Which vocabulary does bunpro use?

Bunpro
#1

I am back after quite some time, I did reset my WaniKani Vocabulary integration and all other progress as well because I don’t remember anything and WK was at 500 open reviews.

Now that WaniKani is removed - what vocabulary does bunpro actually use? If I don’t add any vocabulary decs, will it teach all grammar with the most basic words?

And will there, at any point, be a full Japanese text and I have to type the whole English sentence? Or is it always just fill in the blanks?

Same question with audio, will there ever be a full Japanese spoken sentence that I have to fully translate or not?

I feel like this kind of fully translating a sentence is the only way how I will ever learn to understand Japanese. And if Bunpro doesn’t have such a feature, can you recommend me a software that does? (just reading/hearing something will not correct me if I get something wrong)

#2

I would suggest looking at the review type options and see if you like any of these. There are fill-in options, translate and grade options, and even listen and grade options. But if you’re looking for having to type out full translations, those are not an option.

The grammar is taught in English (Japanese optional, starting from N3 I think). Or do you mean the review sentences? Those are made to roughly fit the grammar level, so N5 grammar mostly uses N5 words, N3 uses mostly N5 to N3 words, etc. So if you’re not going to learn vocab in parallel, you’ll quickly find yourself not understanding the sentences anymore. But even if you’re learning the vocab decks at the same time, there will always be unknown words (just like in real-life immersion).

Bunpro doesn’t come with translation of full sentences, so if that’s what you want, you would have to look somewhere else. As far as I know, there are no “good quality” apps that do full translations, but there are a bunch that are currently being worked on. The problem is that Japanese and English don’t match 1:1, not even in the slightest. This means direct translation is not really possible, and there are like a billion ways to correctly translate the meaning into something that gives the same meaning in the other language. This makes it very hard to make a good app, but people are still working on it. Others can probably chime in with some recommendations, I was never too interested in that.

The best “app” for that at the moment would probably be a private tutor or a language exchange partner.

1 Like
#3

The example sentences roughly follow the level of the vocab/grammar you’re studying. You will come across words which you don’t know, so having strong vocab knowledge makes Bunpro a lot easier.

The reading card type lets you have a flashcard where you translate a Japanese sentence to English. But this is a flashcard and there’s no “check” in the app other than your own judgement. There’s often many ways to translate a sentence so a general comprehension is good enough.