How good is BunPro for learning?

Bunpro
#10

I agree with @zerohbeat here. I started using Bunpro just a few days ago, at N2. I failed the N2 test back in December by just a few points. So Bunpro is being quite helpful for me. At this level I’m already practicing a lot with native material, but passing the test requires you to memorize specific grammar points that you might not get enough exposure just from native material.

However, I also checked the N5 and N4 content from Bunpro and I feel it’d work better as supplementary content. If I were starting to learn Japanese now I’d use Bunpro N5 alongside a textbook, and ideally classes from a teacher.

I think that just learning grammar points isolatedly when you’re starting isn’t the best idea. Textbooks and classes are great in that they tend to present grammar points in a broader context, and you get to practice a lot. I think that for N5 and N4 it’s important to have more “handholding”.

So if you’re starting I’d recommend getting a textbook (and getting classes if you can), using it as a primary source to learn, then using Bunpro to keep practicing the content as you go.

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#11

I think it depends on your goals. I have 0 intention of taking the JLPT tests, but I’ve done all of Wanikani and all of Bunpro. Wanikani was great for memorizing kanji, but not much beyond that. However, it laid the foundation for me to do bunpro without focusing on anything but grammar.

Part way through Bunpro, I was able to start reading novels. Mind you, I use the kindle dictionary constantly, but it helped to see grammar in the wild to hammer it in.

To me, I think Bunpro + reading is going to be your best route (but again, I know nothing about tests, I am doing this for fun).

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#12

I think bunpro stands pretty well on it’s own. The only issue with the site is lack of vocab but they are working on adding vocab decks soon. But at the end of the day bunpro is really good at one thing. Getting you good at doing bunpro reviews. I don’t think it’ll actually fully teach you japanese or let you be able to listen to japanese or speak japanese. You def will need more than one source of knowledge to actually learn the grammar.
Incase you are wondering if the site does help teach grammar and is worth the time to use, that’s a complete yes.

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#13

I am not a student to look into books nowadays so bunpro is helping me a lot!

This week I got the confidence to start watching anime with japanese subtitles and I see many grammar points in those dialogue sentences and it helps to stick to my mind so many of those points. Now at N3 it becomes a little overwhelming, but of course, I am only almost 4 months into bunpro so, time will fix this lack of memory of mine with repetition.

I really like the reviews and I do 2 grammar points every day.

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#15

may I ask what ADo(B/I/A)JG is? I tried googling it and cant find anything

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#16

https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789004546

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#17

Personally I think bunpro works best as a supplementary tool for very basic grammar (basically most of N5 and some of N4), then once you got the basics I think using bunpro as a primary source of study is fine.

Early on you need a little more handholding and explaining to make sense of it all and bunpro is better used for additional practice I think.

On the other hand once you start getting towards more intermediate topics, you’re probably better able to make sense of them on your own based solely on bunpro’s explanations and examples.

After all most of the N3 and above content is mostly idioms and set constructions, not the more complicated and multifaceted constructs you meet early on with the て forms, conditionals, が, は, ば, potential forms, passive forms etc…

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#18

I will echo the sentiment that Bunpro works fairly well as a primary resource after you’ve established some strong foundations.

After working through Genki 1 & 2 in a classroom environment, I moved to Bunpro as my primary resource. If I had just done those lessons through Bunpro, I think I wouldn’t have had the necessary guidance to properly understand a lot of the information I was receiving.

Nowadays, grammar points go 1 of 2 ways for me. I study the lesson, write down some rudimentary notes, add it to SRS - If I am immediately capable of getting most of my SRS right, I leave it be and wait to encounter the grammar in the wild. If I find I’m really struggling with certain reviews, I go find different resources to explain the grammar more in depth.

All in all, it depends on the resources you have and are willing to expend - you most certainly will be better off with additional resources, but Bunpro alone can definitely take you a long way.

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#19

If anyone here would be able to or would like to elaborate on the things you think we can do at the lower levels to help out more, feel free to let us know! We’d love Bunpro to be a resource that will get you from 0% all the way through to near native, so we’re all ears!

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#20

The thing that immediately came to mind was a conjugation drill tool. I’ve seen talk about considering implementing one elsewhere in the forums and if it’s not a made decision I’d like to chime in my support for it here with this being a reason. I think it would be pretty easy for a new learner to get confused about the different inflections if they were only using Bunpro as is.

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#21

In the past I have said BunPro should only be used as a supplement, but I have changed my mind since whenever actual grammar explanations where added, instead of a brief description with a community link as before. BunPro is still not perfect, but it sure is getting there with each update. A conjugation tool would definitely bring it closer to perfection, for the reason that was mentioned above.

Besides that, I think having links to real world usages of the grammar points (or adding links to the ゲーム言語 YouTube channel, which has tons of examples for each grammar point taken from popular video games, would be a good alternative). This would be a monumental tasks, but imagine if even some of the sentences in BunPro where enacted in a way that portrays real world scenarios. Then they wouldn’t have to worry about copyright issues. That would be amazing!! That said, I understand how time consuming this would be to achieve.

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#22

What @Gacee says is absolutely true, but beyond that I think the issue is that at early levels getting a bit of handholding to convey the “essence” of Japanese is in order, something that’s not really about any specific grammar point but more about the general concepts and introducing them in an order that makes sense.

Early on Japanese is really overwhelming for most people I think. I speak several languages so I know the drill when it comes to language learning, but I admit that I was still quite flabbergasted when I started learning Japanese with my usual methods (all the other language I’ve studied are Indo-European).

