I just started using Wanikani and i’m not sure if I should keep using Bunpro for vocabulary.
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Hello!
In my case, I really love wanikani for teaching me kanji and many words on top of that, but vocabulary has never been the goal for wanikani. I realised there are many, many words formed entirely of kanji that I know of (thanks to wanikani) that I’ve just never seen before, which is okay, but I wanted to learn as much as possible.
I synced my bunpro account with my wanikani and I think it was the best idea. Then I just started going through the vocabulary decks, starting with N5, and I was just adding the words I didn’t know to my reviews (though not too many at a time) and starting from there. But this is when the fun started.
I noticed that in the example sentences for the words I was reviewing, if you know the kanji for a word from wanikani, it doesn’t show you the furigana for it, even if you don’t actually know the actual word.
Take 雲行き for example. I saw it in an example sentence in a review for another word. I knew 雲 and 行 from wanikani, so bunpro probably assumed I should know the word, so it didn’t show me any furigana for it. But I really didn’t know it. At the same time, knowing the kanji already made it really easy to then learn both the reading and the meaning, and I ended up knowing a new fun word.
So when I see a word like that, I take it and look it up on bunpro and then just add it to my reviews. This is really helpful because it basically points out words I should know based on the kanji I know, and it’s really amazing because it expands my vocabulary in a natural way. I already know the meaning and reading for those kanjis (or at least mostly, if you exclude the exceptions) so I can learn those new words much more easily. At the same time, I continue with the kanji over on wanikani, and then those get sent over to bunpro and I keep learning new words based on that.
For me, this was genuinely exciting, even if I found out just how much I don’t know yet. But this system really helps me expand my vocabulary and it works for me.
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I haven’t used WaniKani in a few years, so apologies if things have changed since then! From what I remember, WK’s vocab reviews focus on recognition, you see a Japanese word and recall the English meaning. That’s a great foundation, but it doesn’t fully cover two key aspects of mastering vocabulary: understanding how a word is used in context, and being able to actively recall and use it in your own sentences.
That’s where Bunpro comes in. I started Bunpro around level 20–30 of WK and reset vocab to N5. The cloze-style reviews give you multiple natural sentence examples and push you to recall the right word from context. It felt much closer to actually using Japanese.
Of course, it depends on your goals and how much time you want to spend on SRS, but if you want to go beyond recognition and build real usage skills, I’d absolutely recommend keeping Bunpro for vocab alongside WK. The two complement each other really well.
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Thank you!
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I have personally found the cloze style reviews in Bunpro to be very useful. I use both WK and self-built Anki decks, and those are great for vocabularly memorization. When I started using Bunpro for vocabularly I intended to just hit ‘mastered’ on a lot of the vocab I already knew but decided to try out reviewing them, and seeing how words are used in sentences, going from English->Japanese, has improved my understanding of vocab and the increase in reviews has helped with my understanding of grammar points. So I would recommend it.
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