Is Bunpro really worth it?

Japanese Language
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I like it a lot. I don’t know how many example sentences free users get, but for paid users it’s 10 sentences per point. That’s almost 3k translated example sentences for N5 + N4 level content alone, most of which are voiced now and have vocabulary roughly restricted to their levels. I could ignore the SRS functionality altogether and still consider the whopping $3/month price tag dirt cheap just to read through those.

A long time ago I jumped around using Tae Kim, Genki, Human Japanese, Imabi, and probably a few others. I had a hard time making it click and without classes/tutors which also meant I didn’t really have any opportunities for feedback (rip partner exercises and such). It’s not what I’d consider perfect for my situation, but Bunpro more or less fixed that issue and the SRS system gives me repeated, tapered exposure to learned grammar. On my own I can’t really read native content fast enough to get “natural SRS” so that site really helps to keep things fresh for me. At least when I’m looking at native content my reactions have been much less “wtf is this” and more “oh right, I should have known that” or “ez”.

Like others have pointed out I find it way easier to search grammar on Bunpro than doing a google search. The reference pages for the points usually have a section with hyperlinks to related/similar grammar points which can be useful when mixing up points. For a person like me who is always at my PC anyway it’s cheaper and more convenient than buying a dictionary of japanese grammar.

The biggest flaw I’ve noticed is that like most other fill in the blank style resources it struggles when similar points can fit for a review sentence. They try to work around it by throwing out hints or by focusing on certain detail/nuance, but it’s kind of a waste of time for people who aren’t interested in speaking/writing.

Overall, I’m just much more confident in reading Japanese stuff now and I really owe a lot of that to Bunpro. It was the thing I needed to fill gaps in my studies, but it’s not going to be for everyone. There’s no reason to pick up Bunpro if other methods work fine for you, especially if you’re short on time.

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I like using it because I tend to study a grammar point and then forget to use it in daily conversation here in Japan. With the SRS mechanic, I am reminded about grammar points that I’ve studied. I can then use them more often in conversation and cement them in my brain.

I also like to use it for listening and shadowing practice. When I learn a new grammar point, I’ll listen to each sentence example without reading the sentence and then I can quickly check if I understood the sentence.

It’s also useful for me for reading practice and adding vocabulary to my flash cards. I think Bunpro does a great job of using common words very often in their examples. When I see a word I don’t know, it’s almost always listed as a common word on Jisho. I’ll add it to my Anki flash cards along with the example sentence for context.

Like every learning tool out there, Bunpro has its strengths and its weaknesses. I’ve been able to find some use out of it.

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Nothing of interest to add to the conversation

Just wanted to commend anyone doing more than 1 SRS. I can barely wanikani

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For me its the perfect bridge into reading immersion which, as a relatively new Japanese learner, is otherwise too difficult.

I’ve found that, similar to WaniKani, even if I learn a grammar point or kanji for weeks, all that these programs do is prime my brain to recognise the instance in the wild. I feel like when I see something in the wild in an engaging anime or article thats when i actually ‘aquire’ the word as opposed to ‘know’ the word. I hope that makes sense… kinda hard to explain for me sorry.

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I use bunpro, and I get something out of it even though its not the “right” way. I’m somewhere in the low intermediate range of Japanese abilities.

I activate specific grammar points individually instead of using one of the paths. Right now I’m using the Shin Kanzen Master Books. If there is a point that I know, I just skip it and don’t bother to activate it. I try not to add points that are mostly interchangeable with each other because it throws lots of errors - though it usually says something like try this other point instead. I’m more concerned about repetitive exposure, so I don’t stress too much. The Shin kanzen master books are also quizzing the grammar points that are similar to each other, so I am getting some defining the differences in grammar points in a little different way which is a good complement.

When I’ve added enough things that my reviews are unmanageable or my reviews get out of control with ghosts I either delete ghost or all reviews and start over, then add what I’m currently focused on and do it all again.

This is probably not the best way, or makes the most sense, but it is a way that I keep exposing myself to new grammar and studying those points consistently over some period of time which is my goal.

