How do you do flashcards?

Japanese Language Questions
1

I’m on BunPro right now and am getting none of this correct. I read the flashcard, and try as hard as I can to get that down into my hippocampus, but the next time the review comes around it’s right out the window. It’s the same thing with lessons or reviews, cannot get it down. How do you hammer it into the brain without fancy stories?

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2

The absolute best way to learn grammar is to read & listen to it, and then use it.

If you want to use bunpro, then take the lessons, and use the grammar constructs it teaches and use them, just vary the verb / noun / etc, and construct sentences in your head whenever you have 5 minutes free. Use the example sentences as bases.

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3

for some odd reason, the grammar points stick with me just fine. particles? no problem, tell it to me once and I can recall it fine. Vocabulary? You could genuinely say it in my ear over and over a thousand times and within 5 minutes I would forget it. I have no idea how to get the readings or meanings to stick in my head. It’s weird because I don’t have any trouble with WaniKani… maybe because it’s english to japanese instead of vice versa?

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4

Well… the way you normally do it is with mnemonics…

5

…
idk how i didnt think of that
i’ve been using wanikani for a month too
well this is awkward

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I am guessing you mean the flashcards for vocab, not grammar?

If yes, I had the same problem when I started with BunPro, I was following the Genki vocab+grammar decks along with going through the textbooks (vocab before the chapter in the textbook, grammar after).
I found out the hard way that learning vocab without knowing the kanji was not working for me. Not so much having mnemonics (usually they don’t work for me), but first learning the kanji then the associated vocab broken down by kanji (like here on WK) is sooo much easier :blush:
The BunPro vocab with no explanation or kanji info was just… pretty pictures :rofl:

With BunPro, I ended up switching the vocab reviews to full sentences with translation and the review type to “reveal and grade” made it easier for me. I wasn’t worried too much about getting them right, I always clicked on the “Good” button :man_facepalming:
After finishing with Genki 1+2, I took a one month break from BunPro, with the feeling that I didn’t really “learn” the vocab :frowning_face:

Two weeks ago I reset my progress and started over with their standard N5 decks, both vocab and grammar. This time around for vocab I am going with the “fill in” option for vocab, where they serve you full senteces with a blank space plus the English meaning of the vocab they want you to fill in in Japanese.
So far, I’m quite surprised of how much I actually retained from the first run, even though it did not feel like it initially. My accuracy so far for vocab is 100% and that is with a “production” type review style.
Anyway… that was a long-winded way of saying:

  1. concentrate on exposure to content, and the information will stick - or, at least, it seems to have stuck for me :man_shrugging:
  2. try switching to full sentences rather than isolated word reviews - you might recall the item reviewed by examining the context
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I genuinely just couldn’t get grammar flashcards to stick for the life of me. I’d tried Bunpro, but there’s often a gazillion ways you could say something and then it wants the one singular way, so I’d just fail every single card back to back and lose confidence to the point I’d self-doubt myself away from the correct answers. Or being confident I knew what this meant outside of SRS purposes.

In the end, I found Bunpro mostly an incredibly valuable source for the lesson pages with all the example sentences. Studying those and reading all of it out loud, and then immersing because this new info really stood out more once I’d encounter it in the wild after learning it, that was what helped.

WK and anki for vocab and kanji, I have no issues.

But grammar SRS? No.

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Bunpro works the best for me when I just embrace the pain. Keep on failing, over and over. Turn on the “ghost review” feature for maximum inundation. (You may have to slow down on new lessons with this strategy unless you’ve got a lot of time for reviews).

And just keep on doing the same sentences over and over until you don’t even have to think about it. You just know what the answer is at first glance at the sentence without even reading it. Oh that one? The answer is は. At that point you aren’t even doing grammar, just recognizing the question.

And I thought that was a bad thing, but it turns out when I get a similar, but different one, I get that right too. And the effect seems to stick a long time. So some learning is magically occurring even though it seems like it shouldn’t be.

Is that the hard way? Well it takes a lot of patience. Are there easier ways? Maybe. :man_shrugging: