Gradually incorporate the vocabulary into my study sessions

Japanese
#1

Hi everyone,

So, I’ve been using Bunpro every day for a little over two months now, and I really like the system. Up until now, I’ve focused exclusively on grammar, as you can see in the screenshot below:

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I’ve been adding 3 new grammar points every day since I reached the N3 level. In a little over a month, I’ll have gone through all the N3 grammar points. That was my goal, since I’ve registered for the JLPT N3 in July 2026.

Alongside Bunpro, I do a lot of immersion: reading, anime, podcasts… and I use Anki with an immersion deck where I’ve added about 1,000 cards. Across all my Anki decks, I’ve accumulated just over 2,000 “mature” cards.

To maximize my chances of passing the exam in July, I was wondering if it might be worth gradually adding vocabulary on Bunpro as well.

The thing is, I’m not sure how to make the process “smooth.” I already know quite a bit of vocabulary from N5, N4, and N3—and even above.

Since I’ve never worked on vocabulary via Bunpro, I have a “backlog” of 4,000 words from N5 to N3. Do I have to go through every single word one by one and mark them as “mastered” if I know them, and only study the others? Are there any shortcuts to make this easier?

Is anyone else in the same boat?

Don’t hesitate to ask if anything in my message wasn’t clear!

Thanks!

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#2

You can learn vocab in anki instead of bunpro. I used Jalup - now nihongo lessons. [costs as much as bunpro for N5-1]

Ankidrone Essentials is free
Japanese like a breeze and Jo-Mako N5 is free, intermediate and advanced on Patron

Or you can keep mining

Check a list of N5-N3 vocab, and use anki browser to find examples from subs2srs decks.
I download the subs2srs deck of manga and anime I’ve already read/watched. I finished mining chapter 1 of かがみの孤城 Today. And used example sentences from, かがみの孤城, 鋼錬, 犬夜叉, ソマリと森の神様, 進撃の巨人, 坂本ですが, 甘い甘いと稲荷 and ノラガミ

#3

Though I do use Bunpro for vocab reviews for the time being, it’s just not as good as Anki for vocab. I think their intervals are perfectly good for grammar, which requires more practice, but for vocab there are too many intervals in the first two days, and their steps are not large enough later on. I reckon I will probably phase out my vocab reviews on Bunpro once the snowball gets large enough.

I really like that there are a variety of example sentences that showcase different usage though, so it’s a shame.

#4

Marking as mastered the words you already know sounds like a good approach. Unfortunately it might get a bit tedious doing that in BunPro, as I think you’d have to step through every word and for each one, open the sidebar and set to mastered. (There may be a better way in BunPro that I’ve missed, happy to be corrected)

There’s one app I’ve seen that has a pretty good solution to this problem. KameSame is just like any other SRS system for vocabulary (and kanji) but it has a mode called Placement Test that I think would be useful in your circumstances:

Placement test

In this mode, any correctly-answered items will be marked as already-learned (i.e. burned) and any cards you get wrong will be automatically added to your review queue. This is a handy way to work through a list when you already know a significant number of its items.

It’s a pretty neat way of checking what you really already know and adding reviews for what you don’t. It would still take a while to get through all the vocab, but with a smoother interface, and you’re getting the benefit of all that recall practice at the same time.

You can choose to do JP → EN and/or EN → JP.

It’s also free to use. There are a few paid features but I don’t think you’d need them for this.

Edited to add:

I also wanna show BunPro some love here by saying that I do also use it for vocab sometimes, especially in cloze mode, which I find really helpful for seeing words in the context of sentences.

#5

I agree that the actual presentation, with the choice of review styles and all of that, is pretty great. I just think there should be different intervals for vocab. Should be like 1 day, 2/3 days, a week, a month, etc. There’s like four or five more intervals than there need to be.

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#6

Fortunately, there is a better way. You go ahead and say “learn new words,” and if the word that comes up is one you already know well, you click “mark as mastered.”

That’s much quicker than opening the sidebar for each word—even though I’d rather be able to look at a list, click a box by the ones I know, and then choose “mark selected items as mastered.”

Personally, I’m currently using Bunpro vocabulary as supplementary study. I’ve used Anki and I’m currently using jpdb for vocabulary. I figure that the more places I see a word, the more likely I am to remember it—but if I get overwhelmed with reviews, Bunpro is what I will drop.

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