Trouble with accuracy on grammar

Bunpro
#1

I have been having some trouble with my accuracy (69% N5 and 62% N4) and I cannot seem to improve at all. I have been using Bunpro for about 250 days doing all of my reviews twice a day and I just cant seem to grasp certain concepts. I even tried not adding any new lessons for about a month and a half now and my accuracy has not changed at all. I know part of my problem is that I am not even good at english grammar, but I feel like I should have at least been able to memorize some of these concepts by now. I also read Satori Reader every day and I can usually pickup the meanings through reading, but I am not able to recall them in a fill in the bland situation.

Is there anything else I could be doing in order to improve my retention?

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#2

I have been having some trouble with my accuracy (69% N5 and 62% N4) and I cannot seem to improve at all. I have been using Bunpro for about 250 days doing all of my reviews twice a day and I just cant seem to grasp certain concepts.

Honestly, there’s a lot on N4 and N5 that’s actually hard. Te-form, keigo, etc. You say you’ve been using the site for under a year. Can I assume that you’ve been studying Japanese for less than a thousand hours? Because an accuracy rating of 60-70% doesn’t seem too bad. Some things take time. You say you do Satori reader too, so I assume you don’t struggle a lot with understanding the sentences here.

What does your troubled grammar page looks like? What are your “leeches”?

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#3

This might be a little controversial to say, but have you tried outputting at all? I know there are lots of arguments for and against it depending on the reasons a person is learning Japanese, but I personally find a grammar point sticks better if I do a couple of drills and/or write some sentences using it right when I first learn it.

For example, for the ~ておく construction, I wrote five extremely simple sentences about things I was doing in preparation for other things. お姉さんが来るから、食料品を買っておきます。Since I’m using the Genki textbooks, I’ll also use the drills at the end of the chapter, even though a lot of them are for “pair work” or classroom settings, and do the worksheets from the workbook, too.

I don’t add the grammar points to bunpro’s SRS until I’ve already done all of this “homework,” so I generally feel pretty comfortable with the grammar point before it gets added. In that way, I’m using bunpro more as a review tool than a teaching tool, which is what I really bought a subscription for–to help keep me sharp and force to me review all of my known grammar points at regular intervals, even if I don’t see them in any native material for a little while.

I have gone back and learned all of the grammar points bunpro identifies as N5 that aren’t in Genki from bunpro alone, though, and plan to do the same thing when I eventually finish Genki II. When I learn a new grammar point just from bunpro, I still write some sentences with it. I really do think it helps. My accuracy is 95.7% for N5 and 87.35% for N4.

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#4

70% is that bad.
But you could always just take the time to make a custom cram for the ones you are struggling with, but that runs the chance of instead of learning the point just accidentally memorizing the answers for sentences.
But if you can read, and comprehend then the percentage doesn’t matter that much. So what if you can’t input the correct answer all the time, if you understand you understand. I don’t think refusing yourself more grammar points due to something arbitrary as a % is really a good answer.

At the end of the day, doing bunpro reviews makes you good at doing bunpro reviews. Using the language is what makes you good at the language. So I really think you are just letting this little road block seem bigger then it is. Because you can’t move forward while standing still

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#5

If I had to guess I would say around 4-500 hours studied at this point. I have added my current ghosts below. For the most part I do not have trouble with understanding sentences unless I just haven’t seen a word in it before.

I did not think I was doing that bad until I saw that the global averages are 85% for N5 and 78% for N4

Ghost Stage 1
N4 | みたいに・みたいな | Like, Similar to, Resembling
N4 | と | if・when, whenever, and, [conditional]
N4 | ようだ | it seems that, it appears that, it looks like

Ghost Stage 2
N4 | ～代 | Teens, Twenties, Thirties, 1910s, 20s/30s
N4 | ていただけませんか | Won’t you, Could you please (humble request)

Ghost Stage 3
N4 | んだけど・んですが | But…, And…

Ghost Stage 4
N4 | ～のだろうか | I wonder…
N4 | Verb［せる・させる］ | To make/let/have (somebody do something)
N4 | そんなに | so (much), that much, like that
N5 | けれども | But, Although
N4 | ているところだ | in the process of doing ~ right now/at this moment
N4 | ておく | to do something in advance
N4 | もし | If [for emphasis]

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#6

That looks very normal. It’s part of learning things, you’re supposed to get things wrong. If I have fewer than 20 ghosts at a certain time I feel things are ok because I’m not doing an overwhelming number of reviews every day. I’d ignore the global averages. A lot of people here are using bunpro to learn, but also a lot are using this just to review what they study elsewhere.

If anything, If I’m getting more than 80% right I feel I’m not challenging myself enough. It’s pretty good that you’re doing reading practice on the side. If you’re unhappy with your accuracy you can just slowdown here and do more in-depth practice for each point you’re failing regularly.

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#7

Those look like the usual suspects when it comes to the n4 difficulty spike. Don’t feel bad everybody struggles with those things.

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