Learning vocab on bunpro

Bunpro
#1

Hello yall,

I have just finished the n5 grammar points and just started on n4. In the first 3 n4 grammar reviews there were 2 words i hadn’t seen before. Im wondering if this is a sign to start doing some vocab reviews for all the vocab i don’t know.

Some of my questions are:

  • how do people here find the vocab, are they helpful when reading manga/light novels etc ?
  • is it possible / ok to ignore the vocab you don’t know and continue to learn the grammar, as long as you know what the grammar point means / does? Im mainly learning the grammar so i can recognise it when reading in the wild.

Im asking this as im already going through wanikani which has vocab, as well as gathering words to learn from satori reader into anki. so having a third batch of words to learn from seems a bit much maybe? I would probably be fine doing this until September when uni starts but after that… probably not. :sweat_smile:

Any advice welcome.

2 Likes
#2

I love learning all my vocab here, cause most of them come with example sentences and there is a review mode, where you just get a sentence to read. It helped me immensely with reading manga, since every review I get is reading practice :slight_smile:

The JLPT decks have a few vocab that are less useful for manga/anime (but might come in handy if you live in Japan) and are missing some useful manga vocab in the beginning. But I don’t mind, I pick those up by reading manga anyway. the vocab decks are nicely intertwined with the grammar decks, so you get some extra practice on those words.

If you think you profit from the extra reading practice that sentences on here offer, I would suggest switching all vocab to bunpro. If you would use another mode, I would pass and just use whatever is most practical for you. It helps having all your vocab reviews (or even all reviews) in one place.

10 Likes
#3

Install yomitan dictionary extension in your browser.

1 Like
#4

I learn most of my vocab through WaniKani, but then synced my progress in WK to BunPro at about WK level 15.

I think it’s well worth going through all the vocab again on BunPro because:

  • the example sentences are great as they show you the word in context.
  • If a word has multiple meanings that you hadn’t picked up on yet, this process will introduce you to them.
  • Hearing each sentence read out to you by a native speaker is good listening practice (and if you want extra credit you can do “shadowing” speaking practice at this time too).
  • you can get even more extra credit by displaying the hint/definition in Japanese first. When I first started BunPro 9 months ago I could barely understand these definitions, but now I can understand most of them. Which is not only rewarding, but also means I’ve learned a lot of new vocab like “specific”, “non-specific”, and other words that you might see used in a definition. I’m guessing this is going to be helpful if I decide to switch the app into full Japanese mode when I get to N3 or N2.

The only thing I might have done differently would be to not sync to WK. It has it’s pros and cons.

  • Pros of syncing to WK: you can then use BunPro to “catch up” on any vocab from your current level, e.g. N5, that is not taught by WK. Just go to the N5 deck and start learning new items - you’ll be shown anything you haven’t already learned in WK. I did this over the last few months to close the gap on any unknown N5 vocab before the JLPT.
  • Cons: if you’ve already got through a chunk of levels from WK, then after syncing you will suddenly have a massive backlog of reviews in BunPro.

Personally I don’t care too much about the review backlog because a) I don’t get discouraged by seeing the huge number, it’s just a number after all and I’ll get round to all of the reviews over the next few years, and b) it’s possible to focus in on just the reviews you really want to do without getting bogged down by ones you don’t.

I do this by:

  • reviewing only one deck at a time, e.g. the N5 deck
  • ordering my reviews by “lowest level first” - that way I see my new N5 items first, and items I already know from WK (which get set to level ~4 upon sync) come later.

To your good point about not having as much time in the future when you’re at uni, that’s definitely something to consider. I am using a crazy amount of apps at the moment (in addition to WK and BunPro I use Ringotan, KaniWani, and KameSame daily) but because I value all of them, instead of reducing the number of apps, I decided to reduce the number of new kanji I learn per week by half, so I have time to get through all of the reviews they are producing.

3 Likes
#5

Thank you for your input, lots of things to think about and consider.

I do really like the example sentences so thats definitely a plus. In anki my card reviews from satori reader also have example sentences included but without audio. I don’t think i would want to do vocab without example sentences included (wanikani vocab being the exception).

When it comes to reading manga / watching anime i probably have picked up a small amount of the extra vocab you’ve described already as I’ve been on and off reading manga for a couple of years. And im probably never going to live in japan but i do eventually want to read novels and i guess any words i learn will be useful for that in the end.

2 Likes
#6

I have heard about yomitan and things like that. Sadly i mainly read physical books or books on my phone.

#7

Thank you for your long answer! You make a really compelling case for learning vocab on bunpro.

I need to look more into wanikani and bunpro and how they can work together. Atm i have it so that any kanji i know wont have their furigana displayed but I didn’t really know it could do other things. I don’t know whether i would want to go through my wk vocab again per se as i hope that reinforcement could happen when i meet them in the wild. As well as the fact that i would much rather be reading than srs-ing if i can help it. But new words on bunpro that i don’t know could be good.

I think after the advice given here I’ll probably add the vocab I don’t know bit by bit (and try to keep it inline with my grammar progress). I’ll try and balance it with my wanikani, anki and reading. Then I’ll adjust as i go. I think this will be possible for n4 as i know a lot of the vocab but n3 will probably be more tricky to balance like that while still keeping to 3 grammar points a day. (I’ll deal with that when i come to it i guess. :sweat_smile:) I’ll probably scale this all back when September comes around.

Hope that made sense and thanks for everyones help.

#8

No worries!

If you definitely don’t want to go over the vocab you already know, I believe there’s an option to import all WK vocab as “Mastered” (“Burned” in WK speak). So that might be the best option for you. Then you can study new vocab only.

2 Likes
#9

Another thing I just thought of:

After you’ve learned all of the N5 kanji and vocab from WK (~ level 16) I think there are only about 400 N5 vocab items left to catch up on in BunPro, and about 25-50% of those are loan words in katakana.

As for the remaining Japanese words, the interesting thing about them is that a lot of them contain kanji that are not in the (non-official) N5 list. ChatGPT tells me that’s because they are words that may come up in an N5 test but only in hiragana. Thus one should learn the reading and meaning even if you don’t know the kanji yet.

This may not seem relevant if you’re not studying for the JLPT, but it’s just to point out that syncing to WK at level 16 and then learning the remaining N5 vocab in BunPro will show you lots of kanji you don’t recognise yet, which was a bit of a surprise for me.

1 Like
#10

Thanks for the clarification. I’ve already started adding some words that i don’t know to my reviews. I think for now I’ll continue to go through and manually add them as i seem to quite like that workflow.

Im not too concerned about learning vocab with kanji I haven’t encountered on wanikani. I just see it as extra practice which will help when they do come around on wanikani. But it definitely would be something to be aware of if that bothered me so thanks for mentioning it.

1 Like
#11

I previously was using anki but switched to bunpro for vocab and here’s why:

-the biggest reason is that there’s already like 100k vocab cards ready to study. I’m taking the JLPT so going through vocab by N level is extremely handy (and the graphs showing my progress are cool), but as I sentence mine, often I don’t need to create cards myself as I can just find the word in the system and add it into my review queue

-I’m also doing WK and the ability to burn words I’m already studying there is really nice, so I can focus on all new words here

I’m also doing satori reader on the side

3 Likes