How bad/good is my plan?

Bunpro
#1

Hello everyone

I’m pretty new to both Bunpro and learning japanese in general. I spent the last 2 months figuring out how to study japanese and reach my goals. My ultimate goal would be to be able to read japanese books. I love reading and don’t plan to listen/speak too much in the first years of studying.

How would you guys rate the following plan?

First Year:
Bunpro: 1 grammar point per day.
WaniKani: 2 to 3 weeks per level.
Anki: 10 new vocab every day (core 2k/6k)

That means I should be around level N4 in one year when it comes to reading (N4 grammar, 3000 vocab, lvl 20 WaniKani)

2nd year +:
Continue the things above plus starting with easy japanese reading content (graded readers N4 or something)

I know that I won’t be able to read books in the next 3 years but that’s OK for me. I take it slowly.

I reeeally love Bunpro and Wanikani, it’s so much fun and exactly how I love to study.

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#2

I would suggest considering doing the Core 2.3k deck instead of the 2k/6k deck. I switched a while back after realizing I was learning a lot of words that I won’t come across for a long time. The 2.3k deck is an ‘optimized’ version of the 6k deck, and with 1972 cards, you can finish it within your first year if you plan on doing 10 cards a day (~200 days). I think this way, you are better set up for your second year, in which you indicate you want to start reading content.

deck: Core 2.3k Anki Deck - Version 3 (Core2.3k) - Core2k/6k with improvements! | Anacreon DJT

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#3

Do you have any daily time constraints? Adding a little more of grammar and reading since the beginning will probably help you a lot, i think. If you feel you can do more grammar points on a given day, do it. Having too much study will lead you to burnout, but having too little will make every single thing harder to understand, because you don’t spend enough time with the language.

I would recommend you start reading since the beginning, but it doesn’t need to be native material. Read every example sentences from bunpro, or sentences from other japanese resources, whenever you have the opportunity, read. It will help you get used to the word order, grammar usage, how to make sense of phrases and increase your speed reading kana.

Also, get other resources to help you if there’s anything you are not understanding, even repeating lessons are good. There’s some very good lessons on youtube that can help you unlock some grammar and will make your N5 considerably easier. If you are worried to add more than 1 grammar point a day because they are hard, consider doing this a try.

But well, that’s great already :+1:

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#4

Thanks for the tip, I will switch to this deck!

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#5

I think I can do more grammar points ever day. I do have time but I always have that fear that I will forget everything If I add too much every day lol. Commuting to work with the train takes 30min each way. So I can do 1 hour a day easily plus another 30 minutes to 1 hour when I’m home.

Thanks for the help!

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#6

One specific thing I might recommend which will probably give you a boost to learning grammar from scratch would be to use Bunpro alongside a grammar textbook, such as Genki or Minna no Nihongo or any one of the other beginner grammar books that Bunpro supports. Check the Decks page to see all the available grammar books which are supported. (If you don’t see the Decks page available, then you’ll need to opt-in to the Beta program in your account settings.)

The benefit of studying with a textbook is that the textbook provides a more complete description of grammar, in a steadily building-up approach, and – perhaps most importantly – provides exercises to directly practice using the grammar.

Then, once you study the grammar in the textbook, you can ‘learn’ the same grammar points in Bunpro in order to keep practising them in an SRS manner. You just choose whichever textbook you’ve chosen as you Primary Deck, and Bunpro will follow along with the textbook in the same order as the textbook.

As a bonus, several of the textbook Decks include not only the grammar points, but also the vocab which is introduced by the book, chapter by chapter, so you’ll end up learning the vocab of the textbook via SRS as well.

I used this method early on, using Genki I, and then later Genki II. I found it really gave me a head-start on grammar. Later on, I ended up just sticking with Bunpro and occasionally reading/watching about grammar from various online resources. (Each Bunpro grammar point includes links/references to various online and offline resources.)

A second thing I would highly recommend is exposing yourself to Cure Dolly early on in your grammar studies, because sometimes the traditional grammar resources tend to make things more confusing than they need to be. Cure Dolly’s presentation of Japanese grammar provides a very helpful, and I would go so far as to say more ‘logical’, perspective on it. Here’s a playlist of her course “Japanese from Scratch”, which I would say is probably the best starting point to her material:

[Note: Some people find her voice/accent difficult to understand clearly, or otherwise just a bit annoying. In any case, I recommend turning on subtitles, as she includes complete subtitles in each video.]

