Unintuitive but personally helpful

For quite some time I was very much in the “fill in answer for grammar” crowd. However, I started doing lots of vocab just as reading exercises (I already use WK and Torii for vocab), since Bunpro has so many good and fairly well leveled example sentences.

Something I’ve found often is I get bogged down on figuring out which grammar to use. The promptings don’t quite “do it” for me. I’ve also realised that getting myself to a point where I can read and do mass native input is more important to me than being able to speak and write these grammar forms (at least for the moment).

So I ended up changing grammar to reading only. If I don’t understand any part of the sentence (even unrelated to the grammar), I pick it apart and mark it as wrong. Then around and around we go.

What I’m finding is that my overall comprehension is a lot better for doing this. I don’t get bogged down on the grammar points and I understand them a hell of a lot better/faster than I did guessing fill ins and muddling my way through the conjugation (all the input from the vocab drills is probably helping a lot too).

So if you’re feeling bogged down with grammar fill ins, and being able to read/comprehend is more your goal… you might want to try doing them as reading and grading only for a bit and see how you go. Personally, it doesn’t seem to be as unproductive as I thought it might be.

On that note, I still absolutely plan to drill the grammar with fill-ins and really make sure my spoken and written grammar gets some work. But later.

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Interesting idea. Wonder if Bunpro could implement a sort of randomizer (but not completely random), where it selects certain forms for certain sentences so that it’s a combination that you haven’t seen before. Should deepen our retention by seeing the material in different forms.

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