Unintuitive but personally helpful

Bunpro
#1

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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#2

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.

11 Likes
#3

I’ve recently switched to this method as well. Bunpro has it set up so that ghosts are always fill in. I feel like it is much more effective in the long run, you can always change specific reviews to fill in if you prefer it too.

Reviews are a lot less painful when I am just trying to figure out what the sentence says and not how I missed a single kana that throws off the system. You just have to be stricter and honest about whether or not you understood.

2 Likes
#4

There’s something about the „reading only” solution that actually makes you improve reading overall. At the beginning i was really against this approach because I wanted to give my manual input, but like you It was annoying when I didn’t hit it correctly. Since I have switched, my reading and especially comprehension really improved. I wonder what it is really behind the reading only because I always believed that my own input is the best way to get the proper understanding. Sorry for the screed lol.

1 Like
#5

You don’t actually practice reading the grammar points when typing it in. You won’t test your ability to read the kana, you won’t see any kanji. You will fill it in, and move on. There’s no recollection happening in terms of recognition. Knowing that something is ますます and typing that in by memory isn’t helping you when you come across someone who writes 益々 and you can’t tell what it is because you’ve just typed it in and gone to next question.

In general this should still be fine given you come across the grammar often enough during immersion, but most of these don’t really appear that often so it might take too long to get used to.

I switched to reading mode after finishing the N3 grammar because I realized it didn’t make me better at output and it was worse for input. I don’t intend to use fill in ever again. I think the better way to practice output is simply just to output and either have a tutor correct it or grab a list of difficult grammar points to double check if you got them right after writing.

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#6

You’ve inspired me. I’ve been really struggling with spoken Japanese because I am not able to recall how to place grammar in a sentence and how to naturally place the words around it. I think this might also help with that.

I’m going to continue using fill-in for vocab, but do this for grammar.

1 Like
#7

I still see the value in fill in the blank type reviews, purely since for the longest time with vocab I was on the opposite side. I only ever did reviews by reading and it definitely made my reading and comprehension better, but as soon as I had to open my mouth and speak I found myself really struggling to remember the words or grammar points. I do however think that one should train both of these skills in unison since being able to identify grammar points as part of the sentence when you don’t have a prompt as to what it means can help with both reading and listening comprehension. I really wish BP would be able to implement a staggered system where review 1 is manual and review 2 is reading then review 3 goes back to manual. This would probably result in a much wider understanding of the grammar overall.

7 Likes
#8

I personally find the fill-in-the-blanks the most helpful part of Bunpro. If you read enough contents in Japanese, you’d naturally encounter these grammar points, but I have less practice producing these grammar points. I found that when speaking, I’m starting to recall more higher level grammar/vocab ever since I started doing fill-in-the-blanks. The challenge is it is a lot slower than reading type review (I can do many jpdb reviews for the time it took me to complete one Bunpro review).