Struggling to make the connection between Bunpro and textbook

Hey there!

I’m nearing the end of みんなの日本語1 after restarting it, and I’ve decided to add Bunpro into the mix again after a year break; but I’m genuienly so lost. I’m going on the minna route here and every grammar point I’ve studied in the past just doesn’t make sense in my reviews. Nothing is clicking for me, hardly anything is making logical sense like I thought it would and the drastic difference between my textbook and Bunpro means I’m basically just brute force memorising the patterns in the example sentences and can’t apply them to anything else.

Especially when it comes to plain forms and extra hiragana thrown about, or using example sentences that I simply cannot understand at this level — it’s making me feel so behind, but I’m doing fine when it comes to the actual textbook.

I haven’t felt anything clicking with any of the extra resources either. I’ve tried with Tae Kim, I have A Basic Dictionary of Japanese Grammar, nothing clicks! It goes in one ear and right out of the other. But, a friend gave me their Genki 1 books and I’ve skimmed through the chapters and seen their grammar points and I’ve had so many lightbulb moments from those. It’s helped me solidify some knowledge.

What am I doing wrong? Does this style of learning just not work for me? Should I restart once again and take the regular approach rather than the minna one to see if that helps, starting from the basics?

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The grammar orderings for textbooks and other resources are actually secondary to the ‘default’, built-in BunPro ordering. Because of this, by following one of these secondary orderings right off the bat, I think I can understand why it might be seeming disconnected and difficult. But first, let me say something about the default, built-in BunPro ordering:

While the BunPro ordering for grammar points ostensibly is ordered just by the JLPT levels (starting from the easiest N5 to the most difficult N1), the BunPro ordering is much more intricate than that ‘rough’ ordering. The grammar points are generally, more-or-less ordered in such a way that they build upon previous grammar points – well, the first few grammar points are stand-alone, though.

So, if one were to follow the BunPro order – e.g. by going to Settings > General > New Grammar > JLPT Study Level, and selecting “JLPT5”, and then using the Study button or clicking on “New JLPT5 Grammar” on the dashboard page – one would start with the simplest grammar points, だ, です, は, も, etc. The complete BunPro ordering of all of the grammar points can be explored under Content > Lessons (BunPro Grammar Order) at the top of the dashboard.

In this way, BunPro tries to make every lesson build upon previous lessons.

But, if a particular textbook uses an order that starts off with grammar points from somewhere in the middle of BunPro’s ordering, then (for example), some of the example sentences will use grammar points you’ve never seen before.

Even more striking is that, especially later on, you will be expected to do things like conjugating verbs within your answer, using conjugations that you may not have learned yet, if you’ve jumped ahead too far out of the BunPro ordering. So, not only will you be trying to read sentences with grammar you don’t know yet, but you also might be trying to answer an answer that requires you to use grammar you haven’t learned yet.

So, I suspect this is probably the main source of the ‘disconnection’ you’re feeling.

Now, in an ideal world, BunPro might somehow be able to accommodate all of the various textbook orderings perfectly, so that it never uses any grammar you haven’t already covered. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that ideal world, and the only thing that using a textbook’s ordering does at this point is to simply provide the BunPro grammar points in the same order that those same grammar points are covered in the textbook – but at the cost of being in a ‘mixed up’ order with respect to the default BunPro order.

So, I have two main suggestions, and a follow-up suggestion:

  1. Start yourself off in BunPro, for at least a few lessons, by following the default BunPro ordering – and then later switch to your chosen textbook’s ordering, once you’ve got the BunPro basics under your belt. This will at least give you a kind of ‘foundation’ of grammar points you’ve learned to get a better feeling of how things are ‘connected’ in BunPro . When you start following your textbook’s ordering, things ought to flow more smoothly and be more ‘connected’.
  2. Alternatively, if you’d prefer to strictly follow your textbook’s ordering, then I’d suggest trying to follow your textbook’s lead more closely, and only think of BunPro as a mere ‘tool’ which is assisting you by at least providing a system for you to start practicing your textbook’s lessons in addition to what exercises the textbook already provides. In other words, if you find grammar in BunPro you haven’t seen before, just think to yourself, “Ah, that’s just a quirk of BunPro. I don’t need to worry about that stuff yet. I’ll just stay focused on the specific lesson my textbook is trying to teach.”

[Note: In truth, with BunPro you can technically do the grammar points in any ordering you want. In particular, if there’s a grammar point that’s causing you confusion because you haven’t learned it yet, you can look up that grammar point using the Content > Grammar (All BunPro Grammar & Search) menu option, and add it to your reviews. That way, at least you’ll be able to answer the textbook’s grammar points again.]

Followup suggestion:
By all means, if it is painful or troubling to use BunPro for any reason, I do recommend submitting feedback, either on the Feedback - Suggested Improvements/Feature Request and Feedback - Bug Reports threads, or via the various reporting features, such as the Report button or the Ask a Question button at the bottom of grammar point pages, or the +Report button on each review sentence (after answering).

The BunPro team are quite good about responding to feedback and bug reports. They may not be able to solve all problems immediately, but they will at least read and listen and make plans to improve your overall experience of using the site over time. For example, if you discover that you’ve come up with a suggestion to improve how BunPro could work better for people who start off by using a textbook ordering, I’m sure they’d love to get some feedback about that so they can improve BunPro for those folks.

Anyway, hope this helps a bit. Good luck! Oh, and just keep at it. I also found learning grammar frustrating and ‘disconnected’ at the beginning, and for the first while. But over time, keeping practicing, things start to make more and more sense, you also start to get a better feel of how BunPro works and how to make it work for you better, and the frustration will (eventually! :sweat_smile:) fade away!

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Thank you so incredibly much for such a detailed and long response, I really appreciate it!

You’ve pretty much touched on everything I needed, I’ll definitely follow your suggestions and see if that works for me any better. Many thanks again!

4 Likes

Just wanted to follow up on the very detailed and accurate explanation from @wct . Unfortunately at this time, with the Bunpro path being the most ideal one for learning one step at a time without ever seeing things that you have not previously been exposed to, some of the textbook paths do suffer quite a bit in terms of showing sentences which may be slightly out of sync with your overall knowledge.

Writing sentences for the textbook paths that never use any grammar that you have not been exposed to yet is something that we really want to improve at Bunpro in the near future! Until that time (hopefully not too far away!) all of the advice offered by @wct here is A+!

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I second everything said here! When I first started Bunpro I chose the Tae Kim route because I had read some of his guide. But I quickly realized that new grammar points were assuming others that I hadn’t covered yet. So glad I switched to Bunpro order, it does such a great job of covering everything in a logical order :slight_smile:

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