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

That’s probably pretty normal if you learn English mostly through traditional methods and through written means (?). With Japanese I’m not quite there yet, but I think it’s very much a good goal to achieve that intuitive understanding through sound alone. Languages are first and foremost sound, afterall.

Anyway, wouldn’t stress it too much, but focusing really on listening will help a lot, and it will come along naturally.

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Riiight, so… a “status update”. I hope this doesn’t turn into a study log :rofl:

Made it through the first eight Genki 1 lessons. Can’t say I “master” the content so far, but I got the general idea :slight_smile:
Vocab acquisition in Bunpro is still difficult, some words just stick immediately some others do not even after several review attempts :thinking:

I had at it a bit too quickly, though… Okay, I knew what I was getting into with 20+ study items daily on Bunpro, alongside the 10-12 items on WaniKani, the two textbook lessons followed by the YT lessons.
It now feels a little too “intense” and I’ve decided to try out a day off weekly from studying, Sunday is meant to be a rest day after all, isn’t it? :blush:

So now I’ve enabled vacation mode in both WK and BP for today (well, yesterday evening after reviews), to be resumed after 24h. I am concerned about a potential negative impact on the upcoming reviews but we shall see how it all pans out.
If this vacation mode doesn’t work out I might try skipping lessons at the weekends, as someone suggested in another thread, just to ease off the pressure a bit.
However, I don’t relish that thought - even now I feel a bit like a fish out of water not having done the usual morning reviews and no new lessons :rofl:

Anyways… couple of observations from the last few days:

  • I tried 6 or 7 Tadoku level 0 graded readers this week - all good there without any aid. Then I checked a couple of level 1 ones, and there are still too many unknown words in those :frowning: I only scanned the texts though, didn’t spend any time trying to figure out the unknowns from context :man_shrugging:
  • The other day I stumbled upon an interview with Hiroyuki Sanada on YT about the new Shogun series, in Japanese with hardcoded Japanese subs. I did not understand anything (naturally! :roll_eyes: ) but I was surprised that I could now follow the subtitles as the audio went on. Last time I tried something like this was about a month ago, and I would lose track before even getting to the middle section of a subtitle row. So… sorta nice progress, but it did come at the expense of not being able to track what was actually being said to try and catch/translate some words that I “allegedly” know by now. It was just “this kana or kanji corresponds to this sound being voiced” :man_shrugging:
  • When watching films (with English subs, of course) it seems that for a few very common (frequent) words I now no longer “translate” them, just take them in Japanese. Probably it was to be expected by now, but still… it’s a small yet nice sense of… some progress being made.

Guess that’s it for now.
Today may be a vacation from WK and BP and Genki, but not from Japanese input: gonna listen to a bit of music (do I pick up more words now than two weeks ago?) and watch a film later, dunno yet if it’ll be a live-action or anime, again a way to check for vocab progress besides, you know… the actual enjoyment of the content :slight_smile:

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I think you’d be better off doing 15 items a day over 7 days, than 20 items over 5, but in any case, I’d continue to do the reviews because otherwise you are losing the benefit of the Spaced Repetition System. I’m not convinced memorizing grammar is an efficient use of time anyway, but it’s probably worth more than spending the time and not memorizing it.

Once you get comfortable with a level, that’s the time to move on, they should be hard work on first reading.

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Right, sooo… that was an interesting experiment.

  1. As I was saying yesterday, the day felt weird without the SRS routine… believe or not! (it’s kinda hard to believe for me, too)
  2. Reviews of older items went fine today both in the morning and in the evening.
  3. Doing new lessons today went I think slightly better than before the one-day break - not as much on WK (where it’s always “fun” due to how items are introduced) but on BP although it is possible I just had an “easy” batch of new vocab.
  4. The not so good: reviews of recent items (what would normally have been 24h and 48h reviews) went considerably worse than usual, due to my skipping Sunday :confused:

Gotta think about what I might do next… don’t even want to imagine how it would be after a “proper” vacation of a week or two.

The problem with that is that I’d be pushing out the Genki lessons. Now I need two days of 20+ vocab to be able to get to the next Genki lesson on the third day (so 2 textbook lessons over one week). If I reduced the number of daily lessons it’d go into 1.5 lessons a week or some such.
No idea how other people can do one lesson a day… maybe they don’t care about the associated vocab or they know it (or most of) already?

