑）

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#35

No estimated timeline for Flashcard input on Grammar Points, but we’ve done the groundwork to implement this feature pretty quickly in the future.

We’re about to push the Vocab 2.0 update, so first we will focus on fixing Vocab bugs, moving Reviews 2.0 out of Beta, and implementing Dashboard in the new system.

Good to hear someone’s excited about it though!
I’ve been using Bunpro for like 4-odd years, gonna feel weird to have Grammar Point flashcards :sweat_smile: :cowboy_hat_face:

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Reviews 2.0 is coming out of Beta! (Soon)
#36

Something that often happens to native Japanese people, unless they worked real hard in their 国語 classes at school or have a real strong interest in learning by themselves! From speaking to people, it seems like quite often if they come across an unfamiliar kanji, they’ll either try and guess the meaning from context and/or deciphering the radicals, or they’ll just write it into their phone and give it a quick Google. Same way that we, as native speakers of whatever language, will still come across new words!

All this to say, any progress you can make is good progress, and not knowing everything isn’t the end of things. To go from 0% to any% of kanji comprehension is nice in of itself. Whether you get there with WK, Anki, Heisig, following the same grades as Japanese kids… whatever. It’s all good enough in my book. Everyone has different goals and is aiming for different achievements, and that’s why it’s great to have as many resources as possible.

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#37

Natives definitely don’t need to check 2 kanji for every page of a novel but, of course, people look up words. I tend to collect rare or interesting kanji when reading and ask natives if they know them but almost always those rare kanji have furigana. Most of the time the native won’t know the kanji but will know the word. Or being told the word will cause them to “remember” the kanji. My vocabulary is still not large but only 4 or 5 times have I said a word that a native hasn’t heard of. The time when I see natives really having no clue about kanji is when looking at very old texts. That is a bit different though.

I am a native English speaker and in an average novel I look up probably 1 word. I read a fair amount and many novels I look up no words at all. If I were looking up a word or two per page then I would start to doubt my own English ability.

Having said that,

All this to say, any progress you can make is good progress, and not knowing everything isn’t the end of things. To go from 0% to any% of kanji comprehension is nice in of itself. Whether you get there with WK, Anki, Heisig, following the same grades as Japanese kids… whatever. It’s all good enough in my book. Everyone has different goals and is aiming for different achievements, and that’s why it’s great to have as many resources as possible.

I totally agree with this. Didn’t mean to sound so harsh or negative originally. More just venting the frustrations that come with comprehending a fair chunk but seemingly never 100% of Japanese. It is a long journey.

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#38

Using WK alongside a class is one of the best scenarios for WK since you can leave it in the background, chip away at it and you get to be ahead of your classmates. It is also great for helping learners get off the ground with kanji which suits your needs since you mentioned struggling with the first 100 kanji.

That said, I think you are misunderstanding what Megumin is saying, an example of a book for low school grade would be something like this

If you scroll down there are comments/reviews from kids in grades 2-6. There is furigana so not knowing the “readings” is not a detriment.

Different goals require different levels of vocabulary

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#39

Strong disagree. Of course it depends on the person and their needs/goals, but for me getting lifetime was a no-brainer for me. I had already tried Anki, and then tried out WaniKani’s first three levels which are free. I could easily see the benefit (again, just speaking for myself) over Anki.

And, knowing myself, I knew that it was either 1) get lifetime, or 2) not use WK at all. This is because, for me, doing a monthly or yearly subscription runs the dangers of getting a monthly membership at a gym: I could easily end up paying month after month, but not actually use it, for whatever reasons (again, just talking about my own tendencies).

Similarly, even if I was using it on a regular basis, I would always have in the back of my mind the feeling that I need to ‘get as much value for money’ as possible, which would make me feel like there was time pressure. In other words, I would have felt a need to ‘go as fast as possible’. And again, knowing myself, that could easily have led me to the opposite extreme: Using WK too much, neglecting other things in life (both in terms of Japanese study, but also just life in general).

For me, lifetime membership is 1) a much better ‘value for money’, since I already knew from the first three levels that I wanted to go all in on WK, and 2) complete alleviation of ‘time pressure’.

The exact same thing goes for BunPro, too. I got my BunPro lifetime the same time I got WK lifetime. Both have well ‘paid off’ by now, having been around 3-ish years already.

Each person’s different. The key is to figure out what your own goals and needs are and decide based on that. Blanket saying, “Whatever you do, don’t get lifetime,” is not good advice, IMO.

