Do you mind explaining how you went about immersing? This to me sounds like you listened to Japanese content in the background while you did other stuff, as opposed to focusing on what you were listening to, in which case I can see why you would learn to tune it out.
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When I say immersion I mean the same thing, but I just say that it’s possible to supplement native content and environment with sufficint quantity of good quality sentence cards, because not immersion metters but comprehensible input. And then switching to native content will be like changing accent of content you are watching. And I say it should be more efficient if we maintain cards on a right level of difficulty. There is a thing like context of what you care and what you like, and what you need that can help, but to which degree 
Anyhow, I don’t see any way to prove it or disprove right now
I agree, but like with dietary supplements, you cannot live off of supplements alone. You can take a multivitamin every day, but if you don’t eat food you will eventually starve and die.
The issue is for most self-taught beginners (which there are a lot of on BunPro, including myself), it’s very hard to find a “sufficient quantity of good quality sentence cards.” If you don’t fully understand the language, how do you know what is good quality? And good quality for what? Someone’s “good quality” (learning Japanese to play Videogames and watch Anime) won’t be the same “good quality” (learning Japanese to move to and work in Japan) to someone else.
If you make your own cards, you may make mistakes in sentence creation/translation, or choose lines that have been localized, further altering the meaning. If you use premade cards, the creator of said cards may not have had the same goal in mind as you do now for learning.
Every single person I’ve met in my professional life that speaks English as a second language has told me the same thing, “I watched English TV Shows/Movies/Cartoons with English subtitles and spent a lot of time talking to English speaking people.” Their grasp of the English language is fantastic and they have virtually no “foreign accent”.
Can people use sentence cards to learn Japanese? Of course they can. Is it the best way to learn? It could be for them. But again, every single people who has ever learnt a language has learned at least one through immersion, so telling people to immerse and how to do it properly will never (in my opinion) be bad advice.
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Actually a good point. If you learn with prebuilt deck and it’s something like “top 10k words” you’ll learn at least a few thousands of words you almost never use. So something to keep in mind.
Did the same, unfortunately I have an accent but my speaking and understanding of the language is quite large compared to my writing. So it is definitely something that works and I have tested myself.
I can fully agree on that
Anyhow at the moment I think it’s sub efficient, but that is why sentence mining and spaced repetition exist I guess
The leap from N4 to N3 on BunPro is big, the leap from N3 to N2 is even bigger in terms of grammar. Trying to also cram circa 6,000 words in on top of some of the N3/2 grammar points where you have 9 different ways of saying the same thing in subtly different shades is gonna be rough.
I’ve let my vocab lag long behind my grammar. I’m nearly done with N2 additions to my stacks but only just over 60% of the N4 vocab deck. In general this has given me a great deal of flexibility in terms of listening, speaking, and reading practice where I know the form of the sentence and know what I need to look up to obtain some understanding.
I think probably speed running N2-N1 is almost a super human task. It’s not impossible, but I do wonder how much understanding versus just knowledge of the language you’ll end up with trying to cram it all in like that.
I tend to think you can sprint the grammar, but you need to marathon vocabulary, getting to the first 10K words is just a very long term goal I think.
I have 2 great speaking tutors, I’d recommend starting speaking as early as you feel able to say meaningful small sentences. Conversation is really where you end up honing the skills that lead to actually understanding in Japanese IMO.
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I’m making this update a day early on account of me having plans this weekend and I think I’m likely to be too busy and/or too drunk to remember making this update tomorrow.
So let’s all pretend that these are the results after Two Weeks of steadily using BunPro:
The more discerning of you might notice that I did not stick to the plan this week, namely finishing off the N5 Vocab and then “mostly chilling”. That is because this week at work was a good deal busier than the previous one and I didn’t have that much time, and I also just didn’t feel like forcing myself to add 100 entries a day for half of the week.
