Non-English speakers, how do you deal with Bunpro?

[Mannelito]

Honestly, I just checked synonyms as they popped up. Have ghosts on, dont forgive errors and all the weak points will accumulate in ghosts, adept and beginner. Then you just go into those sub-categories and check.

If I managed to bump up a grammar point to a higher SRS by luck, they usually get poked down to ghosts when you get them wrong at SRS10 or higher. Just be honest with yourself and see ghost reviews as an opportunity to hone a specific point of the language.

Also, being structured is good if it has a purpose, otherwise it is just distracting you from doing.

[Buntebunpou]

That’s interesting. I disabled ghosts because it didn’t see any use in it and after disabling them I actually good better. Never liked this grinding idea where you are bombarded by grammar points your brain obviously just can’t digest right now. After my experience that’s quite counterproductive, I often got much better after just taking a break from problematic stuff.

But your approach with ghosts is actually interesting.

Structuring the stuff I have problems with usually works for me. Especially as it shows you problems you didn’t even realize you’re having, e.g. when you learned a few thousand words and some are identical but have different meanings. The main problem is it just costs a lot of time which I don’t really have.

Maybe I should put everything into the user notes and parse that stuff via the Bunpro api. That way I could integrate that into my learning workflow. I did similar stuff with Anki and its flags and tags and that works very well.

[Buntebunpou]

Some parts of English are more complicated than Japanese, I can understand that thought if you’re just focussing on special areas. Different conjugations for singular and plural, articles (I have a car, the car over there, cars and bikes are vehicles), future tense…

And the worst part of English: the irregular pronuncitation like the g in vegetarian, vegetable and vegan. Same shit as kunyomi and onyomi in Japanese.

But the main problem for Japanese and American/European learners is just that the languages are so extremely different I would say. Doesn’t really matter whether you speak English or German, it’s still an extremely foreign language for us.

[Erz]

fellow german reporting in. currently working through n1 (passed jlpt 4 and 3)

i usually write a direct german translation of the grammar point that roughly fits into the notes that i get intuitively. the process of finding the right words yourself is already half of the learning.
in hard cases i use DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator to get a recommendation of the example sentences.

your fear of keigo later in n2 and n1 isnt really that justified. what i would warn you much more about is your plan of feeding anki with all this. you are trying to brute force memorize which is extremly exhausting and inefficient - perhaps even impossible.
you should spend the majority of time with content that is compelling to you. only then the language and things like keigo will seep into you naturally. i know anki is a dopamine spender that spares you the frustration of ambiguity when learning a language. but in the end anki gives soon diminishing returns compared to listening and reading. (god i wish i had this conclusion years ago - nowadays i strictly limit my anki time to 15 minutes per day)

subtle differences become clearer when you read an article or story about an interesting setting - not when bruteforce memorizing.

also: spend the majority of bunpro time with the example sentences.

[RYAN1]

I’m an Arabian and to me the used english to educate people japanese on this site is somewhat off (?) compared to the ones I have been to, as though english isn’t really my language and I really am terrible at it when it comes to express stuff using it, as I’ve seen many japanese learning resources offer good interpretation for the given context in English, this one is kinda off, but I wouldn’t suggest you to add “Arabic” when you hadn’t even added other langs, but yeah as long as it’s understandable, fine by me, also I’m here because I like the features this site offering, keep the great work up (:

[simias]

Honestly if you want to know if there’s a market this is the last place you should ask. Obviously anybody using Bunpro right now and commenting in these forums is going to be at least somewhat functional in English. Personally I’m a French native speaker but I have zero interest in a French Bunpro because my English is decent enough that it doesn’t create too much friction in my studies.

However I’m sure that there are many French-speaking people who don’t have a solid grasp of English and could use something like Bunpro to help in their Japanese studies. How many would that be? Unclear.

Note that looking at Duolingo for instance, they do not offer a Japanese track for French, German or Spanish speakers at the moment. Does it mean that there’s not enough demand or that it’s just an untapped market? Who knows…

[simias]

Digging more on Duolingo, I think the only source language other than English that lets you learn Japanese is Chinese. I guess it makes sense to target the Chinese market for that, it’s huge and there’s probably significant interest in Japanese learning there too.

However I’m not convinced that Chinese people would approach Japanese grammar the way us westies do, I don’t know if a straight translation of Bunpro would work without some deeper changes in the lessons.

[albcasahu]

I love languages, so whenever something comes up that I don’t understand in English, I just use it as an opportunity to learn about it. But I’m a bit of a language nerd and I’m not in a rush to learn Japanese

[EPBBass]

Hello,

I am also from germany and firstly, someone said that only germany would benefit from a german translation. But there is also austria and swiss which both (at least to some degree) could use a german bunpro version. That said, I don’t think it should be localised,at least for now.

A lot of people in Europe, especially the younger generations, are quite fliud in english due to it being taught in most schools from a very early age and of the most media ist consumed in english, e.g. youtube, sometimes movies and series and of course many many other things on the internet.

RIght now I am struggling with some grammar points which sometimes translet as you must and sometimes as you have to do XY (or the negative form)… Can’t put a finger on it why thou…

TL:DR English is fine for me.

[Antsa]

Finnish speaker here! I certainly have had my own philosophical sessions related to this issue if it can even be called one. Learning a language through a proxy language (English) definitely has its own problems, though I have noticed that it has also helped me improve my English a bit as well.

