I tried doing the Bunpro N4 vocab deck, but found the example sentences to be very difficult.
My Japanese level is around N5. I’m about to start on the first chapter of Genki 2 (starting to study for JLPT N4).
I don’t know most of the vocab in the example sentences and I suspect I won’t know any N4 grammar that shows up.
Should I be doing the N4 vocab deck right now, or should I just try to do it only in the future after mastering all of the N4 grammar?
Well, it’s up to you in the end, but I might suggest starting with the N5 deck, and order it by something like Anime, or Novels, or whatever ordering suits your interests.
With N5, presumably you’ll be prompted to learn several Vocabs that you ‘already know’. There are a few different ways to handle this:
Personally, I decided I wanted to experience the whole Bunpro Vocab experience from scratch, so I started from scratch on N5 and just zipped through them. Along the way, I did find some good words that I had not been exposed to before, especially kana-only words that happen to be quite common in written Japanese.
Then I zipped pretty quick through N4, but again picking up some useful words along the way. Finishing off N4 started to get a bit challenging (in a good way), since they were less common words, but were still N4 words.
Then I started N3, and while the first bunch of words were pretty easy because they were pretty common words, once I got about midway through N3 I ‘found my place’, and had to slow down on Vocab significantly, and start pacing myself as usual.
So, I’m currently working at finishing off N3, but I’ve also been adding a lot of extra words (N2, N1, and even some of the A decks and the E1 deck) that I just happen to run across or be interested in.
But, may main point is that starting from N5 isn’t really a bad idea, IMHO. Of course, it depends on your own judgment and goals. It’s just what I ended up doing, and I felt it was worthwhile of my time. Cheers!
Its essential to keep learning vocab alongside grammar. You will better prepare yourself for reading that way. You don’t need to be able to read the sentences to do the vocab-I literally did word to definition on core 2k/6k until finished.
I started N5 Vocab, I do enjoy but sometimes it gets tricky. But i still push through it to do it. It is also essential to learn grammar and vocab together, because it helps. Keep doing it for few weeks, you will notice.
Are we expected to be able to fully understand the example sentences when doing the vocab? That is what is putting me off right now.
I might just do what you did and just blast through the n5 vocab.
I think it’s better to study N4 vocab before studying N4 grammar (rather than vica versa)
You could do both. Every time you get to a vocab word you don’t know, add it to reviews.
So resources where you know all of the words in the example sentence are called i+1.
Bunpro isn’t i+1.
An i+1 resource rail roads you into one specific order of example sentences. There are anki vocab decks that are i+1. Try googling “i+1 japanese sentences with audio”
There is an i+1 setting on JPDB. since JPDB is not railroaded, if you haven’t learned every word in the example sentence, it gives you a translation card instead.
No. In fact, they intentionally introduce vocab from 1 level ahead in various sentences to make things interesting and to prime you for learning those words in the future, as well as just getting comfortable with encountering unknown words out in the wild.
But if you want to catch the meaning of a word in a context sentence, you can always look at the English translation.
That said, I seem to recall that the early sentences tend to be simpler and use vocab from basically the same level, and later sentences are the ones that push things further.
I don’t know most of what it meant when I started four months ago, but now I do with the help of Yomichan to find the meaning behind the words. But these words kept appearing more and more for example words like; family, friends, clerk, store, a lot, and more… The more I see it this somehow help me retain in my memory even though I haven’t learn it from N5 Vocab. But as you learn N5 Vocab you will learn these words. And sometime you will learn new words where it doesn’t even appear on Wanikani or Bunpro. It feels like I’m learning something native learners would know. This is plus and this is why I think Bunpro has a little edge on Vocabulary world.
imo when it comes to vocab reviews you shouldn’t get too hung up on whether you understand the sentence as a whole or not, but mostly just whether you understand the meaning of the highlighted word specifically - because that’s what you’re learning/reviewing.
Sometimes certain words take on a special meaning because of context and well, that can’t be helped, but those are pretty few and far between I think. So for me as long as I 100% understand the meaning of the word itself + can read it properly (after disabling the furigana) I consider it good.
The update on this is that I decided to just start with the N5 deck. Will also accept the fact that the sentences are meant to be hard.
I’m learning a few words here and there, which is somewhat useful.
But, my main problem now is too much time on reviews. Got to pace myself on this!