Grammar text is great, but the benefit of SRS is that it constantly checks you on your knowledge, in the case of Bunpro often with new example sentences. If you have trouble recalling or applying a grammar point, you’ll have to review it more often. Also, it’s synergistic, because you sometimes have to apply multiple pieces of grammar, or at least conjugate. It’s hard to replicate that experience with a book.
Imagine you had WK as a book, without SRS reviews. Ok, not a great comparison, because grammar doesn’t suffer as much from lack of SRS, but it holds to a degree.
Of course, it’s completely understandable that you don’t want to pay for and use yet another SRS. And a grammar book is also a great resource. But to me, Bunpro has been invaluable, my ability to construct and understand sentences improved drastically. You can still complement it with a book.
I tried it a couple months ago. To be honest I liked it, so based on functionality alone it seems superior for studying the %K deck. There are two reasons that make me still choose Anki:
The lack of an offline mode in Torii means that if the creator wants to shut it down tomorrow, I won’t be able to get my reviews anymore. And since the progress can’t be exported (as far as I know) that would mean losing whole months of progress. A less severe situation would be if it became a paid service instead of being completely shut down. Still having no idea what the price could be is something I don’t like, you have no power at all. (And more generally, the idea to pay for one more service when there is a very similar but free alternative doesn’t make me proud)
According to someone on reddit, the bunpro creators did the same almost one year ago… (I still use it, then again I am not one of those first users, so I bear no hard feelings. It was paid since the beginning for me.)
Anki, as you said is solid, very versatile and customizable. It has also different decks, a whole community, and I plan to use it in the second phase of my plan anyway (sentence mining, once I’m able to read something). So I may as well learn to use it with the 2K/4K. It’s also less of a hassle to use one less SRS [I currently use only WK and Bunpro, but having to switch, see how to divide the time and all is already tiring with 2.]
i understand completely. just want to mention that Torii lifetime is 12$ or something, and to me the progress wouldn’t really be lost, because you learned it, and you’ll carry over your learnings to a new SRS very quickly because you know the words well. Also, it’s unlikely any of these services shut down anytime soon.
But again, this is probably not enough to swerve you, and i fully understand your choice
I love Anki too and really should use it more. If only it were as convenient as those other SRS ^^
I had read only Tae Kim’s guide before (50% or so). I learned a lot of stuff, but it didn’t seem to stick. I should have probably reread it every month, but I’m usually good at memorizing rules so I was expecting more. The lack of exercises didn’t help.
As for Bunpro, I’m not sure a SRS is really necessary. A similar approach would probably be to read the grammar points yourself periodically (and make recaps/schemes), to find/create some exercises yourself and do them periodically.
As for my experience with it, I’m still in that first free trial month and have currently done ~70 points out of the 100 of the N5 level (lv 19, whatever that means). I plan to do buy the annual in a week and use that year to finish all N5-N4 stuff (so I can start reading) and later the N3 points. After that, reading itself should be enough to burn the studied grammar, and to find new one. So with 30$ for the annual one, it seems worth it to get solid basics.
I like the fact that it has premade recaps, sentences with audio (plus an integration with WK) and obviously the exercises. The first 40 points were pretty much obvious stuff, but I was actually able to learn new grammatical structures with little effort after that. (The additional resources are a must for stuff you don’t get right away)
So No. It’s not needed, but it makes studying grammar easier and more enjoyable. It is a complement to a book (whichever you use) not a substitute. I think one year is worth it, to make you start reading.
Also, unlike WK you can go pretty damn fast (I think there’s a system in place to stop you from doing all ~600 points right away, but I haven’t met it yet, and i went pretty fast in the beginning). You can try doing the first 100 point (i.e. all of N5) during the trial month and see if it works for you. In the worst case, it’s a way to see how far your grammar knowledge goes.
I don’t think the Bunpro approach can be emulated without an SRS. You may not notice yet at N5, but with N4 grammar, when applying it to sentences, i often apply the wrong one, don’t notice a similar point that could be used, or make a small error in conjugation or particle usage, like using を instead of が before 見られる.
The problem with repeatedly going through a book is that it’s hard to know which items to skip and which you may not have fully learned yet. Emulate some of that and whoops, you have an SRS.
