I have a tendency to just speed answer my reviews. What happens is i miss a lot of brain programming on the context and usage of the terms. Any tricks out there that you’ve used to force yourself to read the sentences?
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I don’t have any tricks in particular, but I do definitely make a conscious choice to properly read (or not read) the sentences. If I am busy on a given day, I just speed through them (only reading the sentence if I need the extra nuance). If I have extra time, I will make sure to read everything. When I do that, I read it all, look up any unknown words, and then try to come up with my own translation before checking the answer.
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I struggle with it, but it helped me a lot to do the reading mode 
I did the reading mode for all the grammar first and then the Cloze fill-in. I find that it’s much easier to read the entire sentence before filling in because my reading is decent.
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If I see furigana, I will want to read the sentence just to get the first rep of a new word. After seeing it once, I manually turn it off for that specific word only. If I don’t see furigana, that means I at least have seen every word and their readings, so the sentence should be easier to approach.
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After encountering and participating in this thread I made the decision to switch to a nuance-first approach to my hints, without the translation by default. Similar to @lunchbox1, when I’m doing my reviews and I’m busy, then I’ll go ahead and reveal the translation and the hint/sentence translation to speed things up. This is usually what I do during the workday.
Once I’m home from work, I usually have the extra time, so then I will try and read through the sentences and hints in Japanese before making my mental guess. Since I’m still early in my journey and can’t always decipher the text, I will then reveal the nuance translation first, and if necessary, the hint/sentence translation to make sure I’m answering the question that I think I am.
Right now I’m trying to maintain quantity of reviews, so reading the sentences themselves is secondary to me while I build the foundation of knowledge. I still have another 500 vocab items to complete N5 on Bunpro, so most of the things I see in the sentences are new to me and slow down my reviews a LOT.
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I also did this after reading that thread, and it has greatly helped my actually read the sentence. Granted, I’m the opposite on the new cards though. I’m currently very rarely adding new items and only really doing reviews due to working overtime. So my review count has become less than 20 for Bunpro per day. That did make it a good time to try and get myself to slow down and actually read the sentences though. I also do the same thing as the previous person when I don’t have time and just click for more hints until I’ve figured it out (or not).
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This works well for me
Basically repeat it until you can say it with the same speed and intonation as a native. That gives a lot of benefits.
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Thanks everyone for the great tips. Let me fiddle with the settings as well as my brain to see what I can do.
If you find a good settings setup for this, please let me know! I have the same problem.
I’ll be testing setting reviews to nuance first.
For decks which have terms that are all Expert and Mastered, I’ll switch it to reading mode.
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I just put some rabbit food on each word, then nibble away 
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It definitely helped me when I reduced the volume. I was gunning hard for N2 at last year’s JLPT and needed to cram a lot of vocab so didn’t really have the time. Now that that’s out of the way (and I decided to wait for next year to try for N1) I’ve been able to reduce the volume and make a point of reading the sentences.
Side note: I found when taking the N2 this past year that my reading speed was too low, so that added incentive. Even though sometimes it feels like a hassle (especially when the sentence is really long with a lot of vocab I’m not familiar with), I just adopted the mentality that “slog through it, your speed/fluency will improve, and eventually it will become easier”. That seems to be paying off.
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im not sure there are any tricks, but just force yourself to slow down and understand each part of the sentence.
As somebody else said, it depends how busy I am during the particular review session. But my number one “trick” is that I hate being ignorant of anything. So I force myself to read it and attempt to translate it (as somebody else said: translations off by default). My entire reason for doing Bunpro and WaniKani is to be able to read and speak Japanese fluently. Attempting to read now is the only way to get there. If I can’t read a few sentences a day… how will I ever reach that goal???
If I am not in a super rush, I do the following too:
- Read it out loud, slowly, then repeat several times until I can do what I feel like is native speed (or close to it), even if I’m cheating via short term memorization
- Listen to the audio several times (spliced between the readings above)
- Paste the entire sentence into an LLM for a full grammatical breakdown and translation (even if I think I understand 95% of the sentence, there is still value here. This is difficult in the Android app since there is no way to copy from the review screen (I have to jump to the lesson and find the sentence there… my feature request has gone long ignored).
Remember that education does not come from scores. I have two different engineering degrees, and in both I noticed there is a massive difference between getting a 4.0 GPA and mastering the material (and weaker students never understood this distinction). My Bunpro score or level does not make me feel good. What makes me feel good is when I encounter a sentence that I can quickly read and interpret on the first attempt. If I wanted to speed through reviews and cared only about filling in blanks correctly and getting high scores, I’d still be using Duolingo.
What also makes me feel good is when I get a new kanji/vocab on WaniKani and realize I already know it because I’ve seen it on Bunpro so many times. This happened pretty recently with 忙しい. Or even when I take a new Bunpro lesson and realize I already know that point from pasting sentences from other lessons into the LLM (i.e. because a review sentence for a N4 point might have some N3 points embedded in other parts of the sentence).
What makes me feel bad is when I encounter a sentence that I recognize 0% of. Bonus bad points if it’s hard to even read out loud because it feels like a tongue twister. Sometimes if I’m doing my reviews late at night and am chemically enhanced impaired I embark on a weird side quest to master one of those irritating sentences. The most recent one that comes to mind is:
I absolutely loved the way the audio sounded, it almost sounds like a song, it rolls off the (skilled) speaker’s tongue so smoothly. But I struggled so hard to say it. So I no joke spent like 30 minutes just repeating the sentence over and over. And then the next day when driving to work I was doing it again. It’s been like 2 months since that happened, but I can still spit this sentence out at alarming speed. And when I meet Japanese friends of my Japanese partner, I like to show off with that sentence before revealing how poor my actual real conversation skills are. 
Most of all, remember that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. As somebody else said: reduce your volume. Don’t commit to insane goals. I started my entire journey in June 2025 and stupidly thought I’d be passing N3 in December 2025. I failed N4 instead. Hopefully this year I will ace it. I’d rather pass N4 with ease and a near perfect score than pass N3 with confusion and barely scrape by.
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