However you’ll also notice that I took a good chunk out of the Genki II deck instead. Reason being that I thought I’d go through the Genki I material and really make sure I “get it”, however it was terribly boring and I simply flipped through the chapters realizing I already know all this shit.
So I was like “alright I guess I’ll just go through Genki II material right away instead”, and I started doing just that. I’m not actually sure how many new entries a day that corresponds to, I decided to kinda take it easy this week.
What I do have are the stats for how many ghosts I have remaining and how many reviews I did:
- Improving upon last week, instead of having 20/4 vocab/grammar ghosts I’m down to 0/10 today!
- I averaged 517 reviews per day, down from 534 last week, with a minimum of 267 (yesterday (it’s 12:30AM rn)) and maximum of 876 (Monday).
Just like last week, my accuracy still hovers at around 98%. My average SRS level however grew from 3 to 4! Definitely due to me adding way less entries a day than I did before.
Knowing now that I don’t actually care about finishing off the N5 Vocab deck as fast as I can that much, and hoping that next week won’t be busy as this one, here’s my plan for the rest of February:
- Saturday and Sunday: I’ll be busy socializing so besides just going through my reviews I might add 20 entries of the Genki II deck per day at best.
- Monday to Friday: I do still want to finish off the N5 Vocab deck, and there are 163 entries left. I’ll be doing 32 new entries from this deck per day, and 18 entries per day at least from the Genki II deck, putting me at 50 new entries per day.
This should keep me well on track to finishing off JLPT N4 content before the end of March as planned.
Other than BunPro I’ve also been keeping up with my WaniKani reviews, which compared to what I have to deal with here lowkey feel like baby type shit. I’ve also looked for tutors and they’re cheaper than I thought they’d be so I figure I could actually do 3 hours a week or so of conversation without much trouble, and starting in March instead of waiting for April when I start covering JLPT N3 content.
Somehow I feel like I haven’t gotten to study as much Japanese this week as I’d have liked, and am a lil disappointed in myself. Womp womp.
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@KurokawaMasumi you did a lot of good work this week, and you shouldn’t feel bad that you prioritized things that came up at work over your Japanese study. You’re still making progress and that’s good!
That being said - remember when many people in this thread were telling you that they’ve seen this happen before and that you shouldn’t let speed bumps make you pull over and quit, and that you will have a smoother time with those speed bumps if you set goals at a more sustainable pace?
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Yeah I don’t feel like quitting or anything, just more determined than ever to gitgud and invest more time into it.
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If you’re looking on italki I can recommend my tutor there, nice and casual atmosphere, tries to teach you actual daily Japanese rather than simply textbook stuff. I also take grammar focused leasons based on Genki II with Shun from Japanese with Shun podcast which has been a massive help. He’s considerably more expensive than my main tutor though. 🥲
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Sorry, this has been in my drafts for 2 weeks
After Genki there are 2 textbooks published by Japanese Times
Quartet A Review of "Quartet: Intermediate Japanese Across the Four Language Skills vol. 1"
and AIAIJ.
Quartet is considered to be the “easier” one.
I went through the vocab, grammar, listening and reading comprehension alone. watch anime and read manga so it was easy enough- took me 6months learning 5 a day (I’m going way slower than you).
I have done two essays with a tutor.
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Here’s my progress after ONE MONTH of getting back into studying Japanese and Three Weeks of steadily using BunPro after its reset!
The plan was:
and that is exactly what I did.
When it comes to what I’ve said last week:
I haven’t really gone through much of the Genki II deck, since during the weekend I got carried away and mostly forgot about studying (I almost missed my reviews entirely on Saturday), but I did finish off the N5 Vocab deck, which was more important.
Here’s the activity graph where for the Saturday to Friday period I averaged 284 reviews per day with a minimum of 19 (Saturday) and maximum of 514 (Monday).
I’ve decided to start going through Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar and A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar again that I’ve had just chilling at home, and cross reference with the entries in BunPro and Imabi to see if I can’t figure out a way to intuitively wrap up a starting foundation for myself in forms of notes that I may or may not publish when I’m done with them.
