Yet another grammar+vocab advice-seeking thread - Genki and BunPro

[Jezzieangel]

@cezarL

Yes, well… that’s how I feel every time I go there. Funny coincidence though: couple of days ago, they had an article about bears waking up from hibernation earlier than usual in the Fukushima Prefecture… I think?!?
Did not know about Watanoc, I’ll check it out. Thanks!

Man, it’s always bears

But yeah, NHK is really hard as a beginner (so! Many! Kanji!) But for me, the fact that it’s written in formal language is a pro, because my casual grammar knowledge is NOT up to par. So it got easier for me once the number of kanji I knew increased. (Though I admittedly haven’t read any articles in… A *while *)

But I think your thirst to gain access to content that suits your taste will serve you well, as long as you use it as a springboard (“I’m going to read this because I want to even though it’s hard and intimidating!”) and not a barrier (“I’m not going to touch any native content until I feel I’m at a level where I can engage with my true interests.”) At least, that’s how it is for me. I’m about to tackle two fantasy book club reads that I’m not ready for, but I’m gonna do my best and have fun doing it, dang it!

But yeah, I forget who first recommended Watanoc to me, but apparently it’s not a generally well known resource? Which is a pity, because the amount of stuff accessible to absolute beginners is so slim that it’s nice to have at least a couple options. (Especially ones that you don’t have to pay for).

Satori Reader is extremely popular here, but I decided I’d rather buy a certain amount of native books every month than pay for another subscription.

And I forgot to say earlier, but I too love the portability of physical books. Don’t gotta worry about wifi or disturbing the people around you, just pack it in a bag and cart it off to the library/the park/a coffee shop/wherever.

[NeoArcturus]

@Jezzieangel

But yeah, NHK is really hard as a beginner (so! Many! Kanji!)

As I already said before, I highly recommend Yomitan (yes, I’m a yomitan worshipper lol)

[northpilot]

There is a bit of manual labor involved if you want to add only the vocabulary. If you click on a deck, it’ll bring up a list of all the content it contains. You can click the three dots on the right of the vocab and then click “Add to Reviews.” You won’t have a lesson for those items and they’ll just immediately appear in your review queue, so it’s not a perfect system.

Unfortunately, there are no textbook decks with only vocabulary. There are textbook decks with only grammar and textbook decks with both grammar and vocabulary. If I were you, I’d probably just learn the grammar points at the same time as the vocabulary, because then you can just hit the “Learn All” button on a specific chapter.

There are relatively few grammar items compared to vocabulary items, especially in the first couple chapters.

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@cezarL

I think I got the gist of Bunpro with the Genki path. Indeed they push the vocab of each lesson before the grammar points, so it’s quite as I wanted it

This isn’t exactly true because there are chapters with vocabulary items that appear after grammar items. It is true of the first few chapters, though.

[cezarL]

@NeoArcturus

Do you have Yomitan installed btw?

I’ve had three direct recommendations, one of them yours yes (thank you!) plus I’ve seen a lot of comments on it in other threads, but I haven’t installed it yet. Maybe tomorrow?
I saw the tutorial on TheMoeWay and I was like… okay, this needs time, dedication and the proper mood

@northpilot

If I were you, I’d probably just learn the grammar points at the same time as the vocabulary

Yeah, I found those additional options but I’m fine with the default path settings. I will read the grammar points in the books first, but since I’m going through the lessons at a higher than usual speed (I keep seeing comments about one or even two weeks per lesson) I want the grammar in BP as well for reinforcement over time so it’s all good.

@northpilot

This isn’t exactly true because there are chapters with vocabulary items that appear after grammar items.

I noticed that but the percentage of ‘post-grammar vocab’ is low so not a major issue. I’m guessing (and it’s only a guess at this point) that those items only appear in the final exercises in the textbook, post-grammar.