You have the complex writing system, the grammar is very alien, the vocabulary outside of katakana words is completely exotic and opaque. So where do you start? Should you start memorizing kanji? Or just vocabulary? What about grammar? How good is knowing grammar if you have zero vocab anyway?

Bunpro offers grammar and now vocabulary (but not really anything for kanji) but it doesn’t offer this content in a “holistic” way. It’s more of a reference than a course. References are great, but for complete beginners they’re just a bit hard to use effectively. Look at genki-style textbooks on the other hand, they offer lessons that each introduce some grammar, vocab and kanji while building on top of the grammar, vocab and kanji from previous levels. It’s a lot more guided.

I think if Bunpro wanted to offer a completely stand-alone Japanese 101 course it would need to offer some N5 deck that would contain both grammar and vocab (and ideally Kanji). And you’d have to take special care not to use not-yet-taught vocabulary in grammar points (or they would need to be keyed).

Also if the idea is for bunpro to work as a stand-alone ressource for complete beginners, it needs to have hiragana/katakana decks. Yeah, it’s boring and lame, but we all had to go through it…

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#23

For N5 (and maybe N4) there needs to be a lot more handholding and “guidance” I think. Adding chapter/lesson intro articles and conclusion articles would help. E.g., at the beginning of a lesson you can add an explanation like “In this lesson we will learn the following grammar points and by the end you will be able to understand [some textbook style text]” etc. Basically making it much more like a coherent textbook rather than seemingly discrete grammar points. There is also the issue of vocab and kanji as others have mentioned.

My honest opinion is that there is no one resource that will teach you what you want at that level and repeated passes using different resources is basically always necessary. Bunpro has the resources tab which is very helpful for this - maybe guiding users to it may be useful for N5. Like “Still doesn’t make sense? Why not check out some other resources in the resources tab?” or something.

Looking forward to N0 and/or more advanced themed decks :wink:

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#24

At that point, is it really BunPro anymore?

It makes sense for them to add vocabulary that goes with the grammar you’re learning because, as you adequately pointed out, you can’t do much with grammar without vocabulary. However, adding Kanji on top of that is a completely different ball game.

The reason why is because, in order to teach Kanji effectively, you’d need a method similar to WaniKani. That’s a HUGE undertaking. Unless BunPro matures to the point of not being able to be improved further, I personally prefer it to stay focused on Grammar. When you’re the Jack of all trades, you end up being the Master of none.

My two cents.

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#25

Oh to be clear I wasn’t saying that I want for bunpro to go down that path, after all personally I’d selfishly prefer for them to focus on more advanced content since I don’t need the beginner stuff anymore, I was just answering Asher’s comment.

If bunpro is to become a stand alone tool to go “from zero to near native” it will necessarily have to tackle kanji at some point.

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#26

Something a little bit similar to this is actually already planned for the near future with decks. This is one of the reasons we redid the order of N5 through N1 as we were doing the writeups, as we wanted to eventually be able to introduce the topics and give a brief overview of why we grouped things together and what students can expect to learn over the course of a 12 to 20 unit lesson.

It is a very very big undertaking, and is something we would have almost completely fleshed out before we released it… if we ever did decide to go down that path. Thankfully though, with some of the tools we are building along the way anyway, such as the wrapper for grammar and vocab allowing each and every word in a sentence to be clicked on, it will also link nicely into kanji at some point, as it would allow someone to click on an unknown word in a sentence, then click on the individual kanji from within the popup, get its definition, and then decide if they want to expedite its learning in their ‘kanji deck’. This is a big hypothetical though, and is really only in reference to what we ‘could do’, rather than what we are planning on doing.

I hear you 100% there. I used to and still do get frustrated at language Youtubers that treat all languages as ‘just learn to read and then do mass input’. You don’t ‘just learn to read’ Japanese :sweat_smile:.

Also true. Would have to think of a way to do this that would be interesting, or if the deck itself without any deep explanation would be fine, as it’s merely memorization.

It’s in the pipeline! No set release date yet, but we are getting there.

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#27

It is a supplementary tool but for the purpose of pacing your grammar education, it is very good.

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#28

My favourites are those who study Spanish and think their methods would apply broadly for learning any language.

No shade towards Spanish learners, getting fluent in any language is a significant achievement and requires a lot of work and dedication, but you can’t approach a language like Japanese where you basically start from zero as a westerner like you would Spanish, a language where like 50% of the vocab will be transparent for an English speaker and the grammar is also not entirely dissimilar.

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#29

By the way, another way the experience could be more streamlined for beginners is by integrating the Reading Practice items into the courses. Right now I know that many users don’t even know that reading practice exists, and personally while I do know about it I always forget to check it out. I haven’t even finished the N5 entries even though I’m almost done with all N3 grammar simply because I never think to check that section of the interface.

Basically right now if a complete beginner comes to bunpro they have grammar decks, vocabulary decks and Reading Practice which are all very valuable tools but there’s not really any simple way to ask the website to just feed that content to you in a straightforward way. You have to decide on your own what to study and in what order.

This is absolutely great for more advanced learners IMO and not a flaw per se, but for absolute beginners it’s just too overwhelming I think. And, again, there’s the kanji issue that needs to be addressed for this to really work as a stand-alone solution.

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#30

I personally learnt to read kanji through learning words and it has been extremely effective (ignore my writing ability, please…) so I think it is justifiable for Bunpro to not have some sort of kanji learning system and still be aimed at absolute beginners. I know lots of Bunpro users are also Wanikani users so maybe they feel averse to this but so long as there is furigana available then I think there isn’t a reason to be that concerned.

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