I also increased the amount of comprehensible input I listen to per day to around an hour and got back into writing as I find it helps me remember things easier.
Here’s the current state of my decks:
This week I’m going to start seeing a tutor for conversing in Japanese and will also start going through An Integrated Approach to Intermediary Japanese at a pace of a chapter a week. The plan for March is still to go through 28 vocabulary and 4 grammar entries of JLPT N4 content per day but my initial plan was:
so if it ends up feeling like too much studying for me I might take it easy and go with this goal instead of end of March, which will let me halve the new entries to 14 vocab and 2 grammar per day.
I still feel hopeful that I can keep this pace up and so far my enthusiasm hasn’t diminished, so hopefully this month alone would be enough, and worst case scenario I’ll take all of April to recover and fully consolidate JLPT N5 + N4 and focus on listening and speaking primarily.
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Nice job hitting your objective of finishing JLPT N5 in Feb! I can relate to almost missing your reviews on the Saturday; I’ve definitely had panic moments at 11:50 PM where I realize I haven’t done my reviews yet for the day (so far on a 375 day anki streak though, and almost a 1 month streak on Bunpro post-reset!).
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Quick update:
I decided to deprioritize JLPT N4 and N3 vocab and go for Core 2000 and Core 4000 most frequently used words instead as it more closely aligns with my goals.
I’m going with my initial goal of hitting JLPT N4 before end of April instead of March for that reason and will probably take longer for N3 as well as a consequence if the vocabulary doesn’t overlap sufficiently well with most commonly used terms.
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Quick update:
I’m going to change the frequency at which I make fuller logs from once a week to twice a month.
In part because I happen to spend every second weekend heavily socializing (this one included), and in part because I don’t like how months are not divisible by 7 and I want to be able to neatly wrap every month up at the end.
I’ll note however that my accuracy went down from 98% to like 95%, which is not a great sign. I’m thinking about spending some time on making custom decks and start using them with BunPro’s cram feature that I have so far just been ignoring.
I also bought a tablet (Lenovo Tab Plus + Pen) because I wanted to start using Skritter, and for now I’m just going through whatever content they have available for free before deciding if I want to actually pay for it or not (it’s kinda expensive). So far it’s been decent.
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Correct. Good luck.
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I feel this so much 
The real problem is weeks having 7 days. Want to do something every second or third day? You are doomed to cycle through the days. Whoever decided to make the number of days in a week a prime really wanted to make sure you get a day of rest per week. I resorted to completely ignoring the date or day for personal things and only use it with other people now.
I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors 
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Alright, y’all know what time it is. Here’s my update for the first half of March.
So two weeks ago, I decided to start seeing a tutor for conversing in Japanese.
Me absolutely gushing over how good of a tutor I found
I ended up trying out a few until I found one that somehow just fits me perfectly. She is so fun to communicate with, patient, and explains things well, and most importantly it doesn’t really feel like work when I’m studying with her. Most of our time is spent just chatting and then we sometimes go through material for vocab and grammar.
Somehow, it’s also the one tutor that doesn’t really speak English much. In fact our sessions are basically devoid of English.
Initially since I never really had an actual conversation in Japanese before I’ve paused a lot and were quite slow with my output, but she was very patient and attentive to whether I understood or not what was being said.
I quickly learnt a good way to communicate on these points with her and she manages to reexplain them well at a level that’s more comprehensible to me.
She highlighted from the beginning that my strongest point is perhaps my pronunciation. I don’t really have an accent in any of the languages I’m fluent in and I’m glad that it carries over to Japanese as well including somehow naturally picking up pitch accents (she corrects me on my pitch accent whenever I come across a word I’ve never seen before and that’s usually sufficient; she actually gets me to read passages of text to make sure).
