the second point about having to manually mark yourself incorrect is a huge issue i have as well. it’s silly to argue “just move on” when you get the answer wrong. most people go back, look at the grammar point, type in the corect aswer so they can get a feel for how it is actually used then move on. there’s a random extra step that’s detrimental to a streamlined experience when it would be really easy to just mark it wrong even if you fix it. and as someone with a broken keyboard, i get typing things in wrong, but it still causes really inconistent results especially if i accidentally double click enter out of habit when i know the answer is right.
I, for one, really like the ability to change your answer in Bunpro’s SRS, although it requires a certain level of honesty and self-discipline. As other people have pointed out, language as well as translations are flexible and Bunpro’s ability to hint at the “correct” solution is inherently imperfect. This is especially true if you use this site not just for grammar, but also vocabulary reviews.
With other SRS systems such as Wanikani, I often find myself having to cancel the current review session after fat-fingering an answer or not remembering the specific English word they are looking for (my native language is not English), even if I have a solid grasp of the concept in my mind. I’m genuinely grateful that I don’t have to deal with this on Bunpro, as it can be quite time-consuming and nerve-wracking.
It ultimately comes down to your personal preference, though.
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Yesssss i agree, i was trying to cram the は and が stuff a while ago but it literally just gives you a hint when u get it wrong 
There are a few ways to get an undo button for Wanikani. Note that all involve 3rd party apps/scripts. In a web browser, consider using the Wanikani Double-Check script. On mobile, there are some apps with undo buttons (Tsurukame, Smouldering Durtles, Hakubun, etc.).
However, I agree that the undo button should be a native feature on Wanikani.
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Hi there!
Welcome to the forums and thanks for trying Bunpro.
Another annoying thing is that during reviews, there doesn’t appear to be any way to modify the beginning of your answer, other than deleting and retyping the whole thing.
Yeah unfortunately once you’ve attempted an answer, you can’t modify what you’ve entered.
For example, there doesn’t seem to be any way to start a quiz once you’ve read the pages for three new grammar points using the keyboard. You have to switch to the mouse and click on the dialog which is annoying.
This is a good catch. I’ll make it so that the ‘Quiz Me!’ button gets focused when that popup appears, so that you can just hit Enter to start the Quiz.
This is how it used to be, so this must be a degradation issue.
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I was able to start a quiz just by pressing enter tonight. Thank you!
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I’ve decided to give up completely on Bunpro. It takes a lot of time and effort and doesn’t seem to be helpful, for the reasons I already described previously. Every time I attempt to study grammar, I become more convinced that there’s no effective way to study grammar. Maybe Bunpro would be more useful if you had JLPT style exercises, at least for gaining the ability to pass the JLPT. But the current exercise style doesn’t seem to help for anything.
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It isn’t for everyone. Did you try the setting where you have to just read the sentence and self-grade based on understanding?
In terms of other ways to learn grammar, I actually mostly learn when reading and looking things up when a sentence doesn’t make sense. I’ll look at Bunpro, the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar, 知恵袋 posts, sometimes Imabi, etc. For more basic concepts Tae Kim and Cure Dolly are very popular as well (I don’t like either too much personally though). As I mentioned before at N2 level there is really no substitute for native materials - everything else exists just to support that. You might be ableto scrape a pass on the JLPT from textbooks but you won’t actually understand anything properly. I will also say that any SRS will really only bear fruit after a reasonable amount of time (like months) so if you move to another SRS for grammar (there are even monolingual anki decks for grammar out there which you might like) then it is worth sticking with it for a while. SRS isn’t necessary though, of course.
Anyway, feel free to come back to the forums here to ask questions even if you aren’t actively using Bunpro. If you do find something that works for you then I’d be interested to know what it is - I’m always curious about how other people study.
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Yes
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just to echo what the fox said, SRS only really pays dividends after a meaningful amount of time. I find myself hearing grammar points that appear in my review Q out in the wild in places like my staff room or on the bus for example. I encounter a whole lol of the grammar points in the reading I do as well. My reading speed has honestly more than doubled since finishing N3 and 3/4 of N2 on BP. I’m no longer needing to stop at every little particle to try and riddle it out. The funny thing is, when i see these grammar points, the first thing that pops into my mind is that little bold hint telling me what grammar point bunpro is looking for. From there i instantly have a feel for what the word means and how it interacts with the other elements in the sentence.
