How good is BunPro for learning?

Bunpro
#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…

2 Likes
#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:

7 Likes
#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.

5 Likes
#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.

5 Likes
#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.

8 Likes
#27

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

1 Like
#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.

4 Likes
#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.

3 Likes
#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.

6 Likes
#31

Yeah grammar and vocab is a big enough job. There are millions of kanji sites. Plus chase 3 rabbits and you’ll miss all of them. Chase 1 rabbit and you’ve got yerself some rabbit stew.

1 Like
#32

AdoBJG
a dictionary of basic japanese grammar
and I guess I is intermediate and A is advance.

2 Likes