There might be a spike if you fall behind on the grammar it uses, but as long as you keep learning more grammar I think you’ll be fine.
MissDagger at Bunpro is indeed me.
Well, lets see here. This will obviously be my opinion and I’m no sage, I just thought I’d put that upfront. Another thing to know is that I went to Japanese language school in Japan for a year. There I got more solid on grammar (I tried to also add it on Bunpro when it came up in my RL lessons), but the biggest thing it taught me was a fairly broad every day vocabulary. That vocabulary made reading slice of life type manga set in school environments and other everyday locales fairly easy to tackle. Doesn’t mean I don’t look up a lot, because I do.
I think you have a pretty solid path, I have a couple of suggestions, and some general advice.
KaniWani (if you doing reverse English to Japanese) works mostly well for the first 10-15 levels, then more and more synonyms starts showing up and it becomes near impossible to guess which one you’re supposed to answer with.
Bunpro is really good for N5 and N4, by N3 I started having trouble guessing which grammar point I was supposed to use because there were so many similar ones, or near similar. This is one reason I haven’t gone back to BP since I started a break in 2020. I might go back and solidify N3 through it, but I’m not entirely sure. I feel like I’ve mostly found the grammar that is mind bending and really needs extra help, the higher it goes, the more grammar is just a more polite version of X, or more like a common way to phrase things rather than pure grammar.
But I definitely highly recommend BP for N5 and N4.
I really found the graded readers helpful, and then honestly WK book clubs have done so much for me. I got most of my education on native level casual language there (dropping です and ます is barely the beginning). Because that is gonna be the biggest hinder once you hit native content. Casual language, slurring words (すげぇ is すごい for example) and dialect can really trip you up. But joining the ABBC and BBC will help. Especially ABBC that tends to have more grammar discussion. Don’t be afraid to read the previous picks and ask questions, a lot of people still watch the threads so they’ll see your post.
My final, but maybe most important, advice is to be okay with ambiguity and to not try to translate everything into natural English/your native language. I don’t know if you have experience with learning another language, but the sooner you let go of your native language as a crutch for understanding the better. It will be necessary to start, and become less and less necessary. When you start to understand the component parts of a sentence, then try to just hold those in your head and see if you understand how they fit together/the meaning of them.
I’m not sure I’m explaining this well, and I’m not sure people can do it exactly like I do. So example time.
Example with simple sentence
これはペンです。Let’s use this meme Japanese learner’s sentence.
So early on, most people will translate this: This is a pen.
The words have been rearranged to fit English word order. Is have been added, because です doesn’t technically mean is, but that is something that will maybe become clear well… a long time from now. I barely understand the grammatical stuff that makes です technically not “is”. >_>
Maybe the learner will then move on to: As for this, (it) is a pen. ( Xは is often translated as “as for X”)
Now the learner is trying to more closely match the Japanese grammar and what different particles will do.
What I suggested above, is to move on to this when possible:
これ (this) は (as for/topic particle) ペン (pen) です (is/exists)
And holding these elements in my head in this exact order, or when the sentences are complex I might reshuffle a little to be able to do it, I ask myself if I understand what the sentence means. And my brain is like: “there is pen”. And I move on.
Notice the meaning isn’t as exact as a true translation would be. I’m not trying to translate well, I’m just trying to understand, and to do it with as little English as possible. Preferably, I don’t even figure out a sentence, I just kinda see the meaning in my head if that makes sense.
Also know that depending on how complex/difficulty a sentence is, you might go from just reading a sentence with no problem to carefully diagraming out a sentence that made absolutely no sense. This is a sliding scale. After all native content freely goes from the simplest sentences to super complex ones as it sees fit. And from one sentence to the next, the complexity might radically change, and therefore your ability to understand it.
So biggest catalyst is probably the casual language I learned through reading a casual language heavy manga with a WK book club. Honestly, once you get more comfortable with casual language so you can look up those parts (because you can guess what is missing or have been slurred), native content just becomes so much more accessible because dictionaries are our friends.
I hope my ramblings are useful. xD