How long should it take for the reviews hell to begin? A week ago Anki used to take 5 minutes at most and now it already takes 16-17 minutes after a few days. I don’t know how much time I spend on Bunpro, because I do not know where to look for time spent, for I don’t use it on my phone, but on my computer.
In a week I will make a post about how much time both take a day by then. I suppose Anki will take 20-25 minutes a day by then.
Are you new to studying Japanese?
Two years ago I had a streak of learning Japanese for a year and a half. Then I replaced it with German.
Lately I have got back into it, because I have realized I have good potential for learning languages. I also have more time now due to being homeschooled.
Last time I reached high N4 I think.
It gets harder as the different SRS stages start compounding so if you feel like it suddenly starts to feel overwhelming you can stop adding new things for a while until you feel like it’s under control.
Consider that there are 12 SRS stages and in the beginning you’re touching maybe 4-6 of them. After a week or two, it will go up one, then after a few more then it will go up one, then after a few more it will go up one, then after some months it will go up one, then some more months it will go up one. All this time you may have gotten X % wrong and your review load has tripled. If you can recall all of them and are willing to put in the time then this is mostly fine, but if you don’t recall enough it will start piling up from misses and suddenly your review load is quadruple what you wanted it to be and people then tend to get very frustrated.
Once you start reviewing N3 grammar I would probably slow down, but if you really don’t want to then it should be possible to reset the N3 grammar deck only if you regret going too fast. If it goes well then happy reading I guess, but you will be doing an absurd amount of grammar review per day and I’m not sure if that’s a good idea when you could be reading native content at that point.
How many hours of Japanese study per day can you sustain? Not hard to reach the 4 hour per day mark at your current pace.
Two weeks at best before it’s too much.
Yeah it’s easy. At the start, at least.
You mentioned you also have previous experience already learning Japanese, so you’re likely going over material you already know, basically as a refresher, so I can imagine that will also be pretty simple to grasp.
You’ll start running into problems if you consistently learn new, difficult content while maintaining these numbers. It really only takes a couple days of grammar points that really stump you to completely throw off your numbers if you’re not careful.
As long as you’re still managing your numbers and your study time isn’t eating into your free time too much, feel free to keep working at this pace. Be aware that once you reach content that you struggle with, you may slow down or completely stop being able to take in new material until you manage to comprehend what’s already on your plate.
Remember that you don’t want to be spending 2-4 hours a day “traditionally studying”. 30 minutes to an hour of book study is around what I recommend generally, followed by as much good immersion as you can manage in that day (reading Japanese literature like manga, ln, actual books, watching shows/anime [NO EN SUBTITLES], playing games/vns in Japanese, speaking to Japanese people/listening practice, etc.) without interfering with your day-to-day life.
SRS is a good tool for introducing concepts and vocabulary, but the best way to learn something is to encounter it “in the wild” while immersing after doing a preliminary study, as it’ll be fresh in your mind.
Be careful with your learning, remember that it’s a lifestyle choice and not a race. If you notice things are slowing down, decrease your numbers for new content and focus on what you’re learning now to have a good foundation of knowledge for the future.
What if I don’t mind Japanese studies eating my free time, because my free time is the Japanese studies.
The idea is balance. I don’t know how old you are or what your life situation is but you mentioned you’re being homeschooled, so you’re still in education of some kind.
There’s a difference between “setting aside time to learn Japanese” and “Japanese interfering with daily activities”. What that difference is for you will be up to you to find out, but remember that rest is equally as important for allowing new knowledge to solidify.
Learning a new language is incredibly fun, especially in the beginning stages, but this can be a double edged sword. It might be great to use up all your free time learning because it’s entertaining and actually works to relieve stress, but passion is fleeting and eventually you will have to rely instead on habit, which is a lot less fun comparatively. If you’ve made the mistake of devoting all your free time to Japanese, now you run into the issue of having no proper leisure time, which will make retention more difficult and contribute more stress and could lead to burnout.
Along with that, it’s important to maintain other aspects of your life while you’re still young. Don’t neglect other studies, make sure to set aside time for friends/family, explore other hobbies. Once you’re out of school it becomes significantly harder to make/maintain friendships (especially nowadays), and those friendships are going to help get you through the rest of your life. Same thing with family. It’s easy to take things for granted while you still have them.
At the end of the day, you know your schedule best. All I’m suggesting is that you be cautious not to overdo things so that you can maintain the langauges you want to learn. You have already broken a streak of learning Japanese before. I’m not sure why you did, but if you want to learn the language and maintain in, you should avoid whatever made you stop the first time around.
There was a guy who did 5 grammar terms a day who wrote everything down in writing to help him remember. I followed his lead but did (3+3) grammar terms. Following this approach, it takes about an hour to do 5-6 grammar terms and the review time per day can take as much as 2 hours (assuming you read the review sentences in their entirety). Not to mention that copious cramming is required outside of normal reviews to actually remember all the grammar points when you’re doing 5+ per day. So I can easily see 10 grammar points requiring 5-6 hours daily not including cramming. When I did crams, I would do 2 lessons at a time 5x to cover the entire N#. Each pair of lessons would take around 20-30 minutes so a full N# is usually around 2 hours. I tried to limit cramming to the weekends or cram a lesson after it’s complete. Remember, you’re cramming on top of your daily work load. If you add 20 vocab on top of this, the time required for vocab can easily increase to 2-3 hours a day when it starts to snowball on you. So on a bad day, you might be looking at 9+ hours of nonstop Japanese learning.
Hey OP, I did 40 Anki words from a starter deck and 10 grammar points a day to get through N5/N4 (now I do 5 grammar points a day for N3). I think speedrunning the beginner stages like this, if you have time, is very helpful. In short time you get past the plateau of boring beginner content that you can barely comprehend. Now I can watch simple animes (with subtitles) and consume other kinds of Japanese content, and even output basic stuff, which is all very motivating. Learning and motivation are not linear and it’s better to be exposed to some concepts, even when not mastered, you’ll master them through immersion, not through Bunpro anyway. Bunpro is here to give you that first exposure and explanation.