[NeoArcturus]

@cezarL

I’ve had three direct recommendations, one of them yours yes (thank you!) but I haven’t installed it yet. Maybe tomorrow?
I saw the tutorial on TheMoeWay and I was like… okay, this needs time, dedication and the proper mood

Nah, it doesn’t need too much time, I think I needed like half an hour or so because I was too dumb to download the correct file lol

I really recommend doing it as soon as possible, and I will quote @Fallynleaf here:

@fallynleaf

Installing Yomichan was one of the absolute best choices I made with my own Japanese studies, and it gave me a huge head start. I bugged two of my friends to install it, knowing it would help them, too, and one of my friends finally did over a month after I recommended it, and she told me she was kicking herself for not listening to me earlier, because it made Japanese way, way faster to read, and it saved her so much time and energy (which helped her read Japanese more!).

It might be a bit annoying to set it all up the first time, but once you have it, you won’t regret taking the time to install it!

[cezarL]

Missed the other reply.

@Jezzieangel

as long as you use it as a springboard (“I’m going to read this because I want to even though it’s hard and intimidating!”) and not a barrier (“I’m not going to touch any native content until I feel I’m at a level where I can engage with my true interests.”) At least, that’s how it is for me.

At the moment I am more in the latter camp, mainly because of how frustrating NHK Easy is when I only recognize a few words per chapter. But it’s one of the reasons why I started with Genki and BP earlier than originally planned, so the desire to get into the first (better) camp is there all right, just need a little more ‘foundation’ vocab

@Jezzieangel

Satori Reader is extremely popular here, but I decided I’d rather buy a certain amount of native books every month than pay for another subscription.

Right now I do want to hop onto the Satori bandwagon, but we’ll see… I may very well end up agreeing with you on the matter of buying books (preferably ones I can hold in my hand) instead of ‘renting’ them.
(I prefer buying films on disc to streaming services for more or less the same reason)

[cezarL]

@NeoArcturus

and I will quote @Fallynleaf here:

Sure enough, @fallynleaf was one of those three to recommend it hehehe

[NeoArcturus]

She convereted me into a Yomitanist

[cezarL]

Couple more questions regarding Bunpro, please and thank you

1. Do they have a feature like “Extra Study” here on WK or like the WK ‘Self Study Quiz’ userscript?
   Where you can review items from recent lessons outside of the SRS schedule. Their “Extra Study” gives more new lessons and the only way to review items that I could find was to open the deck and click on each item individually to see the full details

2. How does the sync via API with WK work - does it run daily and updates automatically known kanji (hide furigana) and vocab (set to BP Level 7 if Guru in WK), or do I have to trigger the two sync options manually whenever I remember to do so?

[NeoArcturus]

@cezarL

Do they have a feature like “Extra Study” here on WK or like the WK ‘Self Study Quiz’ userscript?
Where you can review items from recent lessons outside of the SRS schedule. Their “Extra Study” gives more new lessons and the only way to review items that I could find was to open the deck and click on each item individually to see the full details

Yes, it’s called cram You don’t have an option that automatically chooses the most recently learned items, I think, but you can manually add any grammar item you wish. I think they’re also already working on making this cram feature also available for vocab.

@cezarL

How does the sync via API with WK work - does it run daily and updates automatically known kanji (hide furigana) and vocab (set to BP Level 7 if Guru in WK), or do I have to trigger the two sync options manually whenever I remember to do so?

AFAIK you always have to manually sync it. Master syncing means your items won’t appear in your review queue at all bc they’ve been put in the highest SRS stage, and the other sync option will put the items at Seasoned 1, meaning these items will appear in your review queue after some time.

Btw I’m not sure if you know this, but there is an option that allows you to review grammar and vocab separately, which I find to be very helpful.

[cezarL]

@NeoArcturus

Yes, it’s called cram You don’t have an option that automatically chooses the most recently learned items, I think, but you can manually add any grammar item you wish. I think they’re also already working on making this cram feature also available for vocab.

