Hey there!
When i studied N5 and N4 grammar, I had the feeling that the vocab used in the example sentences was approximately equivalent to the level.
But now that i start with N3 grammar, i have the feeling at least a bunch of sentences are waaay too hard, sometimes with vocab that is not even marked ‘common’ in jisho. Is this just me because I barely started with N3 grammar and vocab or are there other people who feel the same?
Yeah I’ve noticed the difficulty curve has seemed to go up quite a bit in N3/N2.
Something I’ve found helpful is to use the rikaikun extension for chrome while doing reviews. This way I can just highlight unfamiliar vocab for a quick definition and try to figure out the remainder of the sentence on my own, rather than go straight to Bunpro’s full english translation.
Yeah, I do get what I you mean. Towards N2/N1, some sentences seem way too long too hehe. However, Bunpro’s sentences are in general quite good, somewhat modifiable and get the point across.
It’s not something that I have ever worried about.
While using Bunpro, don’t worry so much about the vocab and try to concentrate on the grammar points more. There is also quite a gap between N3 and N4 in terms of vocab and grammar too.
Something that helped while making notes on new grammar points was to use Bunpro’s extra reading section to find (easier) sentences or to just search the grammar point online / YouTube.
OK, so I am not the only one
I have the rikaikun extention but even that doesn’t help much when the sencence is about supernova explosions or such things 
Ya, that’s what I mostly do. Though sometimes I catch myself not even trying to look at the sentence anymore (especially after a few too hard sentences) but only at the few words around the gap or the english hint that is telling me which grammar point to use ^^’
I definitely noticed this at first, but now that I’m nearly done with Bunpro’s N3 section (only 10 more to go!!), the sentences don’t seem so bad anymore for the most part. Occasionally I’ll hit an odd word or two (or people’s names that I don’t even make an attempt to read yet), but usually I can understand (or come very close) without too much trouble.
I hadn’t really thought about it until reading this topic - but now that I’m letting it sink it, that feeling of trackable improvement is really good! I would say just keep up your studies and read, read, read! (And I don’t mean textbooks). I think you will also notice that the further you get into the N3 stuff (and beyond), the more things you’ll be able to read/understand without you even realizing it’s happening!
It’s not just you. I had already memorised all of the words in an N3 vocab book and about 25% of the words in an N2 vocab book before I started N3 on Bunpro and there were still quite a lot of words used in the example sentences that I didn’t know.
Also, as you said, when I check the frequency of the words against the multiple frequency lists I have installed into Yomichan, they are often very uncommon words.
Since the main purpose of Bunpro is to study and review grammar, personally I think the words used in the sentences should not be obscure. It makes it harder to focus on the grammar and to get through reviews when it’s hard to read the sentences. That lead to me taking more mental shortcuts while reviewing like not reading the whole sentences.
Completely agree. I honestly don’t understand the reason behind some sentences. They use like N0 vocab that you won’t even come across unless you dive deep into some really obscure fields. I think the best way to teach grammar is to do just that - focus on grammar and keep vocab as simple as possible, so you don’t have to fight on two fronts: parsing the grammar and fighting a bunch of unknown vocab.
I use a search kitsun.io extension I posted which highlights a word/click and auto-creates a flashcard via the in info within Kitsun’s Jisho for anyone who finds it helpful. A good portion of my vocab in the wild list is coming from BunPro. For my recognition grammar deck, I generally pick the shortest/easiest example on BunPro to just focus on grammar points alone.
Sometimes the challenge of the sentence is not even the grammar or vocab but the context. Even the English can be confusing with a single sentence with an obscure scenario which I suppose is true for any testing condition. But yeah, the N3 sentences are not N3 vocab level.
Hah! There is a supernova explosion in N4.
I think the でできる・からできる grammar point has something about heavy metals being made from them.
I used to feel exactly the same way, but after studying kanji extensively I feel that the main problem is that they use uncommon kanji sometimes (when plain kana might be more common). They also use a few words which are very common in Japan, but not so common in learners books.
