I purchased a lifetime subscription to Wani Kani years ago and studied up to Level 17 (just spend the long weekend powering through 3,000 reviews). I have a newfound appreciation for how well Wani Kani teaches you Kanji, but I know that I’ll need to supplement it with other resources for vocabulary and grammar.
So… I’m wondering what everyone is using these days to learn Vocab and Grammar? I find Anki decks do a really crappy job of teaching me how to effectively use vocab (or learn grammar points) so I’m looking for something that’s Wani Kani like in that it teaches you easy ways to truly let the vocab/grammar points stick in your brain and how to use them - thanks!
BunPro is a grammar site and SRS that has also started adding vocab sorted by JLPT level (they allow you to link to your WK via API for furigana as well as syncing vocab)
Hmm sounds like BunPro might be good for you to check out? It has a breakdown of grammar points, examples, links to external resources (youtube vidoes etc), pretty good, can do SRS reviews too
BunPro gets recommended here a lot and sounds like what you’re asking for, and that all makes sense – if WaniKani works for you, why not find more stuff that works like it? But I’d throw in some other suggestions as well. I like BunPro, but have found that SRS doesn’t work quite as well for grammar where you really have to try it out in a bunch of different ways to really get how to use it. It’s less a recognition thing and more of a production thing, if that makes sense. This is where textbooks are actually really good, taking you through a set of grammar points and making you actually write sentences with them. Speaking is also another good venue to try out the grammar you’ve just learned and use it to express your own thoughts. SRS is comfortable, but approaching the N2 level you’re lucky enough to finally be able to do some really substantial reading, writing, and speaking, so don’t hold yourself back!
Thank you all! Bunpro is exactly what I was looking for in terms of grammar… I also am lucky to have a Japanese speaker in the house so I can use grammar points that I learn immediately in real life
I still don’t really have a great resource for learning vocabulary. I think an SRS system combined with sample sentences where you have to pick the right vocab word would be the most helpful for me, however I haven’t really seen anything like this at scale. Currently, the closest solution I have is to do SRS memorization and then practice questions from past JLPT tests, however this isn’t ideal as I don’t feel like I’m deeply learning the vocabulary’s appropriate usage.
That’s not quite what BP has started doing with their vocab reviews, and not all vocab items have it yet, but what they’ve started doing is having an example sentence come up and you have to fill in the blank, like with their grammar review. Some still have the “give you the vocab, you answer with what it means in English” that they started out with, but they’re moving more toward the fill-in-the-blank method.
(I don’t remember if this is still beta or not though. I turned it on a while back and I don’t exactly keep up with their forums or announcements or anything like that. But users can opt in or out of beta at any time in settings.)
Oh, though also I don’t remember if they’ve added all JLPT levels of vocab yet, and I don’t have access to my laptop to check just now…
My personal view is that the only way to do this is to see the words a lot in a lot of different contexts, i.e. to read a lot… (or listen, if that’s more your thing)
@pm215 reading a lot is helpful and furthers the overall goal of improving Japanese proficiency, but I’m more in search of an efficient study method that targets N2 vocabulary as that’s my more immediate goal.
So, I’ll preface this by saying that I enjoy reading, so my approach to N2 and N1 was somewhat biased to what I personally like and am good at.
For N2 in particular, I didn’t do much specific vocab study. (I made up for it with doing well on the grammar and reading sections). I think the efficiency approach here is probably “just SRS an anki deck for Japanese->rough English meaning”, which is good enough to get you an OK score on the section (and in N2 kanji, vocab and grammar all share a scoring section so there’s no minimum score needed for vocab alone). Other areas of the test repay study time better, in my opinion – there are lots of vocab items, so most of them won’t turn up; much fewer grammar points and so any particular grammar point is more likely to turn up on the test. N2 is also where reading speed starts to really matter, so you’re going to want to read a lot anyway…
