Sorry if this has been answered. Are the sentences used for reviews ordered to ladder up in difficulty using previously learned grammar points, ala a comprehensible input approach?
I ask as I’m starting to read books and I’m looking up grammar points I don’t know. I would like to start incorporating them into reviews but I feel like that would create holes if I add a grammar point from N3 without completing previous points and the review sentences become too difficult/inefficient.
Basically, yes. More specifically, the default BunPro Path is intended to follow such an ordering. Therefore, if you’re following the BunPro Path and you find something out of order, it’s fair to report that as a potential issue.
The other Paths, such as the Genki or Tae Kim paths, because they may follow somewhat different orderings based on their source materials, may be somewhat ‘out of order’ in some cases, though the BunPro team have apparently put in a lot of effort to smooth them out as well, but may not really be possible to make all the paths perfectly ‘in order’.
As for adding grammar points in whatever order, you are definitely free to do that. I’ve done that in some cases.
However, you may run into some difficulties if you end up adding ‘more advanced’ grammar points that will likely use ‘less advanced’ grammar points you haven’t come across yet.
When this has happened to me, I usually looked up the new grammar I had ‘skipped’ and also added it to my lessons. In some cases, this ended up with me ‘biting off more than I could chew’, and after taking a break from BunPro for a while, when I returned, I found that I had a lot of difficulty with a lot of the ‘mixed level’ grammar points I had added.
Along with several other unrelated reasons, I ended up resetting my BP progress and started back with the BunPro path from the very beginning again, and now I have been mostly following the BP path with only a few exceptions here and there. For instance, I’ve also added early grammar points from some of the beginner paths like the Genki path (I had previously studied the Genki I book, so I feel confident with those), the Marugoto path, and some scattered grammar points here and there. But I try not to bite off too much. If I find that I’m starting to have difficulty with some of the higher-level grammar points, then I basically focus on just continuing to do my reviews, but stick to just regular BunPro path lessons for a while, until the higher-level grammar points no longer trip me up. Then maybe I’ll venture forth and add a couple more again. But I take it more slow-and-steady these days than before, and I find it much more ‘comfortable’ this way.
So, try it out, but be careful about possibly biting off more than you can chew. If things get too hairy, just slow down and go back to the default BunPro path for a while until your grammar skillz catch up closer to where your reading material is at. If things get way too crazy, you can always either reset, or just remove some of the more-difficult grammar points out of your reviews (each grammar point has a button to remove it on its page).
Thanks! I didn’t want to waste my time adding a bunch of points that would basically add tons of incomprehensible sentences to my review pile.
I’ll just stick with the BunPro path and continue to look up stuff while reading. If it’s a frequent enough thing, I’ll probably remember it anyway.
One of the great things about the BunPro system is that you can very much customize which points you want to include in reviews, and which you want to exclude. In addition, you can even mark a point as “I know this!”, for example if you want to skip it (perhaps temporarily) when studying from a particular path (e.g. the default BP path). Likewise, if you want to re-include previously ‘skipped’ items, you can also do that.
On the other hand, this freedom also makes it more easy to add too many lessons all at once, potentially leading to overwhelm and burn out, so it’s not as controlled of a pace as say WaniKani.
But, as long as you just pay attention to your daily or weekly workload, and pace out your lessons accordingly – like the accelerator pedal in a car, easing off lessons when going too fast, adding more when going too slow – then you can still maintain a nice steady pace while retaining the flexibility to add in ‘more advanced’ lessons here and there as needed for your own personal purposes.
Also, like driving a car, it doesn’t take too long to get the hang of it. So, don’t worry about it too much, IMO. Any mistakes you make will be correctable. 