I’m far from the most studious person. despite having started BP more than 2 years ago, i have only accumulated 150 days studied on the app. I had about 100 days when I sat the July JLPT. despite the fact that those 100 days were the only grammar study I have ever done, I was able to pass the N3. While it might be annecdotal, there are definitely long term benefits to sticking with an SRS and just trusting the process.
All of that being said, hopefully you find the thing that works for you.
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That seems like more of an intensive vs extensive reading thing. Also, it’s hard to see how Bunpro drilling you to type “noni” whenever you see “importance of means” will help you actually understand grammar in the wild.
Not quite, I haven’t changed the way in which I read. The only difference is the speed in which I am able to do it. If you’re referring to the type of material then it also hasnt changed at all. it is the same diary/conversation format text that I was reading before advancing on BP vs after and the only thing that has changed is my reading speed and comprehension. I had previously given up reading them since the grammar was too far above my level despite having the kanji knowledge to understand a lot of it. after completing the N3 and most of N2 levels on BP i tried the exact chapter i had given up on before and completed it in a giffy. I havent even been learning new kanji since then. Literally only one thing changed in the time between those two instances.
odd that you would mention that one specifically, that was one of my leeches for quite a long time. i saw it so frequently that I got sick of it. Now whenever I see or hear it, the importance of means is what pops into my head. the main reason BP emphasizes the importance of means is because one could easily view ために and のに as being completely identical. while both technically mean ‘in order to’ のに puts more emphasis on, you guessed it, the means by which something else is accomplished. Besides, the main hint for that grammar point is ‘in order to’ which appears below the sentence being reviewed and is highlighted in your accent colour. the ‘importance of means’ prompt was added later if i recall correctly. This was done in order to not have people constantly confuse のに reviews for ために reviews. If i recall correctly, that was not always the case and led to quite a few moments of frustration when trying to remember that there was another way besides ために . Once they added that pointer, i was able to compartmentalize のに in a box that was separated from ために by using that as a prompt. now when i want to use either word i try to think what I am trying to emphasize and it lets me know which is more appropriate for the situation. If you are interested in that update and why the unique hint of ‘importance of means’ came about, you can check this link.
https://community.bunpro.jp/t/major-update-hints-31st-july-2022/50394
With regards to your question about how it would help you identify it in the wild. When you are spending time and effort manually typing and retyping answers and you repeat that often enough and over a long enough time frame. You tend to have an easier time picking up on those structures when they do appear. Two examples that come to mind are two N2 items i learnt on BP recently. 尚 and 万が一 I heard the former while riding the bus this morning and understood immediately how it slotted into the announcement. I heard the latter yesterday when one of my colleagues interrupted my conversation with another colleague in order to ask for something which he needed just in case. Both of these are quite low in terms of my SRS progress with them, but i was able to pick up on them after around 5-6 reviews each. Those are just the two most recent examples.
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I’m curious what you were reading so I could try to read it myself and see how hard it is for me.
Also, “万が一” is a funny example because I learned that long ago as a vocabulary word.
Anyway, it’s interesting to hear your perspective, because it feels like you’re coming at things from the exact opposite direction as I assumed everyone would follow.
I’ve long thought that one of the reasons grammar is so hard to learn through immersion is that it is rarely contrastive. You can understand things most of the time without much detailed grammar knowledge, especially once you’ve got the basics down. You can understand a lot just from context, although I sometimes miss nuance and my eyes tend to glaze over if I hit an especially long and complex sentence.
For example, I’ve been reading Kona II on Satori Reader recently. Consider this sentence:
でも、僕のゆきに対する気持ちは何一つ変わらなかった。
From context, it’s already obvious that it means something like “but my feelings about Yuki didn’t change at all”. But without the explanatory note from SR, I wouldn’t have realized that 何一つ means “not a single one” and is specifically used for countable things and that there is a specific nuance that Kona has multiple feelings about Yuki and not a single one of them changed.
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In my personal experience this is an illusion; I’ve had it dispelled multiple times. Obviously you can follow the broadstrokes of something with some basic knowledge and vocab, especially something with a visual element like TV, but I think it is pretty common to “not know what you don’t know” when it comes to grammar/expression. I have Japanese friends who will say なんとなくわかる of English and then when I ask them what it means it turns out they have missed the point. It goes the other way as well. Obviously this is unrelated to how to learn though.
