N4 Grammar Inflections are Overwhelming

Bunpro
#1

This one is for the Bunpro team…

I recently moved into N4 grammar and am struggling with a couple of recently learned items. It’s taken me a while to figure it out, but I slowed down to review the grammar points to see what I was doing wrong and this is where I am tripping up:

https://bunpro.jp/grammar_points/128

I read the lesson carefully, committing to memory, then on one of my first
reviews I will get this:

Screenshot 2023-02-17 at 12.04.11

Which is conflating 2 grammar points and isn’t clearly referenced at all in the lesson, which only covers:

Verb［て］+ くる
Verb［て］+ きた

I appreciate that you are probably getting us to level up Japanese quicker, but wouldn’t it better to do that once we get at least past the first hurdle?

I’m getting really frustrated because instead of learning 1 thing + figuring out the tense I kind of feel like there are actually 3 things going on, but one was a secret curveball that only serves the purpose of making feel like a dumbass at review time.

Sorry I don’t have a constructive suggestion to fix, but could this have been 2 grammar points instead?

#2

It cannot be separated into two points since it already has two points. The て comes from:
https://bunpro.jp/grammar_points/60
which Bunpro assumes you are already familiar with since you learn it earlier in N5.

The various verb endings and verb combinations are endless (well, not really, but there are lots), so explaining all of them for each grammar point is a lot of work, which is rather unnecessary, I think.

You are taught the most basic form for a particular grammar point (sometimes more things get explained as the grammar points get more complicated). And then you can combine all the basic grammar points to make more complex structures.

There is also the issue of reading the English hint or translation and coming up with the correct answer, which I think all people struggle with sometimes. This is just the nature of the exercise. But I don’t think Bunpro has ever asked me about something I should not yet know at that point. I might’ve forgotten, sure, but that’s on me.

Anyway, you will get better with practice. You will start seeing patterns and stuff and the various combinations will come more naturally to you. So just keep at it.

6 Likes
#3

I can just confirm what @Sumerechny said. Also when you are in higher levels like N2 and N1 it’s kind of difficult translating a sentence from English to Japanese.

Also (when you are getting at higher levels) you will have more and more grammar points which are similar but have sometimes a slightly nuance. In my opinion Bunpro does a great job here helping the people to find the right track.

I can recommend you also using the “Ressources” section of a grammar point you are struggling with. You will have more examples and other explanations and sometimes you understand an explanation B better than explanation A. But this does not mean that explanation A was bad or wrong. Every person struggles with some grammar points. The more and more you get used to Japanese you will have a “feeling” for the sound of sentence which also helps to “find” a correct grammar pattern.

And your method maybe to concentrate on less grammar points it is also a good idea I think.

頑張ってね。日本語を勉強するのが楽しんでください

5 Likes
#4

whenever i had feelings like this with grammar points i read all the example sentences. listen to them over and over again. then reread the rule and then it slowly sinks in.

dont brute force memorise the grammar rules - just shower yourself in example sentences and try to relax. :slight_smile:

5 Likes
#5

Like others have mentioned, Bunpro doesn’t give you something that hasn’t been taught in a previous lesson. However, I can get how this is frustrating as you’ve just started learning this and all of a sudden it’s wanting you to also recall a past grammar point as well. This is really helpful for building an understanding of Japanese as a whole - how everything is working - but like I said, I can see how this may be frustrating since you were expecting てくる or てきた to be the answer and not a different conjugation using a different grammar point. As you spend more time with Japanese and continue to review, these conjugations will become a lot easier, especially with this style of review since you’ll understand the process behind it intuitively.

Maybe a suggestion for this though (to the Bunpro team) is to simply have the earlier/beginning SRS staged reviews only consist of what was learned in the lesson, and not incorporating anything else than that (for what is ‘graded’). This way you can get a feel for how the grammar point works at a low level, and then in later SRS stages it adds in other things (if applicable to that grammar point). I feel like this would only be necessary up to the end of N4 probably but idk, just a suggestion.

1 Like
#6

This will help:

Conjugation Drills

Also had a thought for the team, because I’ve noticed a similar pattern to this that sometimes the first sentence that you are offered for review is sometimes the exception to the main grammar point rather than the core meaning. I think it is a mistake to teach it in that order. It is probably best to have the difficulty of the grammar scale with the number of reviews.

I don’t remember what the order for this specific grammar is, but it would make sense to start the progression like this:

  1. お店に行ってくるよ。
  2. お菓子を持ってきます。

before you drop the harder things like

  1. チョコを持ってきてくれない？
    etc.

At a certain point you hit a combinatorial explosion, which is what makes language learning naturally hard.

1 Like
#7

Thanks everyone for the replies. I’m not a fast learner and Bunpro is a real help, but this time my frustration spilled out into the forums.

Of course this couldn’t be 2 grammar points otherwise it would take a decade to get to N3 :sweat_smile: but, this is exactly what would help:

As it happens got this grammar point right in all my reviews this morning so there’s that - keep on keeping on!

3 Likes
#8

It tries to do that but it doesn’t always work. When I started Bunpro I already knew a lot of N5 and N4 stuff through immersion and some textbooks. So I learned them first and ignored the order of the grammar in Bunpro itself and in the paths (e.g. Genki and Tae Kim). And I definitely got grammar points from cards I didn’t learn before. Not much but a few. I guess they were all from N5.

I have now completed N5 and N4 and again I’m going through already known cards in N3 and the problem didn’t occur there yet. So maybe it’s only for very basic grammar.

#9

This is actually a super useful link. Thank you.

1 Like