i see that the general consensus with people is positive, however i cannot find a single person who said “bunpro made me n1/n2/nwhatever”, or “bunpro made me extremely proficient”.
i’d like to know your guys’s experience with the platform and how much better it actually made you.
I don’t really understand what you mean by people who say “Bunpro made me N1/N2.”
Bunpro is a combination of textbook and SRS. It teaches the grammar and provides reviews all the way through N1. Its explanations are good. The only way it wouldn’t be worth it is if it totally fumbled this, and it doesn’t. You can comfortably get to N3 with Bunpro alone.
But there is no single resource that can “make you” N1 or N2. You need to read an immense amount. You need to hear a huge amount of speech. People don’t say that because people don’t say that about anything. The closest I’ve seen to someone saying that about a single resource is the KKLC in combination with its readers, which is just a massive corpus of native-written text and is a ton of work to get through, and requires you to study grammar independently. It too cannot be your sole resource. And even then, that was in the context of moving from N2 to N1.
i would say that the main advantage of bunpro is that it makes everything compact and gives a long guided structure which is very handy if you learn by yourself. It has by now a huge amount of content, and my personal favorites are :
While some textbook (minna no nihongo for example) just stops at advanced beginner level and throws you into the pit, (if youre in a language school you switch to a different textbook which is quite annoying ) meanwhile bunpro also drags you through the pit until youre out of it.(but it feels like youre dragged out from hell though)
The N1 ,N2 level especially the N1 is native level. You consume already mainly native stuff at this point. Using mainly texbooks for this level would be odd and not recommendable from my side.(I passed N3 and readed alreay 15 volume of mangas already)
If your goal is to reach N1 JLPT certificate fast, there are plenty books specified for this.
Bunpro is good at what it is. It’ll help with memorizing Japanese grammar and vocabulary, and has great explanations on the topics it covers.
It won’t make you N- anything. It won’t teach you kanji. It will barely help you with listening, and it’ll do nothing to help you actually speak in Japanese.
To learn any of those useful skills, you need to read, write, listen to, and interact in Japanese.
I’ve been using Bunpro consistently for the past 4-5 months. I studied Japanese about 10 years ago but stopped because of life situation. Had to leave Tokyo and never had a chance to continue using it. But now looking to go back but felt my Japanese language capability really atrophied. So I started reviewing the JLPT content and currently in N3 with both vocab and grammar. It has helped me out a ton and I feel way more confident in my ability to read Japanese. The only other source of study I do is Anki for RTK kanji, but that’s about it.
I plan on use Bunpro all the way to N1, hopefully completing all the study materials by October, unless I get burnt out. But I know I’m going to need to pick up other resources to study from though, but that’s normal. Using only one source to study from is highly irregular for people who are actually successful at the language.
Btw, if anyone can recommend me some good reading material for N3 level that I can actually just read and enjoy without stopping every 2 or 3 sentences, I’d be grateful.
I passed N2 and the only resource I’ve used for grammar is Bunpro, if that’s what you mean?
Obviously I’ve listened to heaps of podcasts, done my own reading and immersion, as well as watching youtube vids on certain points and and speaking about them, but if we’re talking about formal ‘study’ - I’ve never used textbooks, only ever this site
For me, I use it to solidify the stuff I’ve seen in immersion (and on other resources like WaniKani) but thats because my brain just needs the same thing explained 10,000 different ways before it sticks 
All I know- if I haven’t come across a word on Bunpro, I usually can’t bring it to my brain. Even if I can easily recognise it just won’t pop up in the ole noggin when I want to use it… but, on the other hand, since I only do the English-Japanese fill in the blanks, I find the vocab doesn’t stick very well at first if I haven’t come across it in another context before. Doesn’t mean I don’t push though, I eventually do get them lol!
Have you tried Tadoku for graded readers?
Having studied on and off for the last 20 years with textbooks, old school apps and CDs like Rosetta and Pimsleur, 2 years of university Japanese, iTalki, hellotalk, etc; the combo of bunpro and wanikani has worked the best for me. If I could only pick one, I would pick bunpro.
Like others said, you will need a holistic learning routine in conjunction with speaking practice (meetups, hellotalk, italki, etc), reading practice (yahoo blogs, ameba blogs, twitter, tadoku, etc) and passive learning like native language YouTube and Netflix.
Best of luck on your learning journey.
I passed N5 without spending a penny. I used duolingo, the free Bunpro trial, free wanikani, free KanjiStudy, anki decks, tokini Andy and real Mochi sensei on youtube.
They were all very helpful, and all contributed to my learning. Why should I pay when there are so many great free resources?
I thought I’d do the same again for N4, but realised all the freebies only really covered me for N5. Learning kanji, grammar, vocabulary, reading and listening was going to require a lot of extra legwork.
I could do it without spending anything, but it would be a headache and I would have to put in hours curating my own content and making sure I’d covered everything.
Or I could take out a couple of lifetime subscriptions and save myself the hassle and headaches, because people smarter and more experienced than me have already put in the legwork to curate the material.
My goal is to learn Japanese.
What really swung it for me was knowing that I would learn more, and learn quicker, if I had a Bunpro sub.
I decided on KanjiStudy for kanji and cross-referncing vocab (it’s very useful as a dictionary), and Bunpro for grammar and vocab.
The cost is pretty low for what I’m going to get out of it.
Bunpro isn’t the only thing I use, but it’s an effective component of my learning.
Bunpro made me N2 proficient and really helped me with the grammar and reading since. I failed the N2 4 times before I started using Bunpro for N2 grammar, subsequently I passed the N2. I also did some more rigourous vocab studies in parallel too, but Bunpro absolutely was part of that equation for me.
Since passing the N2 I’ve been working through the vocab list on Bunpro for N1. It’s massively helped with my reading confidence.
Bunpro has 8 example sentences for each vocab / grammar point. This is extremely valuable for learning vocab in context. Even if you like sentence-mining (which I highly recommend to do) Bunpro saves the hassle of copying and pasting a sentence and it’s meaning into Anki.
In my 8 years studying Bunpro is the best app I’ve used for studying. It’s far from perfect, but above all the example sentences for vocab/grammar make it really worth the $5/mo subscription. I’ve seen apps with worse value offerings.
In this post (What Japanese learning advice would you give to your past self? - #22 by Hairymini) I laid out what I wish I did when I started learning Japanese. Amongst them are two things which are crucial:
The main issue with Bunpro is a lot of example sentences use vocab/kanji outside the level you are studying at. e.g. an N5 sentence may have N2 vocab. This problem is more pronounced at earlier levels since you won’t have the proficiency to fill in contextual clues.
This is getting better with a widget to help see what the vocab list for a grammar point is, but still not ideal since the vocab example sentences will use high level vocab. If you can take this point of frustration by the horns and become comfortable with vocab/kanji you don’t understand, Bunpro is excellent.
I haven’t seen this before, I’ll check it out. Thank you.
Also the grammar resource is free to view/use. The paid component only covers the SRS elements of the app. So it’s entirely plausible to work through it like a textbook.