Too Much Grammar?

I find BunPro to be very good, especially for JLPT levels N5 to N3 (the furthest I’ve gotten so far). N2 is still missing some planned grammar points, and N1 is still pretty sparse. However, they are continually working on it, updating it, and adding more grammar points.

What makes me put a lot of trust into BunPro, despite it technically being a work-in-progress, is that the development team (mainly @pushindawood is the one I’ve interacted with the most) is very professional, competent, and responsive. I’ve submitted several bug/issue reports (mostly minor, though a couple more like larger feature requests), and they’ve responded to them all, usually with a rapid fix/update for minor things, but even with well-considered responses to the larger, more complex, longer-term issues and feature requests. In other words, as a former software developer myself, I consider the BunPro team to be a really professional, solid, reliable, and trustworthy software dev team. I like 'em a lot! :grin:

In case no one’s mentioned it yet (probably have, I just haven’t read the replies yet), you’ll be glad to know that BunPro has a feature where you can select various ‘study paths’, including the default JLPT ordering, but also including several textbooks and grammar-related website courses: Both Genki I and II are included, so you can use BP to help you along with your Genki studying. There’s also Tobira, Tae Kim’s course, and I think another one recently added, but I’m not sure which one.

You can also study any grammar points in any order if you want to. Very useful when you find things ‘in the wild’ that you want to understand better.

Finally, I think I should add that I’ve also found that another SRS tool, KameSame, which is very useful for using alongside a grammar resource (Genki, BunPro, both, or any others), since it works much like a cross between WaniKani and KaniWant, except that you can add any vocab words (from a huge corpus of words), and study them very similar to the way you study WaniKani vocab. I’ve been finding this very useful to use in combination with BunPro, because there are often words in the BunPro example sentences that are either not in WaniKani, or which I haven’t unlocked yet, so KameSame allows me to ‘skip ahead’ or ‘fill in the blanks’ to help me with some of the trickier BunPro grammar points/sentences.

In fact, since KameSame uses much of the same source data that Jisho.org uses (e.g. the JMDICT corpus), many of those entries include actual ‘grammar points’, as ‘expressions’, rather than strictly ‘words’ as WaniKani tends to restrict itself to. Thus, you can often find exact matches to specific BP grammar points, and add them as SRS cards to your KameSame lessons. This has been greatly helping me to solidify my grammar studying at BunPro.

So, TL;DR: Yes, use multiple tools, especially if they enhance or complement each other.

Then again, I’m also finding more and more of my free time being diverted into studying Japanese from all these different angles, so I’m trying to reduce how much I use each one, so I don’t get stuck into an ‘overload’ state where I just end up overwhelming myself with too much time spent per day, leaving no time for other stuff.

E.g. I’ve kinda paused adding new lessons on BunPro, trying to ‘catch up’ in terms of vocab SRS study with WaniKani, KaniWani, and KameSame. My BP reviews/day has dropped steadily, leaving me with more brain juice to focus on catch-up vocab, but even that is starting to get overwhelming, so I’m finally slowing down my WaniKani levelling-up speed until I can get my total time spent SRS-ing down to something more reasonable per day.

Good luck! Cheers! :blush:

3 Likes