I’ve progressed pretty quickly with her and no longer really pause when talking. At least not nearly as much as in the beginning.
She’s also helped me realize that the thing that matters the most to me is being able to talk with native speakers, so I’ve changed my priorities away from JLPT (since I never really cared about passing the exam anyway) as you have seen in my previous post.
Either way, how about the state of my progress and my reviews?
For the first half of March (1st to 15th), I averaged 288 reviews per day, with a minimum of 55 (7th March) and maximum of 513 (8th March).
I find it kinda fun how you can tell from my activity graphs when life gets in the way and I prioritize (and then apparently compensate for) my social life. Somehow I’m glad I manage to make good progress without sacrificing my social life either. I can’t say it’s really at all reduced since I got back into studying Japanese.
When it comes to the state of my decks, they’re not really much like what they used to be anymore as they now reflect my actual priorities closer:
I actually went through the “Miki Matsuraba - Stay With Me” deck as a priority at some point as well, and am planning on doing that for more actual Japanese media.
I can’t say I’ve even really got to touch the JLPT N4 decks much, and when they did fill up it was more as a consequence of me naturally prioritizing something else. For example, sure I am going over the Core 2k deck first instead, but I also write down all unfamiliar vocabulary and grammar I come across or end up having to look up to talk with my tutor (when I really want to say something but don’t know how I do a quick search and try to ram it into the conversation and she picks up on what I’m going for and corrects its use).
Somehow I end up with a good amount of terms from the additional (Axx) collections as well as unclassified vocabulary. It’s a shame I can’t track them as well as the terms that are present from JLPT N5 to N1, but oh well.
I wish Bunpro offered a way to see the progression for vocabulary present in the additional collections.
Considering that even as far as JLPT content goes I’m at roughly 700 “above JLPT N5” entries, somehow it seems that I’ve maintained a good pace that would have allowed me to finish N4 this month if it were still a priority (it’s not).
My accuracy hasn’t really suffered either. But I think it’s because I definitely spend more time on Japanese than I did last month. It doesn’t really feel much like work cause having actually conversations in Japanese is hyping me up so much I can’t see myself not working towards it even more.
As you may have noticed from my screenshots, I’m replacing the UI language for shit I use with Japanese. I’ve also installed a couple browser extensions to facilitate the process.
One is Rikaikun (if you hover over terms you don’t know it pops out the reading and definitions), and another is Furigana Maker (it adds furigana to kanji in your browser).
I’m also going through comprehensible input channels and podcasts as well as going through “Shadowing” books. I think that more than anything, these as well as manually inputting terms I want to use in Japanese into Bunpro will help me reach my goals.
As far as what I’m going to do for the next couple weeks:
I don’t think I can say anything as concrete as I did before regarding JLPT N4 completion or whatever, but I think it’s fair to set as a goal that I’ll try to add 700 more “above JLPT N5” entries like I did these last couple weeks.
I haven’t really set it as a metric before and it kinda just naturally happened, so it would be good if it also “naturally happens” again.
I think a big factor that prevents me from going through new vocabulary quicker is that I don’t really know enough kanji. I find that I spend more time revising and cramming these terms than I’d like because of it.
I don’t really enjoy doing that even if it’s nice when they sorta come out like magic as words in my head despite me not feeling like I consciously know them, so I’m going to do my best to go over as much kanji as I can even if it’s to the detriment of my progress in grammar and vocabulary.
Anyway that’s basically it. Gonna hard focus on kanji, and prioritize comprehensible input and shadowing to make sure I can do good progress on every new session I have with my tutor (I’ve already booked her for twice a week until the end of April).
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Also I definitely am glad I reduced the frequency to twice a month cause I think I must have spent like an hour in between other things to write this last post out lol
Teaser for a little something I’m working on that I plan on completing and putting out by the end of the month:
I cant wait for your updates I made a similar goal of passing N4 by the summer JLPT exam. Wishing you much encouragement. 
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