I want to say thank you, Bunpro!

Bunpro
#1

I’m posting this homage here, because the category states “a place to discuss anything and everything related to Bunpro”.

The title says it all, really: Thank you, Bunpro!

I have tried to learn Japanese in all manner of ways in 8 years. During those eight years, I never made it past Genki 1-level. I wanted more than I could handle: I’d set off reading books (way above my level) and burn out immediately. I’d try to play video games in Japanese, and lost interest in an hour because I couldn’t understand anything. I’d turn JP subtitles on anime. I stopped watching anime.

This has changed, and Bunpro was the key to this change.

I have only used Bunpro for 8 months. In that time, I’ve added every N5-N2 grammar point, and 55 of the N1 grammar. I have gone too fast. I know that. It’s painfully apparent when I see my review-pile after a two week vacation without turning on vacation mode (203 reviews - no ghosts). Good news, though: I’m not doing those reviews! I also don’t care that I lost my streak, because losing my streak made me realized what I had gained: The ability to identify grammar in a sentence.

On my vacation I picked up one of those books that I had stored away on my kindle, shamefully abandoned in the first pages. And I could read it. I still had to look up words, of course. I still had to look up grammar I’d studied on Bunpro, as well. But I was able to tell what I needed to look up. I could tell what was a word, what was an inflection of a verb or an adjective, or a contraction, etc. It felt amazing, and I finished that book. Then I started the next one.

So thank you, Bunpro. For giving me the set of tools I need to achieve my Japanese-learning goals. The tools I’ve scrambled for, but never managed to find, for 8 years.

I will be taking a break from Bunpro to go read books, play video games and watch anime. In Japanese! (That said, I will be back. The gamer in me needs to finish the N1 grammar at one point, but that’s a project for another time.)

Once again: Thank you, Bunpro. Keep up the amazing work. Everyone on the staff and everyone in the community working to improve the website: you’re the best!

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#2

Great story! The SRS method is incredibly powerful, and it has been harnessed extremely effectively by this team for Japanese. Honestly, I‘d love to see an identical format for other languages, though particularly conjugative languages like Ancient Greek and Latin.

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#3

I did something similar to this when I started out. Right at the beginning of my Japanese-learning journey, I bought two novels that I wanted to be able to read one day. When I got them, I couldn’t read a thing so I forgot about them for probably half a year. Then I came back, picked one of them up and I could read!.. some of it.

Still, I could distinctly remember the feeling of looking at it before and thinking “yup, that’s Japanese alright” and that’s about it. Then coming back to it later, and realizing that it was actually starting to make sense was an amazing feeling! It’s a visceral sign of progress that is easy to lose when you are making small improvements on a daily basis.

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#4

Yeah, I couldn’t have done N3 without bunpro. Praise be

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#5

@Ivers92
Reading posts like this motivates the team the most!
Thank you :grin:

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