Couple tips: check out the “decks” in bunpro. You can learn vocabulary there but much more importantly they have lessons for 関西弁 (kansai dialect). That aspect of bunpro is still in its infancy (actually, you might not be able to access it unless you opt in for beta stuff in your options or something), but the kansai ben deck is hella useful and will be even moreso if they update it or add to it in the future. There’s also an immersion mode for all of bunpro that changes all text (except the actual grammar lessons) into Japanese. very cool looking and useful if youre ready for it
Also have to recommend Nihongonomori, I don’t know if some of their content has disappeared, but their old N3 playlist is still up here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLINFE8v4DOhuc4Up1z-hGiqj51aGxVQIb
Their N3 videos were the first all-Japanese learning material I felt could understand totally at full speed, barely pausing or looking anything up. After slogging through tough textbook passages and struggling with some podcasts, it was a real breakthrough moment for me at least. Highly recommend.
As for those textbooks, I found Genki I and II to be perfectly serviceable, and Quartet I and II to be great followups with some more engaging readings. That said, the Quartet series was a little tough for me when I first started it. When I wanted something a little lighter to practice the grammar points, I found the TRY JLPT grammar books to be comparatively breezy (N3 more or less lines up with Quartet I, N2 with Quartet II).
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As someone who uses bunpro every day and is currently going through the N2 stuff on there after waiting for them to add writeup content, one of the issues with bunpro is that as you go along, the core mechanic of bunpro, filling the blank to complete a sentence, becomes more and more difficult because unlike the lower levels where there’s usually an obviously objective correct answer, the higher level grammar points become different flavors to say the same thing in a slightly different way, and so it can get frustrating trying to figure out which of the 5 different ways to say the answer is the correct one.
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Nice, that stuff sounds awesome. I will tweak my settings to take a look the beta features after i get my legs under me with Bunpro. It’s nice to know they are building those awesome features so that when I level up I will have plenty to keep me busy! Appreciate the tips!
Ahhh i got you, that was a great explanation of the N2 trickiness. I got about 2 years before I dip my toe there, so maybe they find a way to clean it up for the N2 and N1 folks.
For my learning goals if I ever sniffed N2 level I’d be playing with house money haha
It’s still usable for N2, you just have to go slower or else you’ll wind up with a bunch of reviews at once that are all saying the same thing with different grammar points as the answer. Especially if you do the lessons in order because they group similar things together.
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Oh that’s good to know. I already learned my lesson that I need to limit my reviews in Bunpro when I first tried to catch up to my Japanese progress and did a bunch today haha. Now I have a ton of reviews waiting for me since I opened the flood gates.
I am going to have to limit new bunpro lessons for the next month to clear this queue out and then try and gauge a sustainable plan of doing Lingodeer, WaniKani, and Bunpro.
They used to have a Basic/Introduction to Japanese Grammar N5~N4 playlist… It covered both N5 and N4 and was well over 40 videos, maybe even over 110 videos long. The N5 playlist I see now seems to only be 11 videos, hosted by a young woman. The two young men did funny skits, and one of the first couple of videos explained a point from near the beginning of Genki that just wouldn’t sink in until they had. (I can’t recall which grammar point it was, anymore.) Some of it was silly, but things that make me laugh stick better for me anyways.
my complaints for bunpro for N2 and N1 is not the explanation, it is mostly the reviews that dont work at all anymore with advanced grammar.
Advanced I mean that there are 4 or 5 different ways to say the same thing and nuance is always the “key” there to realize which one to use. IMO, this is not a way to learn a language properly when “nuance” is the answer to everything. I am not a guru.
I almost got crazy with so many “from my point of view” (just as an example) during reviews that I had no idea which to use. Just making parts of a sentence yellow or other color didnt help for me.
Even the creator of marumori dropped bunpro for the same problem.
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I know what you mean completely. For creating your own sentences in a situation of speech or writing then yeah I imagine bunpro isn’t too helpful, but I really appreciate it for the sake of being able to recognize these grammar points when I’m reading. In the situations you describe, bunpro will usually let you try again and give you clearer directions or explain why a certain grammar point is close but doesn’t quite fit (e.g. “not looking for ちょっとも, ぜんぜん, まったく”, “もしかして is usually used in interrogative sentences, can you use a different from?”
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