Strategies for non-beginners?

Bunpro
#1

hi everyone, i just found bunpro yesterday and i am very impressed.

i don’t know how common my situation is but i wanted to ask some advice. i learned japanese in college in 1988-1990 - 6 semesters in total. at that time JLPT had just appeared and was not a part of college curricula. marugoto and minna no nihongo did not exist; the department made their own textbook. also back then there was not that much technology involved in language learning and so i’ll bet that those 6 semesters are more equivalent to 3 or 4 today.

throughout my life i’ve not really used japanese and forgot a lot of stuff, but in the last year i’ve been watching a lot of youtube videos (like ken-san, fumi-san, shun-san, bite-sized japanese, easy japanese podcast, plus a lot of different grammar videos) and i think i’ve recovered quite a bit. from a grammar perspective i’m probably somewhere between N4 and N3, but vocabulary-wise i am in very bad shape. not only because i’ve forgotten so much, but the words we were given back in the day are probably all over the place in N5-N3.

for a start, i wonder if there is a way for me to just go thru all the N5 and N4 vocab and (easily) mark off the words i know, and then cram the rest? i tried cramming the N5 vocab but there’s a lot i already know so it’s very slow going; the cram tool seems to want to present all 1100 words all at once.

on the grammar front it would be nice to do something similar but i think i might have landed in a reasonable place after doing the on-boarding. there are clearly a lot of nuances to the grammar that i did learn that i don’t actually understand so it might be better to go back through some of it.

thanks for any ideas!

8 Likes
#2

Heya, welcome back to Japanese !

There is no quick way to deal with this, but as someone who got started with Bunpro already knowing a sizeable chunk of N5/N4 vocab, here is what I did. Either way, you can go through the vocab decks to check each word individually. It’s a bit long, but it’s not like you have to do it in one sitting. For each word you know, you can either :

  • set it as mastered directly, so it won’t appear in your review queue
  • add it to your reviews at a higher level (like seasoned 1), so you’ll still be able to check that you actually know it well but won’t have to go through the entire process
3 Likes
#3

thanks for the help. i appreciate it.

when i go to this page: Bunpro N4 [Vocab] | Bunpro (hopefully that is the same for you) and open one of the lessons, i can see from the drop down on the right where you can set “mastered” for each word. but how do i add a word to my review at a given level? is that on a separate screen? thanks.

#4

There’s 2 main ways of doing this. For individual items, once you add it to your reviews, you’ll see the Your Progress section on the right-hand side of the screen. Inside of it, there are 12 little pills which each represent 1 stage of the 12 Stages an item progresses through. If you wanted to set something to stage 5, for example, simply just click the 5th pill, then hit the ‘Set SRS Level’ button. This is what it should look like

{5E6A7B3C-2CD0-428F-9B3C-1E4BC5EB6864}

For doing items in bulk (let’s say you want to set a bunch to be the same level but don’t want to do the above ^ a bunch of times: Inside the Search page at the top there is a ‘Select Items’ button. Click this, then choose any amount of words you want to set a custom Stage for, then click the ‘Review Actions’ button located at the bottom of the screen (as seen in this screenshot), then select ‘Set SRS Level’. From here, just select whichever one you want, and all of the items will now be set to that level.

{034A6EB2-820E-44A6-80AE-3DDF6AEB9246}
{034A6EB2-820E-44A6-80AE-3DDF6AEB9246}1511×443 67 KB

Hope that helps! If you got any other questions large or small don’t hesitate to ask! :cowboy_hat_face:

9 Likes
#5

Your situation is definitely more common than you might think. Over years of hosting several local Japanese study groups I’ve had a lot of people come in who haven’t studied in several years. It can be hard to come back seeing how much the landscape has changed. Hope the next couple things will help out.

  1. Experiment. It can be easy to go back to one’s old habits, but new tech brings new opportunities. Explore the free options out there and invest in the ones you feel will benefit you the most. A lot of people here also use Wanikani and Migaku in conjunction with Bunpro.

  2. Go back if you need to, but don’t go too far back. I’ve seen too many people start anew after going long periods without studying. Going over basics they didn’t need to go over. That doesn’t seem to be an issue with you judging from your initial post, but something I wanted to note that I see often.

  3. Don’t do it alone. Like I said, there are many people who are in your situation. Online spaces are great, but face to face is really where you build those true connections. Everyone from high school students to retirees attend the sessions I’ve hosted, all building a connection that overall, very few westerners have.

