Have you done your BunPro Review today?

Bunpro
#548

Leveled up WK and BP.

  • WK kanji is starting to get harder. Small kanji with 3 complex radicals is really hard to read on phone :sweat:
  • As for BP, killed most of the ghosts, only 3 remaining :smile:
    Anyway, I’ll add more grammar points then.
  • Seems like the fastest way for me to get vocab in check is just by jamming it fast in sentences. 2300 words on iKnow so far with 200+ reviews per day. I go full speed at 30 words/day. I’ll finish Core 2000 and stop there for a bit and level up the sentence trainers.
  • For reading, I’ll get N3 book soon. Seems like N3 books have listening and reading than N5 and N4. I’m planning to get Nihongo So Matome (5 books) and Shin Nihongo N3.
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#549

Feeling back into it today. Added all the remaining level 16 vocab on WK, and the level 17 radicals, and the first batch of kanji. Which means I finally started on level 17 content 12 days after reaching the level! Which is longer than it took me to complete each of the previous two levels. Also added 3 new grammar points on Bunpro for a while! I’m pleased ~んだけど was a newly added point, as I feel like that’s one of the things you have to get used to going from English to Japanese, that kindof way of speaking. Anyway, if feels good to be adding things back on WK and BP!

Anyway, this evening’s BP review session, kinda forgot the “must not” form, as “must” is negative + negative, so I couldn’t figure out “must not” is positive + negative. Then also a bit confused over the nuances of one of the new grammar points I added where there are different forms.

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#550

Yesterday I did my normal reviews on BP, WK and Torii and kept adding 20 items on Torii from my classes. In fact, when I finished with that I finally felt like I might actually have enough time to do the critical studying done this holiday week. I might not get all the WK and BP items added that I’d like, but at least I will have caught up with class studies and gone a bit ahead. :smiley:

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#551

Level 30 here on BP! Half way done, oh wait, wrong website. :wink:

Did reviews everywhere yesterday, plus added the rest of the class vocabulary we’ve had to Torii, still need to do almost 25 lessons, found a lot of vocab yesterday. :sweat_smile:

Also did 20 vocab lessons on WK and I think I’ll go through the rest of the vocab before doing more kanji lessons.

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#552

Added some more grammar points yesterday. BP keeps adding more N4 points, so the passive form is still just out of reach (which I’ve been avoiding, because I don’t even know what passive voice means in English >_< ) Also, one of the recent points BP taught me was と for “if”, but it seems to me that for most of the example sentences, it isn’t really an “if” but more of an “and”, or a generic follow-up.

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#553

Hey :sunglasses:

I think the explanation here is decent:

I will try to write more about と. Maybe new lesson.
But generally it can means all: “if”, “when”, “and then”.

Generally when used as “and then”(in AとB) the B clause(part) has to be something that is uncontrollable.

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#554

WK and BP level up.
Slowing down on WK, slowly getting apprentice to 100 and stop there.
Getting a bunch of よう grammar points on BP, really hard to remember them all :sweat:
2500+ words on iKnow, finished all N4 vocabulary words at last. I think I’m getting it too fast with 30 new words/day as I’m getting 300 words to review today. Should slow down a bit :star_struck:

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#555

Thanks! I think I get the と, but it just seems a bit confusing in the sentences to be translated as “if”.

I read the thing about passive voice many many times, and think I get it… you would use a normal verb when someone/thing was doing a verb, but use the passive voice when it’s not the person or thing doing the verb which is important, but when the thing which is getting the verb done to it is the important part of the sentence. So kinda like how you are meant to write a scientific report. All this stuff happened, rather than we did this stuff.

Then there is the other meaning of unfortunate things happening. I know the ちゃう form is used for unfortunate things happening, but am thinking ちゃう is used when you do the unfortunate thing, whereas passive is used when someone else did something which is unfortunate for you.

I guess the ichidan conjugation being the same for passive/potential is something you just have to learn by exposure.

Also, unrelated, but the other day I added the ~んだけど point here, and it lists ~のですが as the alternate form, but are ~んけど and ~んですが also acceptable?

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#556

んですが is acceptable. :+1:

んけど is super casual, and I would think of it as (super casual) contraction of ない like in 知らんけど、わからんけど (しらないけど、わからないけど).

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#557

My week off as I’ve reported saw quite a bit of Japanese studies although BP got the short stick with only 3 new points added. Torii had a bit of snafu. It made it so you could add which words to do in lessons, but if they weren’t part of your lesson set, they didn’t show up in reviews until I realized they weren’t and then I went up to 250 apprentice items after the fix. (If I’d gotten them down 20 per day as I did, it wouldn’t have gotten that high plus 250 reviews dumped all at once. Sad face.)

This meant the end of the week had to be focused on doing those reviews and trying to get the apprentice items lower. I think I’ll manage it later today or tomorrow when most of them should guru (although it isn’t called apprentice and guru in Torii, but same thing as WK’s SRS levels).