I do like that it provides hidden English translations, so I can test myself on those translations immediately to make sure I have a good understanding of what it is trying to say. I also like the vocabulary is just a little out of my level. I occasionally run into a word I don’t know, but its usually a single word in a sentence and it isn’t every sentence.

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There’s a lot about Bunpro that I’d have designed differently. But I would say the same about WaniKani.

Frankly, I find Bunpro the most stressful of my daily SRS tasks. It’s the one I spend the least time on. But it’s still the best way that I’ve found to memorize grammar long-term. Especially for me since I rarely have the opportunity to practice production.

The biggest weakness, as @darkhelmet pointed out, is that the ghosts emphasize memorizing the sentence over memorizing the grammar. I’ve suggested to their team that they could mitigate this by randomizing nouns, verbs, and pronouns in their example sentences, but that would be a lot of work to code in retroactively.

The second biggest weakness is that the platform has a number of mechanisms that give users just enough rope to hang themselves. For example, the option to learn in order of popular textbooks is a good idea in theory, but since the default order has example sentences that linearly build on each other, using any other order negates the graduated challenge level that’s central to Bunpro. I tried using the Tae Kim order and I plateaued almost immediately.

I do like Bunpro. I’ve messaged the team before and they’ve been approachable. And from my language-learning experience, learning grammar “bottom-up” (i.e. out of books and videos as opposed to immersion) is still a bit of an open problem. From what I’ve read on metacognition, spaced repetition is one of the most sure-fire ways to learn. Until someone makes an SRS of randomly generated sentences (so until I get the time to learn Python!), Bunpro is the easiest way I know of to learn grammar over the long term.

Edit: I minored in Japanese about 18 years ago and I’m picking it back up now. I wouldn’t say Bunpro is only useful for learners who are seeing the grammar for the first time. It’s handy for reminding myself that X grammar form exists when I haven’t seen it in a while. But you really do have to read another resource when you learn each new grammar form. And that sucks when all the ones Bunpro cites are long blog posts or long videos.

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Short answer: YES, it is amazing and absolutely worth it. Like WaniKani, you can save considerable time on learning more efficiently, there are many features that are extremely useful.

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I’ve started doing Bunpro about a year ago to review and learn some things I missed from the N4-N2 grammar. While I’ve stopped doing it currently, due to using my study time differently, I can tell you that it has helped immensely with reading.

It’s by no means perfect, but I prefer SRS sentences over text books. As you’ve noted they do repeat, at least early on, a bunch of grammar points to show you that there’s more nuance to them. It’s nice, but you could get the nuance through reading as well ( reading is more personal, and thus you remember stuff easier imo )

As with any SRS tool, give it a shot for a while, see if it works, if it’s fun, and if you have time for it. The good thing about Bunpro is that you can really go at your own pace since nothing is locked behind levels like on WK.

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BunPro is good for repeated exposure, especially for those who don’t have enough contact with native material.

The main concern I have is that the sentences are too easily memorized so they should be randomized and there should be 50, not 10, per grammar point. Naturally, I understand that this is extremely time consuming, and in their shoes, I too would have first added as many grammar points as possible. But now that they have reached the end of the list of gramar points they feel are necessary, I would hope they focus almost exclusively on sentences and randomizing the exposure as much as possible.

The main reason I use Bunpro is to get past the initial hump: When I open a textbook, I fall asleep almost instantly, it’s ridiculous. Ink is smeared everywhere, because, surprisingly, drool has high water content. Bunpro allows me to get past the initial resistance and then go thorugh a textbook or reference without falling asleep. When I do eventually read the explanations in the reference, I understand them much faster and appreciate the fresh perspective.

Fundamentally, Bunpro does what no other platform has done for me for grammar: it keeps me consistent. I just wish that there were far more sentences and that the order were randomized.

I never understood this until you mentioned it now, so thank you. I have always snubbed “pattern” books by thinking “I don’t want to just memorize patterns blindly, I want to understand the grammar properly!”. Your example has clarified why this approach is not optimal: after all, I could do both. I could learn the components and then learn the pattern (in terms of the relation to the components but also in terms of its specific usage which is hard to discern from the individual components).