I’m a bit unsure how I’d grade my English proficiency, like I can read through English content without thinking about the fact that its in English. Its like a brain toggle of a sort I guess. Grammar related vocabulary is an entirely different problem though, since all of my grammar education has been done in Finnish. Like I can understand the grammar explanations, but the abstract grammar words like “nominalization” and “auxiliary verbs” go mostly over my head and I have no clue what they mean without looking them up separately. In these cases the example sentences however have filled the holes quite nicely and I rely on them a lot.

As for vocabulary Anki cards, I used to mass produce them in English with browser plugins etc., but found myself not getting anything out of them. Like I understand what the cards are saying, but its difficult to grasp the core meaning. For sentences and kanji English has been fine, but for vocab these days I create all of the cards in Finnish manually. It certainly adds a lot to the effort required and I have a massive slew of scripts to help with that. I find it quite funny how I need Google Translate a lot when translating English vocabulary to Finnish even though I know what the words mean . Also in some cases I have to look for Japanese example sentences when the English translations are too vague to directly translate to Finnish.

Studying a language through a proxy language is like an onion with its layers. You slowly get rid of the layers one by one trying to cut out the middleman:

1. Japanese → English → Finnish → Mentalese
2. Japanese → Finnish → Mentalese
3. Japanese → Mentalese

The progress is a bit slow with complex things like grammar, but I hope it gets easier over time

If I had to come up with some way to improve this, maybe there could be a page in Bunpro that would explain out some grammar words that are commonly used in the explanations but aren’t common in the normal language? I know that explaining English grammar doesn’t really fit a website meant for teaching Japanese grammar, but it would probably be of some use to non-native English speakers. This way there wouldn’t be a need to translate the entire website, but non-native speakers would still have a way to get more out of the grammar explanations.

Edit: Maybe one quick way to add grammar word explanations would be to link the words to their wordnik.com definitions or something

[username2]

I add new unknown words into my Anki, also practicing English on forum like now, thus effectively learning 2 language with a price of 1. Best deal ever, thank you Bunpro!

[I-k-d]

I’m a native english speaker and I struggle to understand some of the definitions, I often go onto other sites to learn how to use the points.

[RYAN1]

Wow, didn’t think there would be a native English who would struggle with based grammar/point instructions in their own language, I used to have a friend of mine who once taught me almost every japanese essentials thus I became a bit familiar with japanese/ instilled them within my brain, then I got into grammar teaching textbooks like tae Kim’s and a fairy amount of other ones and I guess that’s the reason why, or at least so far.

[sina28]

Fellow German here, currently studying for N3.
In my opinion translations seem kind of useless from hgh N3 onward anyway, so I try not to pay too much attention to them but rather try to get a feeling for how a certain grammar point is used. If I am unsure, I will watch a YT video with explanations in only Japanese. Normally, they are concise enough for me to grasp the concept quickly.

[CenMau]

I’m a non-native English speaker, but don’t have any desire for localization to my native language. I’m in the camp of people that just hides all English translations and focuses on the Japanese, although I admit my Japanese level is already high enough to understand even an explanation fully in Japanese.

If there’s anything that I would desire from Bunpro in terms of language, it’s getting a fully Japanese mode, instead of the half translation we have now. I would like all the necessary information to answer review quiz correctly to be available in Japanese, including stuff about past tense, politeness, etc. Of course it would be okay if this is only done for higher levels (N1, N2, maybe N3).

In an ideal world, grammar explanations would also be fully in Japanese. There’s a lot in the English explanations that is useless for me anyway. I do not quite understand English grammar terminology. “conjugations of the auxiliary verb”, what’s an auxiliary verb? What exactly is a predicate? I just don’t know and always skip these kinds of explanations and rely on examples. If anything it would be more useful to learn them all in Japanese instead.

[Lucas-Emanuel]

Hi there,

I am also experiencing the same problem with some finer details of grammatical structures in English. And yes, also located in Germany.

I mostly use the this extension on Safari and Chrome, just to shortly look up the german translations which this tool provides. This is nice, because I don’t have to leave bunpro to do this.

[julian_s]

I only speak English and very broken French but I’ve found the more Japanese I learn the more productive it is to just focus on the Japanese and ignore English. I think if your English is good enough to get to intermediate level Japanese, once you run into extreme nuances you should be able to switch to Japanese only

[kittycatfish]

haha, the reason why a native English speaker would struggle with grammar explanations is because–like most languages–the advanced grammar is difficult to explain when you just “know it.” Native English speaker and I definitely don’t know what an “auxiliary verb” is without looking it up, but I’m sure I execute them properly. The reasoning for finer points of English grammar start to feel pedantic outside of an academic environment.

Additionally, the only reason I know what a “predicate” is is because, “Mr. Morton is the ‘subject’ of the sentence…and what the ‘predicate’ says, he doessssss”

[scarrera]

On Bunpro I haven’t struggled at all. English is not my native language, but I am fluent in it. I’ve had issues in Wanikani where they would use an uncommon word for some of the radicals. The easy workaround was adding a synonim

Bunpro could try one of those community translation options.

[esutasan]

I am also German and don’t have any issues all. However, I know plently of people (also younger ones) who struggle with English or can’t speak it at all but who are interested in Japanese. There are only few German resources for Japanese in comparison to English.