For example 騙す is in a few example sentences (from memory…) And that kanji isn’t even jlpt. Buttttt that word is sooooooo common once you’re actually in Japan/in anime. So I think perhaps a few words they may have used thinking that they were common, when they’re not so common in ‘textbooks’.
After living in Japan for awhile though, I can honestly say there is almost zero absolutely useless words in the example sentences. Just add the new ones to your anki as you go along, you’re not learning them in vain.
As you said, 騙す is a common word, but there are many words that are very uncommon, like, 20,000th+ or 40,000th+ in frequency lists across multiple domains such as novels, news, slice of life, Netflix and shounen. I don’t want to have to memorise these words just to do Bunpro. When I make flash cards for new words, I prefer them to also have audio and I want to add words I encounter myself in actual immersion in native materials so I have the full context of how the word was used and it’s easier to remember them. I’m also prioritizing learning higher frequency words from the domains I am more interested in first. I don’t want to use Bunpro for learning new words. It would probably be better for them to choose sentences with more common words to make it as easy to focus on the grammar as possible so that people aren’t fighting on two fronts as someone else said.
There are no official JLPT vocabulary lists, so I’m not surprised bunpro isn’t randomly making the same guesses that study guide authors make… even the tests themselves sometimes include words that they feel like they have to explain (in Japanese, of course).
IMHO the difficulty level of the example sentences is fine. It’s nothing compared to the native content people are starting to consume around N3. They’re all very neat example sentences using proper grammar, with the words mostly in textbook order, no slang, no concepts that are difficult to understand due to cultural differences, furigana everywhere, and so on…
騙す as a word is common, the kanji is not, the kanji is not even 常用漢字。The part on the right is not a shape that exists anymore in jouyou kanji, they were changed to the shape that you see in 編。hence why both of them still read as へん、as the onyomi, but are actually different. Typically the JLPT will (should) never include any kanji that is not 常用
Edit - My initial point was about the kanji, sorry if that was unclear. While you are correct that many words may be 20,000th plus, my point was that, that particular kanji would be even higher than that. Is that app you have checking the word frequency? or the kanji. I would assume the word, because you should never see that kanji in a Japanese newspaper.
Not disputing this at all. I also felt this way when I first started using the site. Some vocabulary was a mega cockblock, so to speak.
I think you want to be reading above your level anyways as a healthy exercise, I actually think it would a disservice to make the readings too easy and a major reason why I keep returning to BP (it not just about the grammar or build exp points). My understanding, the team is extracting native content and translating to English so everything here is fair game, especially outside 常用漢字 kanji which happens all the time anyways. Same reason why I dropped NHK easy and now read regular news (yes, more fun to have an easy read but alot less growth).
I recall being a bit slow on N3 but I honestly can’t find any example sentence that are unfair now, they are just longer but now feel much easier now (perhaps some growth, hooray). There is definitely a jump from N3 to N2 IMO though, they took liberties to make the sentences even longer and they are pulling from more literary work or official settings. It’s especially an extra challenge along with similar grammar points floating around which is definitely a source of frustration I had…but I’m sticking with it and I had recently mentioned I need outside grammar study to get a leg up here in context of extra challenges like difficult sentences.
I think it’s the frequency of the word using the kanji, or just the word, not the kanji by itself. I guess there are two ways of looking at how common a kanji is. You can say a kanji is uncommon in the sense that it isn’t used in many words. However, if a kanji is only used in one word, but that word is an extremely common word, would you say that kanji is common or uncommon? As far as I know 騙す is usually written in kanji and it’s a pretty common word. (Edit: I just remembered you said it’s not used in news, but I always saw it written in kanji in media subtitles/light novels and the Jisho article doesn’t say it’s usually written in hiragana so that’s why I said that)
The 常用漢字 list seems not that useful because some of those kanji I have never seen come up, but there are other kanji that are not in the list that are used in common words so. 
Personally, I just learned every vocab in kanji from the beginning so I didn’t even know this was a rare kanji when I learned this word. 