I know that it’s likely no one has an answer, but I wonder where they draw the line to determine what a new grammar point is.

I use the two in conjunction and this occurred to me but it seemed like such a time-consuming task to do :scream:. Do you haz file with page numbers that you’re willing to share? :eyes:

I know that does sound like a lot, but ten sentences means I end up memorizing them unwittingly :confused: Now it’s gottem bad enough that I try to unfocus my eyes and not process the entire sentence so I can’t memorize it, but in conjunction with the translation, I kinda figure out what they want. So I still learn the grammar but it’s really not optimal…

I think this is a problem for a lot of us. There really isn’t much on offer wrt a comprehensive grammar-practising resource. Bunpro is like Democracy: it’s not necessarily the best system, but it’s the best one we have out here.

Can relate so hard. Too often people say to “consume native content”. Sure, I agree, but there has to be a certain fooundation first. I much prefer approaching it once I have N5 and maybe even most of N4 done. I’m ok with native content being baffling on a clause level, but not really on a paragraph level…

I think yes, and no :thinking:. I think having Bunpro as a motivator can really help, and the SRS is not bad. I also don’t think using Bunpro can harm your learning beyond the time that it consumes that could be used elsewhere. But that is frankly true about anything: we could be studying to be a brain-surgeon-rocket-scientist-superman-novelist-philosopher-psychologist-architect instead of learning Japanese, and yet here we are shamelessly bumming around like the world isn’t on fire :man_shrugging:.

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I feel like this may vary. Genki, for instance introduces major grammar points mostly (at least that was my impression), while Tobira sometimes calls even little things like ほとんど grammar points, because the authors felt it’s necessary to elaborate on these.

Speaking of textbooks being boring, have you tried Tobira or a similar reading-heavy textbook? It focuses more on reading comprehension and open production exercises instead of short grammar point intro snippets + rinse & repeat exercises. To me Tobira’s approach would be equivalent to just interacting with native material.

On Bunpro itself, I haven’t used it myself, but it sort of feels like putting grammar into a SRS is a little suboptimal? For me it’s sometimes hard enough to remember the out-of-context glosses WaniKani expects, especially the more reading I do outside of SRSes.

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It’s also going to vary from person to person. For me it’s rather intuitive that any conditional + いい is a sort of “would be good if” construct, but that may not be the case for everyone.

Same goes for 〜なければいけない and the like. In essence that’s just a conditional and a phrase saying “can’t do that” or something of the sort, so that meaning “have to …” is also fairly logical. But treating it as a separate grammar point might be useful for people who don’t intuitively see it that way.

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I would love to start Tobira. I’d need to be at an intermediate level for that though. Currently working through N5+N4, once I’m done with that, I’m headed to Shin Kanzen and Tobira, as well as Sou Matome (for reviewing only).

Speaking of exercises, in case anyone is interested, this book is awesome:
Amazon.com: 新にほんご500問N4-N5 (アスク出版) (Japanese Edition) eBook : 松本 紀子, 佐々木 仁子: Kindle Store
They have it for higher levels too :).

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Oh yeah, that’s definitely true! That’s how I break down grammar points as well, actually :smiley: . It’s kind of a shame that learning resources often don’t include those straightforward explanations and opt for either rote memorization (“this whole grammar point means that…”) or go into complex explanations, while it shouldn’t be rocket surgery, right? :wink:

Thinking about Bunpro again, I kind of use Anki as a refresh for grammar points I almost never see in text so that too could be an option if one’s willing to invest a little more time.

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You can start learning Tobira now by putting all of its vocabs to a SRS programme like Kitsun or Anki. That would take you around 2-4 months to memorize all of them, depending on how many new words you add to a SRS system a day. (There are roughly 2000 vocabs on every chapter index combined). I assume you might know probably 1/3 - 1/2 of them already.

After you memorize all of those, it would be much easier to use Tobira. You can just focus entirely on comprehension and grammar.

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This is excellent advice. Thanks!

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Unfortunately I did not write them all down. However, if you have all three books, the trick is to look up words in the index of the advanced book. The index is cumulative and it will tell you which book and page to find the topic in question. The intermediate book is like this as well, except it does not point you to the advanced book. This is due to the time elapsed between the books coming out.