This is a good example of why the concept of “grammar points” is a bit nebulous. I learnt 何一つ as a word/phrase and not as “grammar”. Bunpro, for example, is relatively overkill and lists a lot of things that people might not consider “grammar” but they are things that some people may struggle with as the nuance is not necessarily obvious, especially when compared with similar phrases as on the JLPT. I would probably vote 万が一 as the easiest to learn grammar point on Bunpro though lol
Just on the topic of learning grammar and SRS etc, I think there needs to be a line drawn between learning a grammar point and remembering it. I would argue that SRS should be used purely to remember something, as a reminder that it exists, and act as a context rich anchor from which you can recall the meaning of something when you see it next in real life (as gnome says). The fact that Bunpro has a lot of hints and nudges is fine by me as the point isn’t for me to be perfect during Bunpro reviews, although I try, but rather just to remind me that something exists so that when I next see it in a book or something I either grasp it immediately or I notice it and go look it up. It is when reading (or whatever) that the actual learning happens. I only mention this since I guess it is possible to approach Bunpro/SRS as a place to learn grammar as a whole which, even as someone who broadly likes Bunpro, I think is not a good method (personally).
I thought more about your situation and finding “grammar” to be a sticking point and I guess it may just be a case of needing to read/listen more to get things to stick and experience them in context in the wild? I can’t say because I don’t know your study habits but I can say that the gap between each N-level is basically double the previous one, in my experience. I think this is why lots of people get to N4/N3 and then stop learning or stagnate as you need to do basically all the effort of N5 to N3 again to get to N2 and then all the effort of N5 to N2 to get to N1 (and then all the effort of up to N1 to actually become okay at the language). If the goal is to consume Japanese TV or something and not to pass the JLPT then I also wouldn’t beat yourself up over “grammar” that doesn’t stick due to not being used to seeing it as clearly it isn’t important for whatever you are using the language for.
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The problem is that the nature of Bunpro is backwards for this. IMO, its grammar explanation pages are much more useful than the SMS. I guess Bunpro’s “arbitrary English cue card → Japanese fill in the blank” style of exercise could possibly be useful for production, but it’s certainly not going to be helpful for comprehension or for the JLPT.
If you actually want to drill grammar understanding the way you say, you would want the opposite kind of exercise, where Bunpro shows you the grammar in Japanese and you have to recall all the other information, meaning, nuance, conjugations, etc.
I clearly have picked up some grammar ability via immersion. It’s just that grammar is the hardest thing to pick up via immersion, for the reasons I alluded to in my previous post. The result is that my grammar is always a level behind everything else. I’ve taken a number of practice JLPT exams of varying levels over the years, and grammar has always been my worst section at every level.
The reason is twofold:
- grammar is only sometimes important for comprehension, so immersion doesn’t stretch that muscle much and
- even if you can recognize grammar in context, that doesn’t mean you can mean you can remember the exact conjugation details or distinguish it from plausible-looking incorrect grammar, which is what the JLPT demands.
As an analogy, consider how you can easily recognize a word while reading from the general shape and context, even if when given two versions of the word side by side, one with an extra line added to one of the kanji, you can’t tell for sure which one is correct. Grammar has the same problem, but it’s a lot worse.
You mentioned earlier that you tried the setting where you read the sentence and self-grade. I’m a little confused because is that not exactly what you’re looking for here and solve all your problems mentioned in the OP? The JP sentence+self grade is a pretty recent development for Bunpro - there’s a blog post by the devs somewhere here where they recommend the option for learners looking to maximize their immersion because it is only Japanese and not the English cue cards/hints that is the default. I use it and through my own testing, reading short articles/passages, answering sample questions (I use the 新にほんご500 series of books - would also recommend these), etc. I’ve found it has dramatically increased my reading comprehension.
To be honest, even prior to Bunpro offering the read/review SRS, it’s been probably the single most important platform to my Japanese learning experience next to Anki, and even there Bunpro has entered the fray by allowing you to SRS vocab too. Barring maybe wanikani which I could not get into, it’s probably the closest thing that replaces traditional textbooks for me, although I have number of those as well.