I wish you the best in your return to studying Japanese and glad that you stumbled up Bunpro which is one of the best resources out there.

3 Likes
#6

thanks, i will go try what you’ve pointed out. i’ve only been using your software for a day or so so i’m still a little bit in the dark about everything.

thanks for the reply!

so i started this with j.io, and eventually i started seeking out transcripts of various youtube videos so that i could add words i had not seen before to an SRS review. i see that migaku is kind of an automatic version of that - pretty cool.

i’m also using wanikani because eventually i’ll be learning something there. in truth a lot of the counting irregulars i have forgotten (or maybe never learned?), so even now there’s a little to learn. but having to drill “hito” over and over again gets pretty old lol.

i have to figure out what my goal actually is. i think if i could understand NHK news or various dramas i’d be happy. of course speaking another ball of wax and yeah, i would benefit from face to face conversation there.

1 Like
#7

ah, ok, i see how to do this now. but i can’t seem to search “N5” or “N4”, so i’m not sure how to build the list of words i want to set levels for. i guess it would be nice if the search function could pick up the JLPT level tag on each word. i realize the search result might be huge and experimenting with short search strings it seems like the backend is working pretty hard when there are a lot of search matches.

1 Like
#8

My suggestion would be to test yourself on the entire vocab deck. Assuming 5 / minute, it’ll take you 3 or 4 hours, but you can do it over more than a day.

  1. Start a reveal and grade cram session
  2. Add the entire N5 vocab deck
  3. For each answer.
    a. If unknown mark it correct by pressing 2-2 (or it will come back)
    b. If known Press “2” then “f” and mark it “mastered” in the info screen
  4. Add the N5-Vocab deck to learn the remaining words normally
  5. Repeat for N5 Grammar

Another strategy would be to ignore the N5 decks entirely and only add N5 vocab / grammar as you encounter it (and are trouble by it) elsewhere. You could “confirm” this is the right method for you by passing 1 or 2 of Bunpro’s built in JLPT N5 tests.

4 Likes
#9

that’s a good point as there doesn’t seem to be a good way to bulk mark words. have to go thru them anyway so might as well test them. to be honest i’m sure there are words in N5 that i don’t know, because the “basic” words given in our ancient textbook and readers probably have quite a lot of overlap but are not the same.

1 Like
#10

Paid:Bunpro, Wanikani, Jalup/ nihongo lessons (Japanese definitions)
Free:Japanese Like A Breeze [grammar and vocab], JoMako [grammar vocab and kanji] Ankidrone [vocab] Kanjidamage [kanji]
JapaneseLikeABreeze and JoMako both use audio from anime for there example sentences - which is really cool

I also recommend doing a placement test in kanshudo. It feels more like a edutainment game from 2003 (like reader rabbit, or the JumpStart series). They aren’t “reviews”, they’re mini games. It doesn’t feel like studing, but it has as much grammar and vocab as Bunpro.

1 Like
#11

so i made an account over there and for the life of me i can’t find any placement test. the closest thing i found was a kanji test but i’m not sure it did anything to set a level. the level seems to be set manually by the user rather than through some evaluation? what did i miss?

#12

I came here to work on higher level vocab, but I did what others mentioned and went through N5, N4, and N3 vocab to just make sure I didn’t have holes and marked everything mastered if I knew it. I think there were only 11 words in N5 I didn’t know, but it does have a handful of weird ones in there, so worth doing. N4 it was probably 10%, and I’d say about half of N3, so if you’re anything like me, you probably have words even in those earlier decks you either don’t know or can’t produce on command. In my case, I only counted it as mastered if it was something I could use in everyday conversation. If I saw it and thought, “Oh yeah, that means X,” but I couldn’t have provided the word if you asked me for it, I made myself review it.

#13

yeah i definitely have this problem. my listening/reading/comprehension is way beyond speaking ability. but i think this is a pretty common problem for everyone.

i’m just going thru the N5 vocalb slowly but i think i’m probably marking things mastered that i couldn’t generate, which is a mistake.

#14

Yes, you can manually set it.

Screenshot_20260331-033524
Screenshot_20260331-033524720×1612 133 KB

https://www.kanshudo.com/wordquiz/first

You can only take the word test once a month, so take it today - last day of March. Use High Score Mode.
boost is available for grammar, vocab and kanji
Hope that helps

1 Like