Weeell… Q.E.D. I suppose :rofl:

Don’t know that I’m trying to memorize it as such, just to get a bit more exposure to grammar points (and to vocab too) through BP’s sample sentences.
The trouble with that is that when I’m faced with batches of 50-60-70 reviews I get tired and tend to skip reading the full sentences and just answering the question directly without processing the context :man_facepalming:

Not just a you problem! I noticed this a lot in my Japanese class in college – the katakana words came much easier to those of us who were native English speakers, but was a lot harder for many of the international students.

And sadly, for recommendations, most of what I’m into is some level of fantasy :sweat:

As for breaks/lessons/etc…I can’t speak to keeping up with Genki, since I’m not following with a textbook, but personally I do often skip on the weekends, or do reviews but not lessons. It can take a while to find a pace/schedule that works for you, and that schedule might even vary from week to week depending on your energy and what’s going on in life. But don’t be afraid to try stuff out, cuz it’s important to get enough rest from studying, too.

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A-ha! :laughing:
Thanks for that. I’m hpoing it’s, as @morteASD said, a matter of getting used to how those words are “created” and it’ll become easier as I learn more and more of them.

I don’t mind fantasy settings, as long as they are light on the fantasy elements (I maybe incorrectly call them “fantastical” elements). I liked Violet Evergarden for example - it’s a fantasy land and you’ve got the mechanical arms, but the stories themselves are all grounded in reality.
And besides, I like Ghibli films - who doesn’t?!? It’s only that I’m not sure I want series with dozens/hundreds of episodes with various fantasy creatures and kids saving the world and whatnot :slight_smile:
Anyways, once the number of films I’ve queued up (there are a few dozens - but I do try to watch one at least every few days) dwindles down I’ll start that thread with more details as to what I liked and what didn’t quite work for me. We’ll see what crops up then…

That is prolly the better way to handle it. And as you say, it doesn’t have to be a fixed thing, I can always adjust week to week depending on load and what’s coming next.

Now just gotta figure out a better way to split my reviews between two daily sessions. Currently their heavily skewed towards the evening because of how the initial stages go (morning lesson → 4h → 8h in the evening → then 24h and multipliers onwards).
Wish there was some way to decide which SRS stage you’d review in a session, so that you could push the older items (over 72h old) into the morning review session the next day…

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You should start a study log! :man_dancing: They’re super fun and motivating.

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@soggyboy Sorry for the late reply. I didn’t ignore your comment, but it’s been a rough week last week, JP learning -wise and I didn’t feel like rambling on.

Accuracy on WK went down to ~90-92% from the usual ~97–98, and I don’t think I can blame just that one day off… more likely it’s my brain forgetting things it should retain - I had quite a few “what is this kanji, I’ve never seen it before!” even though they were Guru-ed :sob:
Moreover, I only managed one new Genki lesson because I slowed down with new vocab lessons on BP. And it was the famed lesson 9 which added a lot to the grammar pile :frowning: More reason for upset as although I recognize the tenses and uses when reading sentences I can’t seem to make my own conjugations… yay!

Anyway… now I’ve settled with 12 lessons in WK and 12 in BP daily, some days maybe going to 15-16 if the initial batches are “easy”. It does mean that I’ll finish Genki later than I was hoping but 10 WK + 20 BP is just a bit too much.
And I think after Genki 1 I might take a break for a couple of weeks to review all the textbook lessons before moving on to Genki 2. Maybe fill in the time with some additional N5 vocab lessons on BP…

Oh and I also set up an account for Satori Reader.
The stories are too difficult at this time (expected!), but I did check out their first chapter in Nutshell Gammar - “The same with 同じ” and gotta say it was very well laid out. Makes me wonder if I maybe should have gone with their Human Japanese e-textbooks instead of Genki :thinking:
In any case I do like Satori a lot, I’ll definitely get back to it after Genki 2.

