I have a question regarding using hints as a beginner. Does it make sense to use nuanced hints as a complete beginner? I am barely grasping the contect of the sentences themselves and usually need the translated english word to put in the correct japanese vocab, so I don’t really understand the benefit of using the japsnese or english nuanced hint. Do those settings make more sense for higher level japanese?
I have always done nuance first, I also have it hide furigana and English unless I hover.
I have done this since day 1 (I might be weird but I dislike furigana)
I’m halfway through the N5 vocab and have encountered all of the N5 grammar in Bunpro (though still working on upping the levels of the grammar points). I’ve also gotten myself to level 8 in WaniKani, and still going. Point is, I’m still quite new to all of this.
Up to this point, I started with the default (Translation first, Show), and later removed the full translation (Translation first, Hint). This has worked well for me the last couple of weeks, though I feel like I should be reading more of the sentences than what I actually am a lot of the time.
I hadn’t tried Nuance only before until just now. I tried a quick cram session and played with the hint settings to test them out and with the nuance settings (Nuance First, Nuance), it forces me to read the Japanese for everything, which is good for immersion. However, I’m lacking enough vocab that I still often have to switch over into the Hint to see what I’m being prompted for. I’ll probably leave it like this for a while and see how it does to force reading practice, and how much time it adds to reviews.
Definitely stick to what works for you at your current stage. You can always increase the difficulty later if you find it’s getting too easy, but don’t go too hard too fast, or you’ll burn yourself out before you start getting into a good routine
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I’ve also put my settings to only show the nuance in Japanese by default and have also turned off furigana. It forces me to read the Japanese and recognize the kanji. Though the information is still available if needed.
It was harder at first, but that’s kind of the point. I feel like I was able to just translate before without getting the benefit of encountering the context, new words, and kanji provided by the sentence.
I now feel that I was short-changing myself before the change.
I think starting out the focus on making sure you get the grammar selection and conjugation correct is what’s most valuable. When you do Cloze you do a few things at once:
- Recalling the specific grammar structure.
- Selecting the correct grammar structure.
- Conjugating the grammar structure.
All this whilst you are presented a sentence which will have one or more vocab you may have not seen before, hidden in a grammar structure. Often there’ll be multiple synonymous grammar structures so you need to remember them ALL.
In that context it’s fine to rely on some hints even if it’s the English word. Definitely do try to read the sentence as much as possible and understand the structure and grammar once you see the translation.
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Good advice and input for sure. Coming back to this after a few days, I have lefts my hints on the nuance first setting, without the nuance translation. If I sincerely try to read through the sentences before doing anything else, it probably at least doubles, if not triples, the time that it takes me to complete a review, so I am not able to put that much effort into every review that I do. My morning reviews are usually pretty filled out, so I usually focus more on speed, and same goes for reviews during the workday. But once I’m home from work, I usually try to dedicate more time to reading through the Japanese sentences with minimal English translation as necessary.
It feels phenomenal when I am able to read through the sentence and/or the nuance hint and come up with a correct answer. At my stage it’s usually just the sentence itself that would be able to lead me to an answer, and only the simple ones. The nuance hints contain a lot that I’m unfamiliar with at this point in time. But for right now, that is pretty rare, so I don’t beat myself up for switching on the nuance translation or even the sentence translation. It’s great reading practice in the meantime, and even if I don’t fully understand what I’m reading, it’s a good way to get into the habit more.