Large grammar points

Bunpro
#1

In the beginning Bunpro was amazing, it was easy to read up on a new grammar point and subsequently test my knowledge of it.

But as I’ve gotten deeper into N5 there the level of memorization requested of me has increased dramatically.

Let’s take a singular item as an example: う-Verb (Negative-Past)
For this grammar point I need to remember ALL BELOW INFORMATION.
Maybe I’m just retarded but I find it nearly impossible and end up failing over and over.

Am I the only one that struggle with these large grammar points?
Couldn’t this one be split up further into 1 grammar point per kana?

Casual
座る + らなかった
歌う + わなかった
歩く + かなかった
話す + さなかった
打つ + たなかった
死ぬ + ななかった
飛ぶ + ばなかった
休む + まなかった
泳ぐ + がなかった

Exceptions:
ある ￫ なかった

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#2

This grammar point isn’t large at all😁 just take the ending hiragana of the verb and make it end in a and toss なかった on there

Example 話す はなす hanasu >> hanasa
はなさ なかった
読む よむ yomu >> yoma
よま なかった

Exception being う to わ u+a makes a wa sound (how I remember)

Ichidans like 食べる （食べます）take away る slap なかった on there 食べなかった

And ある to なかった this one’s easy🥳

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#3

For grammar points which seem large and overwhelming, not sure if this would be standard advice :sweat_smile: but I just skip to the SRS:
You’ll generate enough ghosts of all the different forms and then practise each of those, eventually getting all the different cases right once your brain has internalised the pattern.

To be honest, I would much prefer to read all the “top-down” grammar info after going through the example sentences and seeing the pattern “in action”, a bit more like “guided discovery”, but have never actually managed to train myself to do it that way around :joy:

3 Likes
#4

With time, you’ll remember the conjugations of all these verb forms as you practice them.

However, I highly suggest doing some (additional) conjugation practice using a tool like Don’s Japanese Conjugation Drill.

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#5

I wouldn’t suggest the site splitting up grammar that way because, at the end of the day, this is one single grammar point: how to conjugate to the casual negative past tense.

Grammar points like this is where the SRS shines because all these items are covered under a single grammar point in the SRS and you will review every couple of hours until you get all the variations down, then a couple days, then weeks, and so on.

However, if all these items were split up into different grammar points each, imagine what that would do to your SRS sessions. What used to be a single SRS item now becomes 10 different SRS items. Now multiple that result across all the grammar points on the site and your SRS sessions will go from a hundred items to a thousand.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not doing my SRS sessions if they are in the thousands; it already takes all my motivation to do them when they are in the hundreds.

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#6

I 1000000% am not speaking on behalf of the content team or anything like that, just my personal opinion.

There are a lot of really, really annoying things you (essentially) have to brute force memorize in N5 (and perhaps a little bit in N4, can’t remember off the top of my head.) To me, they have always been ‘annoying’ concepts that you kinda gotta suffer through. At least, that was my brief experience with all of them.

Like others have mentioned here and in the past, splitting it up would I think just be a little too overkill. I’m not trying to trivialize yours or any persons frustration at the concepts whatsoever (I’ve been there before hahaha), I just think there’s more effective ways of drilling it down that will take less time for you than 30+ SRS points. That said, there are always ways we can improve things on the site and introduce new tools, etc. to assist when there’s clear frustration.

In the time being, I would recommend the following things:

  1. KANJI-Link: Learn Japanese grammar (JLPT N5) with free video lessons! Take a gander at this link. Visualizing these core concepts will, I hope, really make a difference. Everyone always loves this link when I post it, and it’s personally something that made me learn them before I started on Bunpro. I think you’ll be shocked at how your mind will change how you see this stuff after only a few minutes.
  2. Inside Cram, load up these points that are troubling you and before you begin, at the bottom of the page click ‘Complete Mode’. This will showcase all the example sentences so you can practice all forms of conjugation.
  3. The Don’s Japanese Conjugation Drill above is also really handy.

I can only cross my fingers those 3 little tips help out for you. The first link especially is something that made the lightbulb in my head go on back when I was trying to learn the concepts. As you begin to read more and more example sentences on Bunpro, it will all start to make more and more sense.

Alllllll of that said, please feel free to post about your progress and what is and isn’t working for you. We can always use this advice to take a look at what we’re doing in-house to see what would work better for learners.

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#7

I think you need to consult other materials outside of Bunpro.
The resource tab on each grammar object entry is there for a reason.

There are numerous advices of materials flying around in this forum, free and paid,
two sources rarely mentioned in this forum are the paid app Human Japanese (by the team that is also doing Satori Reader), which is basically a very good written text book but as an App. It has rudimentary interaction but superb explanations. In think it’s around 10€.

Then there is also the free text book Irodori published by the Japan Foundation. It is the actual free tier of the Marugoto Book series, written for non-japanese people wanting to work in Japan. The content is top notch, you have lot’s of grammar explanations and drills, there is audio, N5 (A1) has 515 pages, ca. N4 (A2) is split into 2 books with 412 & 506 pages. If you don’t want to spend any money, I would highly recommend this book. The only drawback is (depends on perspective), that it is written mostly for ordinary masu/desu keigo speech.

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#8

This is a huge help to me. Thanks for sharing it!

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