Looking for Japanese “chunk learning” decks / resources

Japanese
#1

Recently I started thinking that learning Japanese through chunks/patterns may be much more effective for speaking than memorizing isolated words.

For example, instead of memorizing:

話す = to speak
ようになる = become able to

you memorize the whole chunk:

話せるようになる “become able to speak”

I’m curious whether anyone here studies this way and can recommend bunpro deck or any good resources focused on memorizing useful chunks/patterns rather than isolated vocabulary.

I started N3 official bunpro deck but struggle to use previously learned words.

Would really appreciate recommendations or your experience with this approach :slightly_smiling_face:

#2

Unfortunately - I’m not sure any particular deck is going to help improve speaking - you just need a good opportunity to practice input and output of these words. You can start to get familiar with chunks of common words from immersing in just about anything and seeing how the words you’ve learnt are commonly used together.

Chunking is definitely important when speaking, as I can’t literally think eg. “this is the passive form, so this needs the -u vowel to change to -a vowel, then れ then I want to make an if sentence so it’s たら” without completely failing to fluently express myself.

But, I can remember eg. “when something is said to you” as a chunk といわれたら and pretty effortlessly say this as it’s basically just a word in my memory.

This is a verb form I hear and use loads - so I’ve had practice - but if I had to conjugate a different verb on the fly into passive conditional form I’d probably fall flat on my face.

1 Like
#3

I think this is exactly the kind of thing shadowing is for!

I can recommend this series

1 Like
#4

Another good resources is the Shinkanzen vocab books, all the new words there is presentend in a “chunk” format with collocations and all.

#5

Thank you very much for all advices and links.
I tried shadowing but can’t make is as consistent as bunpro and wanikani. It is not that addictive :slight_smile:

My shadowing experience was with Learn to Speak Japanese Language | Try for Free and I did 40+ hours already, but I can’t say it gave really strong improvement in remembering chunks. For transparency, I was using pimsleur from time to time and haven’t utilized platform to the fullest. I may restart it, since it was already paid but with near daily streak.
Currently, I also trying to shadow https://www.youtube.com/@yuka_japaneseteacher but also not regularly.

@cafelatte thanks for recommendation, I checked it out and I think it similar to pimsleur, so I will finish it first.

1 Like
#6

I don’t have a particular deck or resource, but you might want to do a search for “collocations” which is the term typically used when talking about words that are commonly used together. I haven’t used it personally, but for example, this book: Amazon | Common Japanese Collocations: A Learner's Guide to Frequent Word Pairings | Shoji, Kakuko | Words & Language

I imagine people have probably put together decks on Anki based on some of the more popular books, so I’d maybe try looking at which collocation books are popular and then doing a search for decks based off their names?

#7

If you are watching content with this in mine, you can mine cards that will be chunked in a way you want.