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#7

assuming you stick to your plan, you should have n4 grammar and around 3650 vocab at the start of year 2. You say that you wont be able to read books for 3 years, but I disagree. Get a pop up dictionary like yomichan and by the end of your first year, you should be able to read something you find interesting. I think finding something japanese that you want to read is a good way to motivate yourself to. I read my first vn in jp with about 2k vocab and n4 grammar, so you can do it with time and effort.

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#8

the point of the srs is to make sure you dont forget the grammar points. If you remember, great! if you forget, just look at the correct answer, read the info about it if you need to, and move on

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#9

I bought Genki I and Genki II including workbooks but I have a hard time using it. Do you think its enough if I use Bunpro as my main grammar source? I may use Genki to check stuff I dont understand with Bunpro. Or maybe I will use it later on to “repeat” the grammar with it. I also bought the app Human Japanese which I may check from time to time too.

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#10

The only thing I’d worry about with your plan is you’re not learning enough kanji to go up with the pace of 10 vocab each day. I’d actually focus on having a decent kanji foundation (kanji+vocab with kanji, as Wanikani teaches) before adding too much vocab, which you won’t be able to read unless it has furigana.

Another unwanted effect of learning vocab without enough kanji is that you’ll confuse a lot of kanji because they’re very similar, and this can get tricky when you’re trying to remember which pair of kanji composes a word or recognizing single kanji words.

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#11

Hmm I thought about that problem too. How do people learn vocab with anki usually? Its impossible to know all the kanji before the vocab. What I do right now I just try to remember the reading and meaning of a new vocab in my anki deck. If I know the kanji already from WaniKani thats much easier of course. But I’m just level 4 so I don’t know many.

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#12

Here’s an idea. If you like BP most, then instead of using BP to supplement Genki, maybe you could use Genki to supplement BP?

So, try out the Genki I deck. Use the one that includes both grammar and vocab. Also, use the same edition as your actual Genki edition. Make it as your primary deck. Or, if you prefer, make it secondary and use something else as primary, maybe N5 grammar (or else make N5 grammar secondary and Genki primary).

Then, study some of the items from the Genki deck using Bunpro. Say, for instance, study all the items from the first chapter. Once you get them to a familiar/comfortable level, say just beyond the Beginner SRS levels, then try studying the Genki chapter again. It should be much easier to study by that point, since you’ll already be familiar with the material.

This could get you a head-start on studying the Genki book!

I would caution, however, that it’s possible that doing things in this order might make the Genki book ‘boring’ to read, like, “Eh. I’ve already covered this stuff in Bunpro. Do I really need to do the exercises?”

When I studied Genki I, I actually did find doing the exercises worthwhile because it exercised my language muscles in ways that SRS alone (even the great Bunpro) didn’t really exercise. Then, I used Bunpro’s Genki path to reinforce those exercises by keeping them on a constant SRS ‘loop’, until I became fully proficient with them, and they advanced ahead as things do in SRS.

I believe that if I had done Bunpro first, it probably would have taken me longer, overall, to learn the same amount of grammar, and I probably would not have appreciated the exercises as much – and thus, I feel, I wouldn’t have actually learned as much from them. But that’s just my personal belief based on my own experience and my own personality. Maybe things work different for other folks.

So, I’ll just say that since you already have Genki I, then might as well try to put it to use, right? If it takes using Bunpro first, to do that, or maybe just to get you started on Genki, then I don’t think there’d be any harm in that.

My main point, though, is that using Bunpro and a textbook at the same time is a pretty darn good way of progressing, IMHO. Better, IMO, than using one or the other separately. Might be worth trying out for yourself. (Indeed, originally, that was one of the main selling points of Bunpro when they first started, was this integration with existing grammar resources/textbooks.)

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#13

I agree with @wct in that it’s better to use BunPro alongside a textbook in the beginning, until about reaching N4 level. After that, you can simply stick with BunPro (or keep using it alongside a textbook, of course). The point is, it’s much more important to use a textbook with BunPro when you’re starting out. Otherwise you’ll end up with a bunch of gaps in your grammar knowledge.

N5 and N4 are just the fundamentals of Japanese grammar. Not having a good grasp of the concepts taught in those levels will definitely cripple your learning ability moving forward.

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#14

To me, that problem is easily solved by studying in JLPT order (first you learn all the kanji for one JLPT level, then focus on vocab for the same level). However, this is hard to do when using tools as the Core2k/6k deck and Wanikani, which are both great tools but they have this “setback”. We could also discuss if learning the core 2K/6K is actually better than learning vocab in JLPT order.