Ah yes I found cram but being just for grammar isn’t immediately useful to me; it does sound like something I’ll be using once I’ll have gone through a few more Genki lessons.
I was looking for something to drill that new vocab with… I find it difficult to make them stick when the words are not made up of kanji I’ve recently studied like the WK vocab.
Moreover, production of vocab the BP way is (or, seems) harder than recognition in WK. Not a bad thing, though!

@NeoArcturus

Master syncing means your items won’t appear in your review queue at all bc they’ve been put in the highest SRS stage, and the other sync option will put the items at Seasoned 1, meaning these items will appear in your review queue after some time.

Yeah so I rushed in and clicked the first button (‘master content’) and now I regret it, should have gone with ‘extra study’ instead and that can’t be overriden after-the-fact I feel an account reset might be in order…
EDIT - Nvm, I did a partial reset for WK vocab only, and now I’m slammed with 253 reviews all of a sudden Didn’t realize I had picked up quite that many words from WK (yeah I don’t pay attention to the nice dashboard) - that’s nice!

@NeoArcturus

Btw I’m not sure if you know this, but there is an option that allows you to review grammar and vocab separately, which I find to be very helpful.

Thanks! At the moment I have only a measly 3 grammar points from Genki lesson 1, but I expect that once they go into the dozens I’ll do separate review sessions grammar/vocab.

Anyways. I did a batch of reviews there earlier and gotta say… I felt mighty pleased with myself when I found that I can read and understand some sentences without any aid other than the missing word in English
Very simple ones, true, but still… it’s good to get some kind of encouragement, no matter how small, every now and then

[cezarL]

Replying to myself

The whole ‘Master/Seasoned’ thing for WK vocab is… a good effort (and I really don’t see how they could have set it up another way) but not something I’ll use.

• Seasoned - I started doing reviews, and some 40 items it occurred to me if I finish them all now, in a few weeks’ time when the next SRS stage kicks in I’ll get another batch of 253 on top of everything else I’ll have in my queue at that point. Not quite practical.
• Master - This takes them out of BP for good, which is nice if you are confident you do ‘master’ them, which I for one certainly do not, especially for production.

I think I’ll just let BP serve me the vocab whenever its time, and if I get them right without any effort then and there maybe I’ll set them to ‘Master’ manually (BP lets you do that). If I don’t then… just follow the usual SRS schedule but they’ll come in one by one not 250+.

This sync works best when you start BP at the same time or soon after starting WK, methinks.
Or, you know… just use Anki or something else for vocab, unlike me who can’t be bothered

[cezarL]

Okay. Sooo…

I struggled with the vocab recall (production) mode in BP throughout the week.
All the time I was thinking I just couldn’t pick up new vocab, at least not at the pace I wanted it to. Then I had a look at the hiragana column in the spreadsheet I’m maintaining, and much to my surprise I had (almost) no problem recognizing the words without looking at the English translation problem.
Then I also read this opinion (found from another thread here) - suggesting that practicing recall with cards isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Seeing as how my immediate goals are around reading and listening, rather than speaking I decided to swith the BP review method for vocab to recognition with written input like on WK… and it’s going much better now
(still keeping grammar points on the recall method, though).
I also reactivated the WK vocab ‘master’ SRS sync because if I’m doing recognition-only there’s not much point in doing it in both systems.

The drawback is that BP no longer ‘forces’ me to read full sentences, which was cool!
It’d have been nice if they provided full sentences with the review vocab highlighted and asking for its meaning…

But anyways… I’ve finally covered the vocab up to the grammar of Genki lesson 3. Reding through the textbook dialogue for that lesson was much more pleasing knowing the words in advance
The whole “verb types and conjugation” as covered in the book was… a little ugh but then TokiniAndy explained it a lot better. Niiice!
I have to do more practice with the grammar points from this lesson but now after an eternity (a little less than a week, that is ) I can finally move on to lesson 4 vocab later today.