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#558

Well I’m back from my 3 week vacation where, apart from my 1 BP review a day to keep up my streak. (7 days away from dat 100 streak badge baby~~), I did diddly squat as far as studying Japanese.

But now that I’m back, though still jet lagged, I’m determined to catch up with my 300+ FloFlo reviews. Thank gosh BP and Torii have a Vacation mode or else I’d be really in for it.

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#559

This thread has been quiet lately. I’ve been keeping up with my reviews for the past week, but that’s about it… i did level up on WK, which is a week slower than my previous slowest level up time… and today I finally added some new grammar points on BP! Including that passive form! I hope it will stick and in time become natural.

1 Like
#560

@Jul3 I admit I felt a bit lonely mostly posting by myself. ^^

I’ve been keeping up with reviews and adding class room vocabulary regularly to Torii. Just this weekend I decided I should add either five WK lessons a day or one grammar point on BP. Just so I can progress a bit faster, and 5 lessons vs 1 grammar point only takes like 15 minutes and I can find that amount of time in any day. :slight_smile: I might even see my first WK level up in two months! :sweat_smile:

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#561

When it comes to drilling verb forms, you’ll want this:
https://steven-kraft.com/projects/japanese/

Just do a few dozen reps per day 'til it starts to sink in real well. (Any more than that will start to make your fingers tired, because the endings are all the same few keystrokes over, and over, and over…)

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#562

@MissDagger How are the classroom lessons going over there? Reinforcing or completely different to the self-study you were doing before?

Thanks! I think I’ve come across this before, but definitely need more practice verb conjugation (especially with some of the godan verbs) so should remember to use it! However, with passive, I think I just need to see more examples of it appear naturally so I know when to use it, and what it is used for, as discussed a few posts ago. Whenever it appears in BunPro sentences it has [passive] written in the gap so I just go “rareru” without thinking about why the passive form was used it the sentence rather than standard form.

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#563

Passive verbs (finally) started making perfect sense to me once I examined them using tiny relative clauses. For example:

  • 選ばれた人

This is 選ぶ (えらぶ, to select) in passive form, and means “the person chosen/selected.” The 人 in this example did not 選ぶ anything, because… the verb passively happened to them. Note that 選んだ人 by comparison, without the passive form, is actually ambiguous and, depending on context, may refer to either the chooser or the person chosen.

I never used Tae Kim’s stuff very much, but it looks like he’s got a pretty good piece about the Japanese passive here:

The Japanese word for “passive”,「受身」(うけみ), using the characters for “receive” and “body” expresses what the passive is in Japanese; people are doing things to you and you have no choice but to take it like a bitch. The passive indicates that the action was not done by the subject but done unto the subject. In other words, the subject had no control or input on the action.

I edited it a bit to make more sense out-of-context and added my own emphasis, but if you want to read the original, you can find it here: Don’t Suffer Passively

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#564

They are really helping me reinforce BP N5 and N5 related vocab and kanji from WK. Plus it is teaching me how to speak and listen. I’m also getting to a point where I can actually have a whole conversation even if it is about extremely limited things. But I can now almost entirely have some conversations with my teachers without using English (however only sometimes when I’m asking for help to understand something).

For example, today was school field day so we went to Osaka. Our normal teacher on Fridays escorted us and I talked to her a couple of times entirely in Japanese. Not always complete sentences and such (but then speaking is more lenient for that), but fairly well. Plus I had a maybe 20 minutes discussion with another teacher from my school that I don’t have classes with.

So it is reinforcing what I have learned and also teaching me to use it in speaking, listening, and to some extension writing (I’d done some of that myself). Plus we are practicing particles several times a week and it is really helping me get solid on those. :blush:

Sorry if it was a bit long and circular. My brain is a bit fried after a day in the sun with ~27C degrees.

I’ve been more consistent with WK lessons, doing 5 lessons per day most days this week. Also I’m finally caught up with school vocabulary added to Torii, so this weekend I’ll actually get a bit ahead, so I’ll actually know the words roughly by the time they show up in class! :smiley:

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#565

@Kai Thanks! That’s a good example sentence. I’m going to read a lot more example sentences on a page linked by BP on passive. Also, thanks for the TaeKim link, I read his normal post on passive and it had no info, I had no idea he had a blog going into things in more detail as well, shame the article wasn’t linked directly from his normal passive page.

@MissDagger That’s great to hear about the speaking. 20minutes sounds like a long conversation to be able to hold!

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#566

Well, if I was better at Japanese it would have been much shorter, haha. There were a lot of me saying I don’t understand and him repeating what he said but easier. And then it was me thinking and trying to figure out a way to say the stuff I wanted to say with my limited Japanese.

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#567

Oh dear, haha, but at least you could have a conversation, that’s a good step!

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