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#40

Yeah, I should have added that I don’t mean Japanese people will search several kanji per page, but possibly several kanji per novel. Unless it’s a specialised text, or an archaic one - then the frequency will really shoot up. More often than not it’s a situation where if they were reading out loud, they’d be able to muscle memory their way through the word in context, but just reading it on a page is like “Wait, do I know this?”.

Also depends on the person, haha. To speak of one incident with my friends, they were reading a leaflet we got passed and one of them was like “Wait lmao what the hell is this kanji”. And roundly got roasted by the rest of the group because it was one they’d learnt in junior high - and one I knew, too - but he was a terrible student when it came to Japanese. (I’m sure he won’t mind me dragging him as an example, haha!)

Nah, don’t worry! I just wanted to add it as a reminder to anyone that however they learn, whatever works for them, is good.

It’s the same for me - it’s nice having them there all paid for and ready to use whenever I need, rather than having time constraints. I used a rolling sub for both for a good few months though, just so I knew they’d work out for me. Took the bullet on Lifetimes as soon as the holiday sales rolled around. However, it is a big chunk of change, so only really worth it if you have the pennies spare for it.

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#41

Ironically, I’m on a low income, so even with the holiday specials, I still couldn’t really ‘afford’ it. But I didn’t want to miss the specials, so I splurged and called it a Christmas present to myself. Had to tighten the budget here and there to make up for it for a few months after. :sweat_smile:

But. Good point, and something one would need to consider, whether one can afford it at the time or not.

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#42

I didn’t get that from the comment, but okay. We might also just have different thresholds to where we feel like it’s too much of a struggle/we’re not “there” yet. My main problem at this stage is usually recognizing grammar and applying it correctly (there’s so little context, who’s doing what? Are we still talking about the thing from three sentences ago?), not so much vocab since it’s a lot easier to look up.

And I agree that WK is best used alongside other tools. I can’t imagine why some people would try to “finish” WK by itself before starting to look at other resources. (Even the recommended “wait till level 10 before starting grammar” seems like really counterintuitive advice.) And this is why lifetime is a good deal if you can afford it, both for WK and for bunpro, it takes time to get the balance right. I’m glad bunpro made such huge updates during/since the sale a year ago, I got a lot more out of it already than I would have thought when I signed up, especially with the addition of vocab decks (I’m not far enough on grammar to enjoy the more recent explanations).

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#43

I don’t think it would be 240 unique kanji :slight_smile:
Nevertheless, there are graded readers, like まる子ちゃん manga series. I think 300-500 kanji are sufficient to read such books. And of course, there is fugirana for almost every kanji.

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#44

Of course they wouldn’t be unique kanji 笑. I am talking about coverage % of kanji. 800 kanji gives roughly 90% coverage (obviously depends heavily on the text). It was that sort of statistic that I was discussing.

#45

You’re right, each person is different. I had wrongly assumed that everybody would understand that sentence to mean that the learner should do either a monthly or yearly sub to give themselves a chance to re-evaluate before committing. It doesn’t mean no one should ever get lifetime.

Six to eight months sub gets most people to approx. level 15-33, and at that point someone who hasn’t bought lifetime has committed $54-72 or $89 (or less as there are 30-50% coupons for new yearly subs). Their goals and needs may have changed in that time and they have the flexibility to reallocate their resources. Maybe they want to learn/practice writing Kanji at the same time and discovered Skritter. There are a lot of different Japanese learning tools out there.

Again, if someone is sure then by all means but even then unless they are getting it during the year end sale, they are better off getting a yearly sub first since $89 (which gets prorated) + $199 < $299. There is really no reason to not retain flexibility.

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#46

It depends on who you ask, doesn’t it? I think that being able to read 80% of the Japanese you encounter in online articles, news, social media, etc. in 6 months is really good. I don’t think many people can say they can read 80% of Japanese even after 2 years of study, unless you’re living in Japan and studying Japanese at a cram school. Heck there are people who have lived in Japan for many years and still can’t read 20% of what they see (if anything). Of course there are exceptions, but they are not the norm.

Personally, I think it’s really cool that you don’t have to do that much Kanji look up these days, but how long did it take you to get to that level of Kanji reading? If I may ask?

BTW, WaniKani level 30 is around 1,000 Kanji, which is where you start to reach the point of diminishing returns. Actually, I’d say level 40 would be more like it (which would put people learning through WaniKani at around the 1,500 mark as you mentioned).