It’s good to practise reading a little above your level, but when it comes to SRS review systems there is a reason people make their flash cards i+1. It’s the most efficient way to learn new things. If you’re making sentence flashcards to learn new vocab, would it make sense to use i+4 sentences that also contain 3 other unknown words in addition to the one you’re trying to learn because you should “read above your level”? No, I don’t think so. When you’re reviewing that flashcard, you’re trying to remember one new word. That’s the purpose of the flashcard.
In my opinion, Bunpro is an SRS for grammar points and my goal is to remember and understand the new grammar points by using Bunpro. If it adopted your philosophy and made the N3 sentences above the N3 level, that would be mentally the same as me trying to review all my vocabulary flashcards using i+>1 sentence cards where I had to look up other words in the example sentences during each flashcard review. In my opinion that isn’t fun or efficient, I’ll read above my level when I’m actually doing reading immersion.
I don’t really think Bunpro can win this game… to make universally OKish sentences.
For one, we all have different vocabulary and we all probably started to use Bunpro at slightly different stages in our Japanese learning journey. We all probably enjoy different things in Japanese too…
Initially when I started to study I basically used りんご (apple) in nearly every new grammar sentence that I could and that was not fun 
…
If similar grammar points had similar vocab it would be really confusing (towards N2/N1)… I really appreciate the different sentences and vocab used on Bunpro.
We all probably study Japanese differently and our study pace too… Eg My grammar has always been way above my kanji / vocabulary knowledge.
Like I said in the post above… I do agree that Bunpro’s sentences can be somewhat frustrating from time to time hehe… Towards N2/N1, self-study, reading and being exposed to different media become really important … which I guess explains the different vocabulary used on Bunpro too.
Thankfully, the website has evolved and changed a lot for the better and it will continue to evolve and give us ways to mitigate the “frustrations” … Everything is translated, All grammar points have extra reading section for more exposure, we can also add our own sentences to the grammar points too.
It’s not true one has to have mastered all the vocab in order the execute the BP grammar point correctly. Of course it would be convenient to make reviews faster but knowing the vocabulary is not the threshold I’m using (reason why I’m mining the vocab separately). Since I ghost plenty, I end up naturally picking up plenty of vocab in the process as well. If one has covered the joyo kanji spectrum and good chunk of vocab, there are opportunities for many safe assumptions as well. To echo what zerohbeat mentions, it’s really unavoidable to see new words by N2 unless one is really well read/experienced.
The likeliness of a complete simple sentence overhaul is probably nil. So we can either 1) kick and scream 2) suck it up and learn the content because it has be to learned anyways or 3) find other methods of grammar learning. Personally, I’m doing all 3. But for the most part the vocab isn’t antiquated or exotic, it all appears to be modern content. And supplement grammar study SRS has helped alot too where I can have the focus to be grammar only comprehension and a singular sentence, I recommend it and helps BP reviews too.
I never said that you have to know all the words in every sentence to master a grammar point using Bunpro.
I think there are actually quite a lot of systems Bunpro could implement to help with this problem and I have suggested many of them in the past. For example, the ability to choose to remove specific sentences from your reviews to replace them with other example sentences for a grammar point if a particular sentence has too many unknown elements for you aside from the grammar point. The ability to flag words as known or unknown during reviews and on the example sentence pages. This could allow various options like, showing furigana only for words flagged as unknown automatically, or the SRS system prioritising example sentences with less unknown words. They could add the ability to import known word lists from anki and so on, other systems have these features so they certainly aren’t impossible to implement. Obviously, they could also try to tailor vocabulary from commonly used JLPT lists to match the JLPT level of the grammar points, even if there are no official lists, or they could just generally use words that are more common across multiple frequency lists. (Or at least just not use words that are very uncommon) I think using more common words is the better option because not everyone studies for the JLPT. These are just some of the possible options though.
Anyway, I’m just suggesting that they take the frequency of the vocabulary into consideration when they make the sentences because it would make acquiring the grammar points a lot smoother. The systems I mentioned before would allow for the best of both worlds since if you don’t want to remove any sentences or flag words as known or unknown you could ignore the systems.