recently I have found i can easily read kanji, but have very poor production skills, especially for vocab words etc. This has made me want to improve my grammar and vocab, so I have recently purchased lifetime membership of BunPro and Tango N5 for each of these.
My question is, 1) what kind of balance should I be trying to reach? like right now i spend a few hours on WK and that’s basically all my free time gone. should I swap some of that focus to grammar or vocab at the expense of my reviews/lessons?
and 2) any good tips for grammar teaching sources that actually work? bunpro is great for SRS, but I need an actual explanation
thanks for any help!! sorry if these questions seem stupid, thought better to ask and risk embarrassing myself than to suffer in silence!
I like to use a certain number of Aprentice level to balance work load. The number depends on what else I am doing in my life.
I like “Sarah Moon Japanese” on YouTube for easy and beginner friendly grammar. I am also I fan of “Cure Dolly” on 125% speed, also on YouTube. She explains really in detail, but has a voice many people can’t stomach
Old school, but I just got a tutor. We went through genki 1 and 2 together and for the most part I can get close to what I want to say now, even if there is a better way to say it in Japanese.
I focused of speaking with native speakers after that.
Even if you’re studying full time at max speed WK shouldn’t take that long. My first guess would be that you’re spending too much time on reviews and it’s a somewhat commonly discussed strategy to just mark something wrong after too much time has passed.
If you’re using Bunpro I would recommend looking at basic vocab from an N5/N4 wordlist or mining straight out of their site since they try to stick vocab at the appropriate N level for each grammar point.
I definitely think going pure WK at the expense of everything else is bad. In particular I think it’s important to have at least some familiarity with N4 level grammar (roughly Genki II, or the end of most beginner textbooks) by around the time you hit burn reviews or WK 20-30 so you can reinforce whatever you learn here with reading native material. From there it’s really easy to adapt your studies however you want and reading will help cover the slack if you choose to go a little hard on WK over other things.
I’m going to say this just in case because I’ve seen a few people miss it, but for any given point on Bunpro the resources tab will usually have a link to a combination of free online resources (eg. Tae Kim, Maggie, Japanese Ammo with Misa) or books (Genki, MNN, A dictionary of Japanese Grammar, ect.). Some of the discussion threads for each point get really detailed as well, so check out those for more complex points.
Also I’d have to say I appreciate the existence of 80/20 Japanese (expensive) and Japanese the Manga Way as supplements. Human Japanese was OK to me, but I preferred it as a way to pass the time on the subway. I like Imabi, but I don’t think it’s beginner friendly at all.
I haven’t tried them, but I’ve seen a lot of praise for Jalup and LingoDeer as well.
Getting a tutor seems really underrated these days. People learn in different ways and this is totally an excellent option for people.
Downside being the high cost. Though if your someone who struggles with motivation it can help because you will want to make sure that you don’t disappoint them as opposed to only having yourself to keep yourself going.