Funny thing, though:
I had learned 午前 and 午後 on BP a while ago from the introductory Genki vocab, and just knew them ‘by heart’ without understanding their composition until now that I’ve gotten to them in WK.
Those are just two simple examples but it kinda makes sense why Tofugu recommends getting to WK level 10 to have a good kanji base before tackling textbooks.
I of course do not regret going in sooner but knowing the kanji does make vocab pickup and understanding much easier :man_shrugging:

Sooo… yeah… If I had a study log, last week it would have been quite NSFW with lots of "Welcome To Facebook"s and "For Further Study"s, if you know what I mean :rofl:
And besides, I tend to go on and on and on when I write responses (as can be seen here :blush: ) and with a properly and regularly maintained study log I’d be investing lots of time in it.
Not saying a definitive “no” to it, but… oh well maybe not right now :slight_smile:

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Oh and one more funny thing (or not, not really funny):

The other day I run into a sample grammar sentence on Bunpro where they used のがへたすぎる instead of the usual writing with kanji.
They usually go with kanji, I guess this was maybe thrown in with hiragana just to have a bit of fun at my expense, and it sure worked:
I couldn’t figure out what へた meant because it was not 下手 - once I heard the audio it made sense, but not in writing :man_facepalming:

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How does CureDolly’s “Japanese from scratch” series align to Genki’s coverage, does anyone know?

I am thinking after finishing Genki 1 and before Genki 2, instead of reviewing the same textbook chapters I might go with CureDolly’s take on the same topics.
Or would it be better to leave this series until after wrapping up Genki 2 as well?

The playlist on YT has 93 videos, that’s a lot. I’m guessing it goes beyond what is covered in Genki 1+2 but I’d like to stick with what I’ve learned so far… maybe that’s not even possible (i.e. direct overlap).

Hmmm so the last couple of days I’ve run into a lot of… not interesting vocab on Bunpro from the Genki path (lesson 11) related to train stations, commuter tickets and so on.
Up to now I’ve just let it put any vocab in my queue but now I’m wondering if maybe I should skip some items (i.e. set them to ‘mastered’), at least those that are low on the frequency lists :thinking:

And coming back to Yomitan… at last! :grin:

@NeoArcturus and @fallynleaf
What dictionaries do you use with it?
Or better said, what would you recommend for beginners, and what to consider for later down the road?
(pretty please :blush: )

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I’ll share my current setup, though keep in mind this is maybe more of a “down the road” recommendation, haha!

Here's what I wrote about it in my study log:

I did end up disabling the CC100 frequency dictionary, and also added surasura Onomatopoeia from this repository. I think those are the only changes I’ve made since the above post.

For a beginner, I think you’d be fine starting with this!

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Thank you very much! :blush:

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I don’t even nearly have as much dictionaries as @fallynleaf :sweat_smile: I only installed Jitendix, and that’s it.

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Okay, a more detailed reply now - sorry yesterday was a bit hectic.

I had picked up Jitendex, JMnedict, KANJIDIC and the JLPT+WK addons already :slight_smile:
I’ve now added DoJG and 斎藤和英大 which seems awesome with all its examples… if I’ll ever have the patience to read them :rofl:

Monolinguals… yeah there’s quite a way to go until then :man_shrugging:
Frequency lists will be useful when/if ever I’ll use Anki and will want to add my own words to SRS.

Thanks again for the recommendations!

And now, of course, even for a single kanji I am getting a looooong list in the pop-up :confused: I get why @NeoArcturus keeps it simple :slight_smile:

I don’t suppose there’s a way to hide/remove the ‘obsolete reading’ entries?
Maybe there’s a purpose to them that I’m not thinking of, but it seems to me they just add clutter to an already busy pop-up…

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If there is a way, I don’t know of it, haha. You might find that you actually appreciate those entries if you ever read older stuff where you might see obsolete readings.

I personally don’t mind the clutter because it often saves me from having to google something if I have most of what I could want to know about a word right at my fingertips. I guess I’ve never found myself wishing an entry had less information, but I have often found myself wishing it had more.

I think you’ll find that often the most common words are the most cluttery in the interface, because there are simply more uses and such to talk about (and if you have multiple dictionaries, most of them will have entries for the word). But as you learn the common words and no longer need to look those up, that will become less of an issue, and you’ll start to wish the uncommon words had more in their entries…

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Well… I’ve finished going through Genki 1 and the corresponding grammar+vocab deck on Bunpro.
Took me a little over 6 weeks, versus the planned 4 but there was too much vocab to go through.

