My 1st vocab to hit Expert leaves me puzzled

Bunpro
#1

So I was really excited to see I finally got a vocab word into the Expert category. Then, of course, I checked to see which one it was. 「にあう」

Problem is, I wouldn’t know what にあう means without checking the definition. So I’m wondering if my approach is all wrong.

Here’s my routine:

I go through my reviews and if I’m unsure, I will just enter randomly and then check the answer and review the lesson. I know I am making progress with this approach but I’m not sure it’s optimal. My fear is that I will “master” vocab and grammar only not to really know it.

What do you guys think?

#2

So from the sound of it, you are always hitting 100% correct scores, right? You review the lesson if you get one wrong, but still mark it as correct.
For me, not all words are equal in difficulty. I can take one look at breakfast and think to myself, morning meal, makes sense, and because I know morning and meal, it requires next to no review. It comes in up reviews and I get it right instantly, takes under a second to type in, and I move on with the tiny bit of reinforcement.
Now, joushaken, boarding pass, took me ages. Not sure why, but I had it being reviewed twice a day for over a week and it still hasn’t completely sunk in. If I can’t come up with the right answer within about 5 seconds, I know I need more study, so it gets marked wrong and shows up again sooner. Even if I get close to the answer, say kaisha instead of kousha, I still mark it wrong, because for me the goal isn’t to get the words marked as expert on bunpro, but to be able to have the right word pop into my head instantly.
I use wanikani without any addons, and give myself a 5 second time limit on each word, which means sometimes I do typos on words about to be burned, or just have a brain fart and put in the wrong answer when I know the right one. That hurts, and it’s a shame to see the words take an extra 4 months to burn when that happens, but for me, it’s worth it.
If you feel like you are happy with your current state on a word, keep it marked right. If you are not happy, mark it wrong.
Hope that helps.

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#3

Right. So I’m basically trying to use it like wani kani. If I get something wrong, I try to understand why by using the associated lesson. Then I type the correct answer to hopefully reinforce the right response into my memory (I’m a very visual learner).

#4

I think in this case it’s better to type it and then erase your correct answer so it still gets marked as wrong. Bunpro is more forgiving than WK so if you really don’t know something, you need to be sure to let it get marked as incorrect.

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#5

Have you tried the “reading” review type ? Maybe it will be a better fit if you’re a visual learner. It also makes marking things as wrong easier, compared to the “entry” type

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#6

Personally, I send every incorrect answer back to SRS 1. I also manually mark things wrong if it took me more than 10 seconds to answer after reading the sentence for nuance.

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#7

Just marking something correct everytime but also relearning the item everytime can work out. It’s more useful for grammar points in my opinion.

Like you get a grammar point and instead of checking if you can use it correctly, you read up the explanation (maybe opt for a different source every time) and then make a few sentences or a textbook exercise with the grammar point and mark it as correct. If you do that everytime the SRS gives it to you, that would probably be way more effective than just a quick fill-in the blank review. But also way more time consuming.

For vocab, I’m not sure this method would work as well, as there are no good explanation write ups for vocab :sweat_smile: and just using it in a few sentences also doesn’t have the same effect (at least for me). But taking your time reviewing (and maybe rewriting) your mnemonics, remembering where you encountered the word in the wild or trying to find a few sentences that contains the word in one of your recent readings (just skimming a few pages), looking up the kanji and in which other words those are also used, and stuff like that could work out as well.

In other words: Using the SRS as a reminder to learn when you got something wrong instead of failing the card can work really well :slight_smile: Obviously, those ways are way more time consuming, but they may also be highly effective for some. If your stuff hits master, but you don’t know it yet, you were either taking shortcuts during the learning or this method isn’t a good fit for you. But only you can tell which one it is.

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