"modern" stack for learning japanese

Japanese
#1

Hello All,

I am new to bunpro (Mostly) and have been trying to learn japanese for lets say sense April or so. I plan to start like using it in japan in Janurary 2028.

To peopple whom are becoming fluent or getting there. Are you able to get there with a “stack” of just Bunpro, Wanikani, Reading(Tadoku readers / satori) and Shadowing (Tadoku / podcasts) obviously there will be some disconnect when you get to Japan, which can hopefully be sidestepped with mentoring before I go (Italki or etc.).

Anyways, would this actually make someone fluent? I was using Genki but I got to chapter 4 and slowly became annoyed with it.

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#2

Nothing will make you fluent except consuming a ton of native material or otherwise interacting with native level Japanese, the stack will not make you fluent, but it will give you a bridge in order to start consuming native material.

I’m fairly functional in Japanese. I can get my point across, hold conversations, get myself in trouble, but I’m still not good enough to get myself out of said trouble again. The definition of fluent depends on the person, I am not fluent as per my own definition.

I only used Bunpro and some very light WaniKani. Right now, Bunpro is the only type of structured studying I do.

I have never used Tadoku / Satori or any comprehensible japanese product.

Once I had enough vocab to not be frustrated, I started watching a shitton of content. I didn’t start early. Some people start early but I found it frustrating.

Right now I consume about 2-2.5 hours of native content (movies, twitter, live streams, the occasional manga, anime) per day, and I feel like only this is what is slowly enabling me to maybe gain fluency at some point.

Our journeys are all different. it’s still almost 1.5 years until January 2028. My journey certainly wasn’t ideal or speed optimized and I would be semi-able going through life mostly in Japanese but with a lot of drawbacks, and I have been at it for about 1.5 years.

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#3

Depends on your goal. “Fluent” isn’t a target, it’s a relative description that depends on context, so people are way too strict about it on forums like these :sweat_smile:

“Start using it in Japan 2028” could mean joining a language school there with just Hiragana/Katakana (for ~$3000 a year iirc). N5 is another soft requirement, and really only requires a group class. Some universities have summer programs that will get you there in a single summer.

Either way, here’s my lowest $$ N2 stack

Kanji/“Kanji Vocab”: Wanikani
Grammar: Bunpro
Misc Vocab: Bunpro
Sentence Mining: Bunpro
Reading: Bunpro, NHK Easy (N5/N4) => Live content (N3/N2)
Speaking: Marugoto / Group Class (N5- 50% N3) => Good Luck (N3/N2)
Listening: NHK Easy, Ken’s Youtube channel (N5/N4) => Various other, Japanese only Youtube learning channels
JLPT Practice: Bunpro
Writing: Not worth in a 1.5 year time frame

Or to summarize

Wanikani ($300), Bunpro ($150), Marugoto (Group Class $), Youtube/News (Free). There’s a gap in speaking here that I only think can be overcome with private tutoring or live situations.

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#4

thank you both for the information. so its a practically yes. Also i gotta check out Marugoto

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#5

At this point, it’s mainly Bunpro for me, supplemented by CIJ (now NIJ) for listening/shadowing. I passed N4, and my N3 results are pending.

While I strongly disagree with the way that Bunpro translates sample sentences, the reality is that it’s almost a complete (if imperfect) stand-alone resource for learning Japanese at this point.

Sure, it won’t teach you kana, but that’s a few weeks of study. Other than the listening gap, it has pretty much everything else you need to go a long way.

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#6

Just want to say this is such a thoughtful and well written post.

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#7

I used Skritter to learn Chinese characters for Mandarin, and I continued with it for Japanese. I think I know kanji quite well for my level.

I know 99% of people online will say Wanikani is the way to learn kanji, but I’ve never touched Wanikani even once and done fine, so I just want to throw another option out there that worked for me.

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#8

I’ve been living in Japan for almost 5 years now, but never studied japanese in a classic proper way because I immediately landed a job which didn’t require the language after arriving.

This resulted in me “street learning” japanese and while I’m quite functional in Japanese, I often struggled to understand / use nuance linked to some grammar points, and there are many mistakes that were completely fossilized in my language use.

Anyway, I’ve been using Bunpro for ~100 days now and I can 100% assure you that it’s been a real game changer.
I’m currently mainly going through grammar points (N4~N3) that I already know and use but I’m just now discovering how to perfectly use them. It’s an incredible feeling, and it’s directly translating to my japanese level. My partner (fluent in JP but we speak English and French to each other) told me I suddenly really improved in the past few months. I’m also feeling quite confident when I speak Japanese now since I’m not “guessing around” for the proper grammar anymore.

So yeah, my final take is if you get tons of native input and keep up with Bunpro only, you can get to a pretty decent level. So gambatte !!

3 Likes
#9

I appreciate all the posts here and they have all been useful

#10

Couple things I would add differently is - Instead of WaniKani you can try to take a look at KKLC, though it is a physical book, I feel like it teaches kanji a lot better than wanikani (and if you want you can use anki together with it for SRS). This would be for sure cheaper that wanikani.

Also since you mention “modern” I suggest you to check out jiten.moe which is like a better and up-to-date jpdb. To me it is perfect for vocabulary (also works perfectly free), I only use bunpro for grammar.