Gotta say I’m a little bummed out at the “progress” made, which says more about me than about Genki I suppose.
I don’t feel like I know a lot more now than I did before. Sure, I recognize more vocab in films and some (few) grammar structures but that’s informed by the corresponding English subtitles rather than natural listening comprehension :frowning: There’ve been a few occasions over the last week where I’d read the sub and realize I should have understood what was said without reading, but things didn’t click. And I’m not brave enough to try watching something without subtitles :pensive:

Reading isn’t going a whole lot better either: there are still a lot of unknowns in the N5 sentences on Bunpro. Doesn’t help much if I know the grammar used when I don’t know the word making use of those grammar points.
And according to the info on their decks, I should now be familiar with 75% N5 grammar and 69% N5 vocab but it certainly feels like I’ve learned all the wrong portions of it :rofl:

I’ve seen comments around here from people considering taking the JLPT N5 or even N4 after Genki 1. I’ve no interest in the exams myself but I think I’d fail miserably even at the N5 one :man_shrugging:

Anyways. Rant over :slight_smile:
One week pause before tackling Genki 2 and I’ll see how that goes. Aiming for 5 weeks with it, so that I’d finish by the end of June…

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Just some thoughts and encouragement! Congrats on finishing Genki I!

Iteration: when you learn grammar and vocab, you have to see it again and again in different contexts for it to stick and make more and more sense. Keep iterating, and by the sounds of it, find more level appropriate material. Challenges are good, but if the challenge level is too high, you can’t even tell if you’re making progress. Genki 2 will help, so keep going, but don’t expect reading to get easier until you’ve grappled with a lot of reading. That’s just the way it is! The good news is if you read a little bit of something daily, then over time, it will get easier and easier to read more in the same amount of time. Reading more makes reading more easier. We normally have to do other language activities to support that and I’m not diminishing the importance of that, but don’t wait for or expect anything else to do that job. It took me a long time (years) to realise that and I wish I had learned it much sooner.

Expectation management: with N5 grammar, the most level appropriate material you can read is Tadoku graded readers (for learners), where things have been simplified to stick to the grammar you know and the vocabulary is also restricted to a small set. It can still be tough, but you can get that kick from seeing the grammar you know in action. You’ll still be learning a lot of vocab at this stage.

If you’re bored by graded readers or moving up from there, your best source of native material will be to get into the ABBC and read with the support of the club, or read on Satori and make it through with the help of the notes there. No matter what, at first, this will probably be a struggle and be a lot harder than Tadoku. But you will notice making progress after making it through a full ABBC pick, or a full series on Satori. See ChristopherFritz’s post on deciphering vs reading .

For films at natural speed - this should be a fun side activity with low expectations right now. You’ll need to cover a lot more vocab and grammar and get in a lot of listening practice before this starts to feel like you’re making any progress. And that’s not fair because you will be making a lot of progress. Break it down and go for simpler things and work your way up: audio for Genki exercises and reading section, audio for Tadoku/graded readers, audio for Satori episodes, manga read throughs, podcasts in Japanese directed at learners with transcripts, youtube videos in Japanese directed at learners, youtube videos directed at children, shorter films or anime episodes, easier films, most films.

Bunpro sentences - I haven’t used it, but outside of a story, reading isolated sentences is a lot harder. You’re missing the context which allows you to make connections easier. Remembering the word for “fear” is a lot easier when you just read a sentence that might make the character feel afraid.

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I like Satori Reader because you can read as little or as much as you like. I’m reading one episode a day at the moment of “The Jam Maker”. Takes me about 10mins.

  • Each sentence has audio & a translation.
  • You can click on any word you don’t know & get a translation.
  • A couple of interesting expressions and/or grammar usages are explained each episode.
  • you can link WK to SR so you can read at your current WK kanji level.

I don’t bother with their flashcard reviews because I do enough of that with WK

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Hi CezarL, could I DM you? I have a very similar setup to yours (WK + Bunpro) but I think Im about 3 weeks behind you :smile: I found your post because I was about to ask a very similar question to yours. Thanks, Rene