I’d honestly recommend you to learn at least all the N5 kanji (as most of these kanjis are actually radicals too) and most of N4 kanji before jumping into learning so much vocab. Maybe for the first months or so, focus on leveling up on Wanikani, and then you can add as much vocab as you want.

To me, the problem with your plan is not the method but the rhythm. With so many new words each day, I don’t think you can learn enough kanji to support that amount of vocab.

#15

This is kind of a hot take in this community but I would just drop WK and anki and just do jpdb for kanji + vocab. Its simply more efficient than both WK and anki and its something you can quickly use without much hassle from the very start to the very end.

You can just copy paste and then scan all the example sentences from bunpo for n5 and n4 into 2 decks. I would just do the n5 deck alongside bunpro n5 in chronological order and then some maybe subtitles of a few easy videos before doing bunpro n4 vocab and moving on to vocab from things you want to read/watch.
Knowing all the words makes learning grammar much more efficient. And with jpdb you can do way more new cards per day than with wk and/or anki.

(Especially in the beginning it should be better to rush things a bit more for grammar and then solidify, afterwards you can go at a slower pace. That way you will quickly gain a base understanding and things will make more sense.) [<-Tricky topic]

Edit: as mentioned by wct I would also suggest using a textbook alongside bunpro. Imo you dont need to fully do it, its enough if you skip the exercises and just read through the grammar and dialoges to get a basic understanding of the grammar and master it through bunpro

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#16

hey man. Do more than 1 grammar per day. Then once you finish n4 + a lot of the way (or perhaps some of the way) through n3 start reading straight away. I reccomend around 15-20 words on anki a day on the core 2.3k or 2k/6k then just immerse in anime or eroge with yomichan + textractor or just yomichanning anime subs and adding new words to anki.
If you reach n4 in a year you will be dissapointed, as reading at n4 is still very hard and hundreds more grammar to learn whilst you try to read.
Best of luck!
BTW wanikani is good but dont feel compelled to do it as you dont even need to learn kanji invidually if you don’t want to-I learnt it through vocab recognisation

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#17

Oh yeah, this is a very hot topic. As a clarifier, there’s no global consensus on memorizing kanji at a early stage on the community. A big group believes it’s necessary, and the other thinks it’s optional or useless (more here). Unless you want to actually write them from a early stage, the only recommendation I give is don’t obsess too much over kanji.

I also only use jpdb for learning vocab, and I even disabled the kanji cards, since I can recognize a bunch of kanji just by the sheer repetition. If you want to learn a bit more about jpdb you can read this post of mine:

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How fast is fast? - JLPT Grammar
#18

The best plan is the one you like.
I didn’t like WK, but I know a lot of people do.

The one thing you need, that you don’t have is reading practice

I recommend kanji/vocab then reading then grammar.
You want to already know most of the words in the example sentences in bunpro.
Your goal is to be able to read, how you learn to read is by practicing reading.
I add bunpro grammar to reviews when I come across grammar in example sentences in the core deck.

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#19

You can try the Migaku Kanji God add-on for Anki. It generates kanji cards automatically based on your progress through any Anki deck, so you can learn the kanji and their keywords before seeing it in your vocabulary or sentence deck. I use it with the Tango N5 deck (i+1 sentences) to learn the kanji 25 cards ahead. Here are some videos to check out about Migaku Kanji God:

Edit: wording & added a sentence

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#20

Hey there! I don’t really have much to add in terms of specifics, but I wanted to chime in with something that’s probably obvious: no matter how well-laid your plans, they probably won’t go just how you thought. It’s great to have a roadmap, but at the end of the day you’re learning a language and there’s no perfect way to do that. As a new learner, you don’t have all the knowledge to make the perfect plan for yourself, and nobody can do it for you either. So, in my opinion, it’s more important to jump in and then be open to course correction as you learn more about the language and your own learning style, than it is to know exactly what you’ll be studying two years from now. It’ll also help you keep your passion and avoid burning out. The Japanese ocean is deep and wide and lots of fun. Make sure to keep an open mind, don’t get too obsessed and overwhelmed by all the resources and rules Internet strangers will throw at you. Just keep moving forward at your own pace and be open to changing strategies if you need to. Try not to get stuck in “I need a perfect plan before I can start” Hell.

Good luck! It’s awesome that you’re learning a language in the first place.

(Also, consider doing grammar points in batches of two. You’ll double your speed, and 2 per day is really not that much harder than 1 per day.)

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