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If it’s not too much off topic, could you speak a little more about this? I have been thinking about it these days but I don’t have much insight on this yet… It seems you consciously realized it happening to your japanese comprehension multiple times, so can you also give a few examples?
I have been reading some manga recently (both intensive and extensive i guess) and i thought i had i good understanding of what was being said on some places; but after learning half of n4 grammar and coming back, it seems i got a lot of the meaning considerably wrong. So sometimes i get a little worried about my own confidence even on “simple” phrases, specially those with tons of hiragana, where it’s hard to differentiate where words end and start, along with particles. I guess this will get better if i study my weaker grammar points more extensively, and practice reading more, but I’m curious about it.
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I don’t really have especially coherent thoughts on this but my entirely unresearced theory is that since we are so good at finding meaning in things we convince ourselves of some interpretation based of off very little information. Like have you ever seen a kid making up a story for a book when they can’t read properly?
In early stages of learning just being able to follow a story is a big achievement (and rightly so) and it is easy to trick oneself into thinking that because you can follow the story that you understand most of what is being said. It probably isn’t true. I think we do a pretty good job of ignoring what we don’t understand and filling in the cracks without noticing.
In the more intermediate stages I would say the problem is one of not knowing what one needs to look out for. I think you need to either see the same thing a lot of times when immersing extensively or you need to really question everything very closely when doing intensive immersion (“Okay, they used が here but は is grammatically acceptable so why did they use が and not は?” etc). The answers might not always be that deep but it will lead to a more acute sense of what you are “whitenoising”.
Obviously comprehension is not something that is black and white which is what makes this problem particularly insidious. The two contexts in which make me realise what I am missing in terms of comprehension the most are when re-watching or re-reading and just during conversation. When re-watching or re-reading, normally after a few months, I will notice so many things that I didn’t catch the first time. It also makes me realise that I have improved (when I feel like my ability never changes) so it is a good exercise. On the side of conversation, you are really forced to consider if you understand something as you have to reply. If you don’t understand properly then your reply will be nonsense. If you are speaking with a friend they will probably rephrase what they said and you will realise your error. If you are speaking with a stranger then they will probably just nod politely and say 日本語上手 (I am only half-joking).
Another reason why this situation comes about is probably comes about is the fact that expression and expressive ability are a lot more complicated than the basic version found in grammar resources. Bunpro is one of the more fairly comprehensive resources but it wouldn’t be possible to include everything.
As you get better obviously this kind of thing happens less but it is just part of learning the language. The flipside is that if you don’t understand something now then that too will also become comprehensible after some time without you really noticing. That’s probably the nice version of this effect.
My final thought on this, which maybe people won’t agree with, is that if you compare your comprehension to your native language you will realise how bad it is even if you can follow everything. If you had to write a standard high school essay on something like “How does the author create tension in this scene?” or something then could you do it as well as you could in your native language? Some people might say this is unfair as a metric but if your goal is to have a high level of Japanese then being able to write a high school style essay is actually a low measure (depending on your educational background). My own big goal is to be C2+ so being quite strict about exact understanding makes sense but you can enjoy a lot of media without getting close to that level so at a certain point the question of precision when understanding things is just personal.
Sorry this was a brain dump - I have never put my thoughts together on this before. It is a good topic though.
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Thank you, that’s a more extensive answer than what i was expecting, and very good info to keep in mind. It really gives a lot of meaning to diversifying your study methods in a sense, reading something you already read before, reading both with very extreme intensive immersion and also extensive or talking to people or writing high school essays lmao.
I assume re-reading or re-watching something you have already seen translated in your native language makes this problem a lot worse, since instead of actually trying to understand what is actually being said, your brain can cheat and take everything it possibly can from memory in your native language; tricking you into thinking you understood a lot more than what you really did…
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Yeah pretty much that is my experience. I started immersion with Terrace House. I would watch some episodes first with English subs and then with Japanese subs. When I look back at those same episodes now I realise how much I missed even with the advantage of having “fully understood it in English” first. Japanese is just so different that English subs are very far away from the original (grammatically and also ignoring certain cultural things/jokes).
However giving yourself as much help as possible to make input comprehensible is extremely important. You have to get the broadstrokes before you get the finer details just by necessity so I still absolutely would encourage people to use whatever they feel they understand and enjoy best as immersion material.
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