Couple of observations:

• I like having the furigana obviously as I barely know some simple kanji but damn! I always ‘default’ to furigana and don’t pay attention to the kanji themselves Gotta be a little more proactive on this and start hiding furigana for vocab I learn (where applicable, besides what gets hidden automatically from the WK sync). Maybe once I get the items into the first Adept SRS stage in BP…
• Knowing a few kanji makes some unknown jukugo words easily understandable - okay maybe not the exact meaning/translation every time but thereabouts - that’s very cool!

[morteASD]

I also find grammar exercises boring and mostly a waste of time. Never did them and turned out fine . I watched some videos explaining in Japanese N4 and N3 grammar and after that just stopped thinking about “grammar”; most of it just feels like vocabulary after that.

[cezarL]

Yeah, I saw your post in the other thread
For now I find the grammar exercises in BunPro helpful, but it’s still very early days for me - I’m only at Genki 1 lesson 7.
Opinions might change over time, and I wouldn’t mind getting to the same point, but… who knows, we’ll see

[morteASD]

Oh yeah I did do some Bunpro at some point as well. It was fine until there were just too many similar ones they could have been asking

[Ayara012]

Hope it’s okay if I join the convo two weeks late with non-existent starbucks, lol.

@pm215

I would suggest here that names are hard – they may use the same kanji sometimes but they’re often oddball pronunciations or combinations of familiar and unfamiliar kanji. And unlike words, they don’t come in a context that might prime you to remember the word or the meaning.

(PS: 花すけ is also a name, so it doesn’t have a meaning as such.)

Seconding this! The thing about names is that they can be read in…kinda whatever way someone decides. That’s why so much Japanese paperwork has you write your name in kanji and then again in kana. Because it’s a name, not a vocabulary word, you can’t really assume anything about which reading its using. Of course, realizing you recognize the kanji in someone’s name is always cool! But don’t get frustrated if a translation reads it as something super different than what you learned/thought, because names are just like that.

@mitrac

This isn’t just a vocab problem though. Japanese grammar works so different from unrelated languages. There are some exceptions where people learn Japanese without formal grammar study but if you lurk a long time most people used and highly recommend using some kind of grammar guide. Things you think of as words in English like “but” and “and” require grammar glossing (multiple! ).

Yeah, English and Japanese grammar are nearly completely flipped. We could get into Subject-Verb-Object vs Subject-Object-Verb kinda stuff, but I find that an example often makes more sense if you’re not good at formal grammar labeling (like me).

In English, I might say “I ate an apple at the library.”
In Japanese, I might say 「私は図書館でリンゴを食べました。」
(図書館＝としょかん、食べました＝たべました)

You can see that the only thing that stays in the same place is the “I”, which honestly Japanese often drops. So English has “eat(past tense) apple library”, whereas Japanese has “library apple eat(past tense)”. Obviously this is a really simple example and things can get a lot more complex, but it’s part of why knowing the vocabulary can still leave you really confused at first.
Also if it helps anyone to remember: Japanese is hard for us to learn…and English is hard for Japanese people to learn. It goes both ways! They’re very different languages.

@cezarL

Re. graded readers: I’m not saying a definitive “no” to them, just… not attracted to the idea of reading (struggling to read, to be precise) something that presents no interest at all. At least three I looked at on Tadoku were like that. Maybe I just have to check out more of them…
I do think I should try and acquire just a little more vocab first, though.

Yeah, that’s about where I stand with it. I skipped right over graded readers (to be fair, I started Japanese in a classroom setting, so I DID get a bunch of textbook reading kind of stuff) and I read manga. I pick a series that I’ve A) read before and B) really like/want to re-read, so I get that support combo of knowing the broad strokes of the story (for when there’s something I just can’t figure out) AND having the motivation of “Heck yeah here comes x y z cool character/event/thing”.

