So. I took a break from bunpro for possibly a year. I put it in vacation mode before i stopped (super happy i did that).
I didn’t stop japanese however i only stopped using bunpro. Because i was overwhelmed with wanikani+ bunpro SRS stack. I am level 64 here level 48 in wanikani. In term of jlpt i am N3 grammar (middle or beginning of N3 grammar tbf), around N2(or N1 realistically as only have 16 kanji left for N2) kanji. As you can see my kanji is way ahead of my grammar studies. My vocabulary study is even worse. Haven’t studied new word SRS style in years. How can i narrow the gap between my kanji and grammar while having a way to study words without totally overwhelming myself(again) iguess. Is my question. Thanks for reading this.
I’d start by adding grammar slowly, I’d also reset if there’s a huge backlog you are not feeling comfortable with.
And if you are that ahead in kanji, I’d read a lot. That will expose you to not only vocabulary, but grammar being used in real situations and not just example sentences. Another matter is if reading is your thing or not, but there are plenty of mediums, not just novels, you have manga, VNs, news articles…
One thing that might (probably will!) happen is that you’ll have forgotten a lot of the BunPro grammar points, even though you put it in vacation mode. At least you won’t have a giant stack of reviews, but you’ll probably find yourself being unable to answer a lot of the upcoming reviews, and making a lot of mistakes, which will generate a lot of ghost reviews, if you haven’t turned off ghost reviews – personally I recommend keeping ghost reviews on, and whenever you get a lot of ghost reviews, take the time to slow right down until you start getting them right and exorcising the ghosts (which you get badges for, by the way! ).
If this does happen to you (forget lots of grammar), and especially if it starts to wear down your enjoyment and enthusiasm, leading to possible burn-out, then I would highly recommend doing one of two things:
- Reset your BunPro progress back a bit, using the built-in reset feature. This can be very useful if you feel really far behind. But it is also somewhat ‘destructive’, and might be overkill. In which case…
- Any grammar points that you find yourself stuck on, go into their grammar info pages and manually remove them from your reviews (using the Remove from Reviews button, not the Reset button, which will just set them back to SRS level 0, but keep them in your reviews). You can and will eventually add them back, just by doing new lessons with Study, once you’re back in a groove and can start re-learning those forgotten items. [Although you may need to adjust your current SRS level in your Settings if, for example, you are currently set to study JLPT3, but some of the items you forgot were actually JLPT4 or JLPT5.]
That should take care of the potential problem of getting overwhelmed and burnt out over old grammar you’ve forgotten.
In terms of:
You’re in luck! BunPro has a new beta feature for studying vocab! You have to opt-in to the beta program in your settings, but that’s easy enough, and as far as I can tell, the beta is pretty stable, so it won’t mess up your studying experience, IMHO. Once you opt in, you’ll be able to study vocab as well as grammar. You can even split up the interface to have separate buttons for studying vocab and for studying grammar (can’t remember how to make that change, but it’s pretty easy).
The vocab is easy to study, as it is recognition only, no production required. And the kanji all has furigana available, so no need to try to guess readings or anything. Just entering the English equivalent.
If you want to skip all the WaniKani vocab you’ve already studied, there’s an option to automatically ‘burn’ them all on the BunPro side. [Caution: this is a one-way thing. Once automatically ‘burned’ on BP, the only way (currently, as this is beta, remember) to unburn them is to do so manually. However, even though I didn’t want the extra dump of experience points this produces, it turns out I don’t miss double-studying WK vocab, so being a one-way thing isn’t a terrible drawback actually.]
All that said and done, I’ve actually found the vocab study to be decent and even fun. Learning a bunch of new words and phrases, even if only for recognition purposes, is still very helpful, IMHO. For me, even studying the many katakana words (often imported English words) was helpful for brushing up on my katakana reading and also getting a better feel for how foreign words are usually transliterated into Japanese phonology.
The most straightforward way to get started on studying vocab is to use the Decks feature (also beta, I believe), and use one or more of the available decks which have vocab. The obvious ones to use are the built-in BunPro N5 and N4 Vocab decks. But some textbook decks also feature vocab (I believe they all pull from the same BunPro N5, N4 vocabs, but just present them in different orders), such as the Marugoto and Genki textbook decks. There’s also a distinct deck for Kansai dialect which has both grammar and vocab, not shared by the N5 and N4 vocab decks, if that interests you.
I’m gonna second what @Megumin said: reeeeeeeeead! It doesn’t matter what specifically, but just diving into real Japanese texts is probably the best way to get your skill set rounded out really well. It’s good to pair this with SRS stuff in places where you’re weak, but even without an SRS service for every type of study (vocab, grammar, kanji), those things will start to stick like glue, both in your head and in your gut, if you read a lot and come across them again and again.
Instead of focusing on what tool to study with, there comes a point in learning the language where your effort is better spent figuring out what sorts of material you enjoy reading for actual leisure, which will double as your study time 'Course whether or not you’re at/past this point is a judgement call only you can make for yourself.
In the event you DO want SRS tools for all these things and are looking for something for Vocab, I personally enjoy using Kitsun to make my own deck of vocab and kanji, and use their card generator that integrates with Jisho.org to build the deck. The rule I follow for myself is that if I see something in the wild and have to look it up once, I add it to the deck, as it’s fairly likely that things I see once, I’ll see twice. So all my learning is very heuristic these days, but I’ve seen some of the fastest personal growth from this method since I started studying in the first place, so it’s a method I can recommend highly if you’re willing to spend a little dough on a Kitsun sub.