I don’t think it is misleading at all if you consider the typical working adult, who spends about 8 of hours working 5 days a week, PLUS has a family, and other responsibilities. Or take a college student who, besides studying for their career, also have work and possibly other responsibilities. The only time I would agree with you is if the person studying Japanese hardly has the responsibilities mentioned above and thus has all the time in the world to solely focus of Japanese studies. Then, of course!

Well, that depends if you consider 40 mins a day just practicing new Kanji (besides the time it takes to learn it) insignificant:

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#47

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is great to be reading anything in Japanese. Just I think that when percentages get thrown around it can mislead new learners a little bit (it mislead me, at least, and I thought I was fairly realistic at the time).

To answer your question, I have been studying Japanese for around 16 months, if you go from when I started learning hiragana, and in that time I have probably studied/immersed for at least 800+ hours. I don’t want to misrepresent my level; I am still not very good at Japanese but I do appreciate that I have maybe moved a lot faster than some other people. I don’t really track so it is hard to tell. I’ve lived in Japan for about 6 months and I work as an ALT in a high school. Obviously I have more time on my hands than someone with a family and a more stressful job however I haven’t exactly put insane hours in either. When I started I would study for maybe 20-40 minutes a day and only since I came to Japan have my hours really gone up.

Regarding foreigners in Japan learning or not learning Japanese, I think that, as you say, there are some cases where people are way way too busy. There are also people who know they won’t be here for too long and therefore learn very casually so that they can just about get by. Nothing wrong with that. Depending on your goals and your own situation you may not want to compare your own progress with those people though. You might not want to compare yourself to anyone at all (probably the healthiest option, although it can be hard to do).

Regarding children learning kanji, I don’t mean to imply that they don’t do a fair bit of it (I didn’t watch that video but I don’t think they do an honest 40 minutes every day though - I’ll watch the video when I finish work) but rather that the situation is so different for natives that it is hard to make a real comparison. I do feel like that the 9 years thing can mislead learners because of this.

I’ll say it again - I do tell people to check out wanikani since it works for many people. It has some clear advantages for some situations. I just also think it has clear disadvantages for most situations. Ask me again in 10 years when I actually know Japanese and I’m sure I can give you a more balanced answer though lol

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#48

Those percentages are not baseless though. I’m not pulling them out of thin air:

image
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https://www.wkstats.com/login

Apologies for not being able to screenshot the whole table but, if you look at the Level 30 mark, you’ll see that the WaniKani stats page says you should be able to read at least 80% of the pages mentioned at the top of the table. At Level 60, the percentage raises to ~93% to 99% (it’s not 100% since WaniKani doesn’t cover all of the Joyo Kanji). Anyway, that’s where I’m getting my numbers from :wink:.

Watch the video :wink:.

Of course you can’t make a direct comparison. But, if you take into account the things I mentioned (work, family, etc), not being born in or living in Japan, etc. And on the other hand, these being kids, who (as you correctly said) are also learning other subjects at school, not learning as many Kanji a week as some of us are, but are surrounded by the language and were born in Japan, etc. I think it balances out.

BTW, you are in a privileged situation since, not only do you not have family responsibilities, but you are in Japan! I assume most people here don’t have that advantage, but I also don’t want to deter from your achievements because, as I mentioned earlier, there are also people who live in Japan who barely know the language, so keep up the great work!! :+1:

As for not wanting to mislead people, I’m with you on that, which is why I try to be as accurate as I can when I comment. I guess I should include my sources next time I comment on percentages, etc, so that people don’t think I’m just guessing. Unfortunately a lot of people do that, which is why I don’t blame you for thinking I’m just throwing numbers here.

Lastly, I’m not saying WaniKani is the best method to learn Kanji for everyone. I simply wanted to clarify some of the things mentioned here because it seems that they are coming from people who didn’t complete all of the WaniKani levels, and that’s fine. It didn’t work for you guys, that’s alright. But if people stick with it, at least to level 30, they will really start seeing the benefits of the system and it’s a great feeling when that happens. Unfortunately you do have to reach a high enough level to notice them, because in the beginning you won’t be able to read much of anything.

Anyway, that’s basically all I wanted to do (to clarify why I think what I think about WaniKani).

Take care!

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#49

We are still planning on doing this in the near future. It will probably be soon after we finish making all of the fixes to the naturalness of the sentences on the website as mentioned in our most recent update post. This itself should be complete within a few weeks, which means we would possibly be looking at making flashcard reviews available sometime reasonably soon after that.

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