So I’ve finished N3 for Bunpro and while I technically should be pretty damn good at grammar at this point, I feel as if most nuanced things I want to say are kinda just… not in my brain? Like if I see it in my reviews I know “oh its X” but when trying to actually speak the knowledge is just not there. It’s relatively frustrating since it really breaks the flow of how I speak since I’ll be thinking in Japanese getting my point across well and then just completely mind blank on how I would say something, leading me to swap back into english and have to spend a bit of time getting back into “flow” so to speak. Anyone got some solutions? Bunpro has been the best me for grammar so far but I feel like around N4ish the grammar points just stopped working for me.
As annoying and overly repeated this advice is, practice.
If you want to be able to think/speak Japanese with these newly learnt grammar points, you need to use them. Whether that be through writing, talking lessons or even talking to yourself.
I also just finished N3, and I’m lucky enough to work in a Japanese speaking environment. So I’ll try newly learnt grammar points with my colleagues, and they’re more than happy to let me know that it’s wrong. The more times you get it wrong, the more you learn when not to use it, meaning you narrow down when it’s actually applicable.
Again, it’s annoying, but it all comes down to practice.
Just because you’re able to read it, doesn’t mean you’ve learnt how to speak it. Totally different skill sets.
Speaking, just like reading or listening is a totally separate skill that takes dedicated practice.
Knowing more words and grammar will of course help raise the level you can achieve in those skill areas. And just like with reading and listening, everyone struggles with speaking at first.
The more you actively practice speaking, the more natural speaking becomes.
This Bruce guy really summed up what I said in a much easier to understand manner.
Thanks Bruce
Totally agree with this, it probably took me month before starting to incorporate わけ in my speaking!
By ‘finished’ do you mean completed all the lessons or have SRS’d the lessons until the end one?
I agree, I can easily read and write Japanese, but if I try to speak it, I sound like an alien.
One thing I can recommend, for improvement directly inside Bunpro, is to activate “Hide Japanese (Listening mode)” in your Display and Reviews settings while learning. Learning the grammar points in a listening-first manner has helped connect me a bit more with speaking compared to reading everything.
What helped me here was immersion and dedicated speaking / listening practice.
I got a preply tutor who strongly focusses on speaking practice. It helped me immensely with being able to form sentences on the spot to express an idea or an intention in Japanese.
The other thing is immersion: any Japanese spoken content, preferably without English subtitles, helped me gradually build some sort of real-time parsing for the language.
There’s two issues here:
First of all, it’s largely non-measurable. Unlike Bunpro or other SRS systems where you can say “done!”, it’s really hard to quantify progress in listening comprehension. And I sometimes struggle to trust that I’m making progress, because it’s hard to see.
The other is, that the whole thing appears to have two distinct mental channels for the lack of a better term. There’s terms I recognize in spoken content, but once I add them to the SRS, I keep failing them. Also vice versa. I know how to say X but if I hear someone say it in a youtube video, I go “eeeh?”.
I must add that I don’t believe in the “just immerse, bro! It’ll come, bro! That’s how you learned a language as a kid!”-mindset. Tools such as textbook learning, or Bunpro, or Anki, are insanely important in order to quickly build a theoretical foundation to process Japanese. Actually consuming content and interacting with the language outside of those systems, is however just as imperative.
Okay, I’ll try that.
I’ll probably just be echoing a lot of the excellent points and advice people have been saying, but one thing to remember is that in language learning, production is almost always going to lag behind passive understanding. In other words, it’s just kind of the nature of the beast that you’ll always (to some degree) be able to take in and understand more than you’re able to produce for yourself.
That said, I encourage you not lose heart because this is definitely something where you can close the gap through time and effort. I also dislike the ‘just immerse, bro’ crowd, because I feel like these people oversimply the process (and downplay/minimize the importance of studying grammar and vocab). The truth is that while using Bunpro alone (or studying from a textbook or grammar reference) is not going to make you a fluent speaker of the language all by itself, what it will do is give you the foundation that will make native content more comprehensible to you (and therefore also more fun and compelling to engage with), therefore allowing you to reinforce that knowledge in a wide variety of contexts and situations, which (after repeating this over and over) will lead to internalizing things at a high level.
It’s also important to remember that, while all the skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening) are interconnected skills, the best way (the only true way?) to improve at any one of them is to practice that specific skill. Which is to say, you may pick up new vocab while reading a book or listening to a podcast which you can then use when speaking, but the only way to truly develop comfort and fluency speaking is to speak, and speak a lot (ideally doing so with a native speaker friend or tutor, either in person or online, so that you can get feedback and corrections as necessary).
TL;DR – The grammar you’re learning with Bunpro is giving you an incredible foundation for the language, but achieving true proficiency/mastery is still going to depend on you reinforcing and practically applying that foundational knowledge by interacting with Japanese speakers and the Japanese language outside the ‘learning environment’.
The bad news is that this is a lot of work, but the good news is it can also be a lot of fun (it’s very satisfying to come across grammar you’ve learned ‘in the wild’ or to use something in conversation and get that ‘Hey, I can really understand/speak Japanese!’ feeling).
You brain is too smart to be tricked. You’ve learned to recognize the grammar points via cloze etc and if you read and consume content it may have been extended there. Your brain hasn’t mapped it to production because it doesn’t need it.
To produce it you have to practice producing it. The good thing is once you start it retains much quicker, but its still hard at first.
Thanks for all the advice guys! I think what I’ll probably is probably reset N3 and actually write sentences with the new points rather than just reviewing them to practice actually forming it. I really appreciate everyone taking the time to reply :))
I’ve got most of them on seasoned or expert.
Another thing you could do, is start going through the N3 vocab deck. They have so many different uses of different grammar structures. I personally have it set as read and self judge, so if I don’t understand the whole sentence (even if I’m extremely familiar with the word itself) I’ll say that I got it wrong. Forcing myself to really understand the whole sentence.
The biggest downfall of that, is when I’m in a “I would rather not do any of this today” mood, I do tend to be much more lenient towards myself.