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WK is my only SRS at the moment.

There is a youtube channel the guy recommends games for beginners and he recommended 13 sentinels, which I am playing now and honestly it is not for beginners.

I am using english subtitles and only by trying to listen i japanese, I can barely understand the sentences because of grammar points and many vocab I still dont know.

I really need to dive into a new SRS and bunpro will be the way.

I quit shirimono after their overhaul in the website, there is a point I memorized the sentences and the new sentences were all over the place, no hints how to answer them. Got frustrated and quit.

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BunPro is an output exercise that can give feedback without a human expert loop so it marries well with output practice (writing/speaking). But this is a different skill set and time investment than reading. You never gave your short/long term goals and I feel grammar study is generally shaped around whatever this may be.

But here is my recommendation based on general differing primary goals I see on the boards:

  1. Media consumption (manga/anime/novels/video games) - don’t recommend, you can probably absorb your grammar through reading much quicker. Plus the synonym pain is just frustrating in this respect to keep the platform rewarding to this particular goal.

  2. JLPT - moderate, though organized by JLPT it’s not a JLPT training course nor acclimates to the test structure which is not an output exercise. Despite the the name, it’s actually a comprehension test (not proficiency) and there are other resources that I think do it better for time effectiveness though the site is still a great resource.

  3. Speaking/writing - highly recommended. I get the most success with active conversation and writing practice along side BP. And this makes grammar a million times more fun, a way to accurately express yourself with another human being which is highly rewarding. Grammar does not need to be a grind.

Bonus:

  1. Value - again highly recommended, the lifetime is half of WK’s. They are tuning the site right now very actively so I don’t expect the low prices to last much longer.

  2. Autonomy - You have curated content with solid translations and native audio for ~11k sentences where a beginner or experience user can jump right in. I’ve mined plenty of vocab. listened to audio and practiced reading…there is more going than just the grammar input

  3. Grammar dictionary is great, use it all the time.

I stuck with WaniKani - Kitsun - BunPro for awhile, it can be done though time is finite. I enjoyed jumping around and it helped to keep everything fresh. I kept WK as the focus and bounced around on Kitsun and BP but now I dropped WK. I would argue that WK is more of a time suck and least efficient in some respects. Typing answer is a waste of time, most of us have an over-ride script so the ‘honesty’ filter is lost and no evidence it helps learn better in my case. And there is no vocab filters whatsoever here…there far more efficient methods to get vocab practice IMO. But for kanji, there is nothing better by far (and the sentences are a hidden gem, I get way better vocab practice doing a WK sentence deck than I ever did by vocab SRS).

One last tidbit: I still do grammar decks outside of BP. I can’t output certain grammar yet in N2/1 independently, so I have to practice recognition first in sentence decks and whatnot, the leap to output is harder. It’s arguable whether this is necessary, many points are more literary in this range and I find I would selective use certain points my own purposes. The platform should provide this but it doesn’t so I resort to my own Kitsun decks get this practice. But the sentences are still a good comprehension exercise and if I can get through the BP review, the point feels pretty solid.

I lied, last tidbit again: Ghost review and memorizing sentences isn’t bad to clear the review…often my grammar ‘lock-in’ is based on a favorite sentence I see over and over. The more important aspect is whether the next SRS level can be cleared; that indicate whether the ghost review work or not…and if not then you get a new ghost to grind.

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I seriously love Bunpro. It’s helped me out immensely with grammar, as a general introduction as well as a refresher. Should you rely on it exclusively, though? Of course not. But it’s suuuuuper helpful for people like myself who have trouble sitting down to focus on grammar. I find it much easier to study when I’ve been introduced to the grammar point previously, and am just learning it more deeply, rather than from zero.

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They have actually released Reading exercises for up to N3 these days. Haven’t looked into them, but they’re supposed to only use grammar you’ve learned so far.

As a grammar beginner, and with using the resources they list within the Resources section of their items, it has helped me from not understanding anything to actually being able to read stuff casually.

But again, that was with using the resources they listed, and with reading a few pages of a Japanese book every few months :joy:

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