You can also mark items as known in Bunpro and you’ll never see them again. (did that for よ and ね)
For me, just practicing applying grammar and conjugations on example (fill out) sentences with SRS is a good enough deal. This has an aspect of sentence mining.
For example, in the grammar point ように~てほしい, i encountered どのように書いてほしいですか。(in which way do you want me to write this?), which is quite a complex example and a great pattern to absorb.
Also, not showing furigana for kanji you learned on WK already is a great way to practice reading. (Bunpro checks that with a WK API key)
I also used a textbook to try to learn some vocabulary and grammar and it didn’t stick, now I am also level 11 on WaniKani and am level 20 on BunPro, 78 N5 items studied. I just recently bought a year subscription to BunPro. It seems to be very useful for verb conjugations and for certain vocabulary words that can be written entirely in hiragana/katakana, which WK doesn’t cover. So far I am enjoying both, but I enjoy WK more.
That’s the reason why I asked in the past for a script or from WK itself for support for a user level e.g. 100 where I could put personal stuff while still using the WK infrastructure. But in the meantime I have given up hope. Perhaps sometime in the future I can implement it myself, but looks like I don’t have the time. I guess for some people it would be simple but even if I’m a programmer I didn’t do web stuff for 20 years and the frameworks changed a little bit in this time. So I would need a couple of days to catch up …
As you can see I’m still on track doing 10 vocab lessons a day.
Considering what that means I suppose it’s about 50 apprentice and 500 guru. Some days ago I only had 40 master. But now gurus are spilling over to master. Now I have 111. Keep tuned in to see when master will be saturated. Being at vocab 22 ATM.
I also recently read that WK vocabs are mainly meant to teach the kanji of a level without considering the importance of the vocab itself (No criticism of WK intended:It’s a valid concern for a kanji teaching tool).
So now I think I will start reading as far as time allows.
My first try will be 私、能力は平均値でって言ったよね！. 私、能力は平均値でって言ったよね！
The English paper version is available. So I can read the story before.
On chrome I installed “Right Click Translate” to send text to Google Translate.
With rikaikun I can get information on the kanji and check with the translation.
sounds good! i think reading will be great for you. it may be rough in the beginning, but the more you read, the better you get. i for example constantly encountered new words and weird uses of grammar.
i think that’s the main concern, but the usefulness and commonness of WK’s vocabulary is often understated. Jisho rates most of WK’s vocabulary as common, and the Torii 10k vocab deck contains ~4300 of WK vocab items, so i guess only about 1700 are rarer than a 10K deck. WK does cover a lot of very common vocab too, just sometimes in rather late levels.
i mainly started reading Yotsuba on bilingualmanga.com,
i really like that you can switch languages instantly with one button, i wished the publishers would sell and release it like that. very helpful.
sometimes i look up words on jisho.org, but besides that i mostly just try to understand the japanese first, then check the translation, then see if i can learn something. for real grammar study and sentence practice i use bunpro.jp.
i’m still in the beginning of my reading practice as well. but i already learned a lot. and i hear from others how much reading has helped them after a while.
Hi mate, this really looks good: I like the Shield hero, the manga has furigana. Together with “Right Click Translate” and “rikaikun” this seems to be a nice way of reading. On my wishlist would be still a rikaikun link to Wanikani. But I’m “working” on it
I only have the Shield Hero LNs. Perhaps I should also buy some Manga to have in addition the German translation.
As an aside note: I wonder whether perhaps it should be easier to translate from Japanese to German than from Japanese to English. Because in German we don’t have the strict SPO. Also the verb at the end is fine in German too like in Japanese.
Concerning Yotsuba I hear from friends that it’s great. OTOH I heard it’s using a lot of kana. Using WK I prefer kanji.
Only Yotsuba (the child) is in Hiragana, in the first few volume she even uses Kanji sometimes. There are still plenty of Kanji in the manga.
My native language is also german, but i don’t think it makes much of a difference for translations. And in german you have other problems like needing to define the gender of persons a lot of times.
Another 10 days starting 2020. Still doing 10 vocab lessons a day. Being pretty busy the last three days. So suddenly there are hundreds of reviews. But we have weekend now. So it’s time for some extra Wanikani shifts.
