Finishing N1 grammar and learning 6000 words I see as the final deadline to start immersing. I might immerse after certain milestones, such as completing N5, N4 and so on. At appropriate levels.
That sounds like doing things in the wrong order.
The best method I’ve used for building a larger vocabulary is actually reading and watching / listening to native Japanese material. Much easier to stay in my memory if I can connect it to a piece of media I’ve consumed, rather than only some vocab card on an SRS app (but I still use Bunpro and Wanikani). And if you immerse in Japanese everyday it essentially becomes like an SRS, but actually enjoyable.
Your method kind of seems like the equivalent of learning how to become a proficient swimmer, before entering the water.
You’ll probably learn much faster if you put yourself in the environment you’re training to be in, as soon as possible.
4 Likes
Can I do it like this:
- Do the daily load of Anki cards from Core 2k/6k.
- Do the daily dose of grammar on Bunpro.
- Sentence mine unknown vocabulary.
1 Like
That’s a doable way to go about it. I started reading simpler manga with N5 grammar and a few hundred words vocabulary and novels with N4 grammar and a thousand or two or so vocabulary, it wasn’t easy but you get better by doing.
You don’t need to plan your entire journey yet, I just winged it as I went by trying things out. Shoujo romance manga or slice of life anime are usually somewhat on the lower difficulty spectrum. You’ll probaby get caught off guard by colloqiual slang that you haven’t studied, but that’s one way to learn it.
Definitely start immersing sooner rather than later. Just need to adjust the difficulty here and there and hope to understand some of it, then most of it, and no need to worry if there is something you don’t understand in the beginning. Just keep going if you can’t figure it out yet, you’ll probably get to it eventually.
One of the most crucial thing with immersion is that it actually helps reduce your review workload because you actually reinforce what you’ve studied so you won’t forget it so easily. Reviews will be easier and faster the more you’ve immersed and come across a word.
Let’s say that I’ll start mining soon. What if I will find a word I don’t know, but the Core 2k/6k contains it but later in the pile of cards?
As for the words that the deck does not have, I assume I just put them in my mining deck. I already came across 笹 that the Core 2k/6k had only in a sentence.
You can reposition a card so its on the top of the pile if you want to prioritize it immediately, I have 14k *new mined cards I’ve yet to go through that sadly grows faster than I can work through it. My strategy here is to simply just read and if I try to mine a card I’ve already mined I put it on top of the pile and assume the most common words will be on top of the pile most of the time, though I don’t know how the kaishi1.6k or 2k/6k decks are ordered in terms of difficulty, you may as well just do nothing and wait until it arrives eventually unless it’s a word you keep seeing and forgetting in which case you should prioritize it to save lookup time.
If a word already in the starter deck you’re using you don’t need to mine it again of course. If it’s only in a sentence but not a word you’re being tested on, mine it.
Right now I am using both. It can be more work if you are not careful.
I am using Bunpro to learn grammar and vocabulary and it fits very nicely with so many example sentences where I can practice both points. 5 new vocabulary entries every day.
I am using Anki mainly for learning kanji with 3 new entires every day. At some point both apps end up overlapping some entries but it ends up working nicely. I use it as a reinforcement.
I struggle with some kanji even if I already understood the word so this way I feel like I am progressing more.
1 Like
Honestly, do what works for you, but the sooner that you expose yourself to the language in its natural settings, the better.
You don’t have to wait til you reach a certain level for it. You can use things like the graded readers supplied through Bunpro or the thousands of YouTube videos aimed at beginners.
You wont understand a chunk of whatever you are using as that comes with time and experience but I promise you it will help cement the learning.
For example, you learn a new grammar rule - look it up on immersion kit and listen to clips that come up, you can then get a vibe for how this rule actually works in the real world. Then look on YouTube for videos that also include this or similar level grammar.
Im not a “just immerse bro” person, but you need to have a balance between input, output, immersion and vocab accrual. It’s all well and good knowing thousands of words but not knowing how they work in the real world will only demoralise you later down the line. There are tons on colloquial phrases such as “pull a cold” that if you learn words in silo you’ll never learn the real phrases.
As @FubuMiOkaKoro just mentioned, your method is like reading how to swim, mastering it to Olympic level, yet never even doing a length.
Im not telling you that you are wrong, if your way works for you then great but I think you can immerse a little more than you think you can, don’t doubt yourself! 
1 Like
The big differences are:
in bunpro you type in the answers,
the examples sentences are more confusing,
there are many examples of different meanings of each word- instead of just the one.
I now recomend “complete Japanese course based on Tae Kim’s Guide” anki deck
Genki, classes and kanji Damage were very useful to me runners up.
My fav resource was jalup [anki deck]- now nihongo lessons (iOS app)
I tried Anki, Kanshudo, Lingo deer, duolingo, wankikani, kanjidamage, Classes, Genki, and bunpro.
I’m open to “being wrong” but I don’t understand how what you say differs from what I’ve said. I realize Bunpro doesn’t replace immersion, however both are Anki and Bunpro are SRS systems and that’s what helps with memorizing. If I have an easier time memorizing things with context rather than in isolation, what is exactly wrong about it?