Obviously manga might be a bit much for you right now, but like a couple folks have mentioned, it’s good to use the material you’re interested in a springboard.

@cezarL

Oh soon enough I’ll start a thread asking for some recommendations. Naturally, I have peculiar tastes with anime too

I am one of the (presumably quite a few) people who eagerly await this request, so as to swarm you with recs

[cezarL]

Allow me to add katakana English-loaned words to the list of “hard” items, at least for initial exposure to them.
Maybe they come easy to native English speakers (or maybe to everyone and it’s just a “me” problem) but I have a hard time figuring out what they mean without looking up the translations. I think it may be a matter of my “knowing” the English words by the way they are written not pronounced and then something as simple as ページ is indecipherable until I find out it’s meant to be “page” and then it’s duh!!!

Funny enough, when I first encountered アルバイト loaned from German I had no trouble figuring out it must be related to “work”

@Ayara012

I am one of the (presumably quite a few) people who eagerly await this request, so as to swarm you with recs

Well… let’s try this for a warm-up, then
It’s my thread so I’m free to derail it, right?

I like Kore-eda Hirokazu’s films A LOT. Some brief examples in case the films are not familiar to you or anyone else who might see this thread:

Maborosi - A young woman remarries after her first husband committed suicide (or did he?) and tries to rebuild her life but is haunted by the memory of the first marriage and that inexplicable act.

Still Walking - A man visits his parents on the anniversary of his brother’s death, bringing along his new wife and her son from a previous marriage. He lives in the shadow of his brother, at least as far as the parents are concerned, and that carries with it its own burden.

Like Father, Like Son - A family finds out that the son they’ve been raising for 6 years is not their biological child, he was swapped accidentally at birth. Now they must decide if they keep him, or swap him for their “true” child.

After the Storm - A washed-up novelist now moonlighting as a private detective tries to rekindle the relationship with his former wife, and wants to be more involved in his son’s life… eventually he ends up growing a bit himself (emotionally, that is).

Are there any anime out there similar to those?
Mature subjects, non-fantastical, non-violent, humour kept to a minimum (but not absent, that’d be too glum), the good kind of slow…

[morteASD]

@cezarL

have a hard time figuring out what they mean without looking up the translations

I think it’s just a matter of getting a feel for how the words are “katakanized”. Not a native speaker, and I think I probably only have problems with less than 1% of them; most are just free vocabulary. Granted, having a good ear for the original English words is pretty important. I wonder if having been exposed to a really wide range of English accents help with having a more “fluid” idea of the words..

[cezarL]

@morteASD

Granted, having a good ear for the original English words is pretty important.

Oh sorry, maybe I didn’t explain it properly: I’ve no problem at all with pronounciation in English, I only meant my brain associates the words with their writing first and foremost, when it comes to… “decoding” / processing them; that makes it difficult to identify the connection between katakana words and their English counterparts.

@morteASD

I wonder if having been exposed to a really wide range of English accents help with having a more “fluid” idea of the words…

That could very well play a part, but… I’m no stranger to several accents and it doesn’t seem to help in my case.

Okay… Rant mode on now
With pronounciation (and spelling, wherever applicable), I try to follow the British standard but it isn’t easy to stick to it. Of course, I’m primarily exposed to American English due to its widespread adoption and also my work environment so I end up drifting to American speak most of the time.
I am fairly familiar with Scottish and Irish accents from TV series but I very rarely have direct contact with native speakers of those.
I love the sound of the American “Southern drawl” but I don’t actually know anyone who uses it

That said, the “neutral” accent of Scandinavians speaking English is also very pleasing to my ear - more so than English native speak (except that Southern accent, that one’s cuter).

With Japanese, and this is most likely because I’m still an absolute beginner, if I don’t see the people speaking I can’t really tell the difference between natives and foreigners (well, the very few foreigners I’ve heard speaking in some YT videos)