Have you done your BunPro Review today?

Bunpro
#543

I was away at a festival over the long Easter weekend, so didn’t have much time to do reviews. This was the first real break from doing SRS twice a day I’ve had since I started over half a year ago… I only had one session a day and gave priority to wanikani, mainly because the number of reviews was growing so large that I couldn’t finish my queue each day in the limited time I had, and also because it seemed easier than doing grammar. I did at least 1 grammar point a day to keep my streak up, but then I also noticed that the style of the way BP asked you questions had completely changed, and I needed a standard day to get used to it. I completed my BP queue today, and it did take all those reviews to get used to the new style, and, perhaps it is indeed better, as it is getting harder.

On the other apps, I levelled up on WK before my trip, but loads of vocab from the previous level still to add, so not added any lessons… the way it is now, cuz I’m not succeeding in all my burn reviews, items are bouncing down the queue back to guru so I’m getting a lot of reviews. Still have 74 reviews left to do today and my apprentice count is over 100…

Torii I still have ~90 reviews to do today, and lack of lessons has meant the apprentice queue there is only at 30 items…

Aside from that, Monday night was the first time I had the chance to speak Japanese in a casual setting with Japanese people since I’ve started studying properly and that was interesting. I think my conversations did go smoother and could say more things (more vocab did help), but the conversations still did have lots of pauses for thinking, and I found stuff like conjugation much harder to do on the fly than writing, so I’d start a verb and then get confused, and sometimes do something wrong, and also just using a lot simpler grammar in general. Also, forgetting how to ask questions, as I hadn’t done any of that since my JP classes ended a month or so ago. So things like “what did you do in X?” became “do you know X?”, which I only realised later when thinking back at the responses. Anyway, it reinforces that I should get a tutor, on iTalki if I can’t IRL, to practice speaking, as it’s definitely hard to do compared to SRS or other self-study, and I’m bad at it.

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#544

I’ve been doing reviews on BP and WK every day, except yesterday where I didn’t get to the WK reviews. I also realized during class that I need to do review of all the vocab we’ve been assigned even after the lessons where it was homework (well yeah…) because it flitted out of my brain really quickly. I hope that Torii will get the feature of being able to search for a word in it and add it to lessons so I can get my class vocabulary into an actual SRS.

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#545

WK is on the verge of levelling up. Lately my priority is on iKnow, still have too many vocabulary for N4 not done.

As for BP, stumble across some “can you say it another way” hints.
I think it would went crazy on higher level since there’s so many different way to say things :sweat_smile:

Another hurdle are “should” and “why don’t you” without any further hints.
Seems like similar grammar points are starting to confuse me.

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#546

Doing reviews every day is going splendid, also Torii updated so you can search for words and add them to your lessons meaning I’m now learning school vocabulary in Torii, learning N4 grammar on BP and more kanji on WK. BP and WK I add very few lessons per week. My goal is 3 new points on BP and 10-20 new lessons on WK.

Although right now is golden week in Japan, so I hope to double up on the lessons. I would do more except I have school vocabulary to catch up on, and some other things related to my school textbook and such.

I also just bought a few graded readers of Amazon. Very easy ones, but then I have a couple of the books for the Absolute Beginners Book Club on WK, so it is nice to have both easy and challenging reading.

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#547

I was away again this weekend, so again I’m struggling to keep up with my reviews, as out of the routine. I need to get into the morning and evening reviews again. I’ve randomly added a few words on WK and Torii, but only a few, and it’s been ages since I’ve added new grammar on BP, but I seem to be forgetting some old ones which are appearing in my reviews anyway. Need to get back into the routine of things.

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#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.

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#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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