At least for me, my Anki → Bunpro pipeline is speeding things up quite a bit now after a week. Let’s see how it works out in the longer run.
… How is Anki isolated? Kaishi has example sentences, that is not isolated.
Especially later on when you make your own sentence cards you learn the vocab from YOUR OWN CONTEXT when YOU YOURSELF come across the vocab.
I’m just very confused by what you are saying.
Also only very very very few people are able to maintain 20 new news without burning out and having good retention rate so I’d really suggest you only do 10 news a day.
Honestly the work done to make Bunpro’s vocabulary so comprehensive is impressive but it’s just such an inefficient way to learn. For grammar, deep diving each point and using cloze questions to hammer it in works perfectly but there’s just so much vocab out there I feel like you need a broader strategy.
There are great preset Anki decks out there you can brute force your way through with recognition and then come to learn the nuance from context through actual immersion, which is a way more natural approach than textbook learning.
Many others have also pointed out the customization with Anki and, with a proper set up, mining is really so easy. I’ll recommend mining strategies for listening and reading below:
Reading: Yomichan is an absolute must have, it allows you to automatically translate words and kanji in your browser with your cursor. Instructions can be found here Yomichan Setup Tutorial - TheMoeWay. Using this you can find ebooks (legally or otherwise) and upload them to this online reader Book Manager | ッツ Ebook Reader where you can read and translate with yomichan. The best part? Whenever the dictionary pop up opens you can send that word directly to anki to create a card automatically with the context sentence included. You can also do this for visual novels and include images if you follow the tutorial on TheMoeWay.
Listening: If you find a podcast or TV show you like, listen along with subtitles and download the Takoboto dictionary app https://takoboto.jp/ on your phone. Keep this app open and use the “send to anki” function to automatically populate a deck with the words you hear that you don’t know.
I promise this will make your life so much easier and reduce the SRS hell for you, hope this helps.
Both is always a good answer, but I have some recommendations for using anki as well.
If you have the android app for anki, you can use the “whiteboard mode” with some sort of kanji deck to memorise writing kanji as well as just doing some vocab. I don’t know if this is just me, but I imagine other people who use this method would agree, that learning to write kanji helps tremendously when learning vocabulary. I find that the vocabulary sticks in my head much better, and definitely recommend this route, although it takes a bit more effort!
Also, when using anki, you should mix pure vocab with some “sentence” decks to see how words are used in context. There are plenty on the shared decks page, so you can pick sentences that match your level. I got this idea from using the “Kim’s Korean Grammar” “…/Sentences” decks from anki for studying korean.
But the best way to learn things is to learn it from several angles simultaneously!
2 Likes
I go through Bunpro’s vocab deck starting from N5. There’s a lot of words I already know which makes it quite a breeze.
As I’m reading manga though, there’ll be a lot of casual words I don’t know so I search them up using Bunpro’s search. You can add your own context sentences, so I’ll usually type in the sentence that was in the manga. Then add to reviews. I feel this way makes learning more motivating when you know the vocab is actually useful now.
1 Like
I agree with all the Anki proselytizers above me, with a few things to add.
First, re:context – if you mine unknown words you find via immersion, even if the card itself has just the word and nothing else, seeing that word multiple times in context during immersion does most of the heavy lifting of inductive learning. In other words, if textbook study is only one component of your learning rather than the totality, your learning materials don’t have to be as detailed. Book study just preps you to internalize more fully natural language in immersion.
My own process of figuring out which words to mine/how to schedule is somewhat laborious but works for me. I mine pretty much everything, and when I see a word that I’ve already mined I move it forward in scheduling by increments. This way, I usually have seen a word 3-4 already in immersion before I ever try to consolidate that information in Anki.
Also, one more tool similar to ッツ reader for ebooks mentioned earlier, is Mokuro reader which allows you to read properly formatted manga with yomitan lookup compatiblity. See the resources section of TheMoeWay guide mentioned earlier for more details.
A little bit off topic, but since everyone in this thread is sharing mining+study strategy, I thought I’d share too.
Yup thats how I use it too. I only use Anki on my phone and the cards are all set up for phone use only. On all my cards, on the top there is a space to write my answer. I used to use just my finger to scribble on my phone before and got an S23 Ultra just for the stylus so that its a bit closer to actually “writing”.
A while ago I would have said Anki, but I’m currently reading Paul Nation’s guide and now my current understanding is that perhaps Bunpro would be better than Anki due to some minor differences between the SRS on Bunpro and the SRS in Anki. If you really wanted to use Anki than I would recommend installing some extensions.
1 Like
I use both, It takes too much time but none is perfect to me so I am kind of stuck in this.
I like anki for the SRS, having my cards customised (audio/images, whatever I want…).
I like bunpro for the variety in the sentences and that it exposes you to nuances or different meanings all the time, it is unpredictable which I think is excellent for memorisation.
I have an issue with the difficulty in bunpro’s example sentences though.
While I like the difficulty in bunpro grammar, I’d prefer to feel confortable doing vocab reviews and find myself often struggling with them
1 Like
What extensions do you recommend me?
Something that can retire cards after a certain level, similar to how Bunpro graduates cards to “Mastered” after enough reviews.