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#11

I love Japanese like a Breeze (called something like Japanese I+1 based on Tae Kim’s Guide)
I learned Kanji with Kanji Damage free, and I learned vocab from Nihongo Lessons $300
Also reading manga and watching anime like lizard.
I liked the example dialogues in Genki.

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#12

As someone who’s using almost the same “stack” and is so far from being fluent, I can’t imagine myself reaching that level just with that combo. It lacks a lot of output practice.

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#13

At my early stage I only use Bunpro, but I feel I am not learning Kanji.
I have tried Wanikani. It has a couple of issues for my specific use case:

  • It feels like “radicals” are associated with arbitrary keywords that do not reflect Japanese meaning. This puts me off. Feels like wasted effort.
  • It teaches kanji and vocabulary. I do vocabulary here on Bunpro already so I would like to avoid duplicate SRS and learn only kanji

I built a deck in jpdb with some high frequency kanji and it appears to be doing exactly what I want. I just skip the vocabulary and focus on kanji.
Any thoughts?

Also, once I have enough vocabulary I am planning ot use Wakatta. It’s a very new app that transcribes podcasts and youtube videos. You can tap on any words and get its meaning and explanation.

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#14

Hi there!

I wish I was in your situation! I started my learning journey in May because I learned that I was moving to Japan for work that month. My goal is to get as fluent as possible by January 2028 - somewhat of an arbitrary goal based on my birthday and when I move back to the US, but it aligns really well with your timeline.

As many have said - fluency is exceptionally hard without immersion, but I’ll tell you there are three tools I am using consistently to try to get myself there:

  1. Wanikani - Mostly because I find it satisfying but it also builds the Kanji in a way that helps me remember them. I am averaging about 8 days per level but honestly may throttle back because my vocab is falling behind and the reviews are crushing me.
  2. BunPro - 12 items a day, starting with Genki 1 and 2, not sure where I’m going after deck-wise but after trying to use the textbooks I found these a much better way to review the materials.
  3. Pimsleur - These lessons are exceptional pieces for speaking and you can do them during a commute so the time commitment is pretty easy, I’ve read some people ragging on it, but honestly the Japanese courses have been really useful for me living here and put me into very real world situations pretty early on. Because it’s audio only, it’s good to have a decent base to build off of rather than going cold, I think it oversells it’s “audio-only” approach, but I think it’s a great fit into the stack.

The biggest help has been my friend who is a local and language exchanges, but that is much tougher when you’re not in Japan. I don’t think it’s necessary, but it makes it more fun to be able to put whatever the lesson was to work - or to talk about how you think it’s funny that the word for sarcasm is skin meat.

I have found a few games that have been well-reviewed as well such as Learn Japanese RPG: Hiragana Forbidden Speech and Wagatobi on Steam and Lingo Legend on iOS that I couldn’t really get into myself but seem to have a decent amount of content. I don’t think they’re a full replacement by any stretch, but if you enjoy them, it’s another method to learn.

Having only been at it seriously for about three months now, I am in absolutely no way “fluent” and struggle with basic sentences - but that said, I struggle with the basic sentences - they still happen. At the Karaoke bar I find myself pulling out my phone for Google Translate far less often than when I got here, and enjoying every bit of making mistakes.

By the way, for anyone who is from the US and hasn’t been to Japan - hot just means hot and not anything else, but cool usually means handsome when referring to someone. Ask me how I know!

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#15

yeah i plan to move there for a university i can go free too. So I want to be as close as possible. I dont technically need to learn anything but thats just not good to do.

I really appreciate this response.

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#16

You should absolutely not learn kanji independently of vocabulary. Learning readings in isolation is essentially (literally) useless. You need to learn words they are a part of. What WaniKani and KKLC do is teach vocab words in place of bare readings. Learning the kun’yomi of a kanji without knowing the word is like learning ‘solu’ instead of ‘absolute’.

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#17

Hi.
That’s an interesting point.
Personally I tried to memorise the kanji when bunpro gives me a new word, but the success rate was terrible. I could only remember the kana.
Now I have added a kanji only deck via jpdb. I don’t focus on the sound of them. Just on the general meaning/keyword.
I have been doing this for a week or so and I noticed that kanji meaning (jpdb) and kana pronunciation (bunpro) sometimes work together to recollect the meaning more accurately.
But it’s still early to say.
It might be useless as you say

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#18

Respectfully, I disagree. While learning readings on their own seems like too much of a bother, focusing on kanji’s individual meaning(s) helped me a lot, especially when travelling to Japan.

I spent my first year of Japanese studies focused on kanji (and only doing Duolingo on the side lol, don’t judge me), learning general meanings for each of them. As a result, my kanji level has always been a degree higher than my overall Japanese level : while I’m currently N3ish, I know 90% of N2 kanji. And it’s incredibly useful when trying to decipher texts that should be too difficult for me : I won’t know how to pronounce an unknown word, however I can often parse its meaning based on the kanji used, meaning that I can still get the gist of the text.

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#19

This is exactly what I am hoping to achieve. A bit like when recognising the greek or latin root would help my understanding of unknown English words.

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#20

Of all the things I would go back in time and tell myself when I first started learning Japanese, it’d be this. A lot of time and effort wasted that could have been directed at something more fruitful. To live is to learn, I suppose. 🤷

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