LLearn Japanese

Bunpro, WaniKani or Nativshark?

  • May 12, 2023

I am trying to choose a SRS program to use for studying and I am having trouble picking which to use. I mostly just know most of kana now and some vocab. Which ever I decide to go with, I plan on doing that along with the Japanese from Zero books with the use of Anki (wish there were already decks for this) to study the words from the Zero book. Would really appreciate getting some of peoples opinion on these apps and what ended up working best for them.

8 comments

  1. I’m not very familiar with nativshark, but as for the other 2: I use both bunpro and wanikani. They are both great at what they set out to do, but you can’t just use 1 for all your japanese needs. Bunpro is a great SRS for grammar and wanikani is great for kanji. For vocab, I use Anki as well. Wanikani is rolling out kana only words next week as well though, so that will help using fewer SRSes.

  2. I don’t understand why you need another SRS. Just use Anki for everything. There absolutely are premade decks for JFZ, as well as for pretty much everything else.

  4. I like Wanikani, it doesn’t overload me with information or force me to keep adding cards to my workload.

  6. From what i heard Nativshark is more all in one than either wanikani or Bunpro. On the other hand Bunpro and Wanikani each have their own focus and one alone is not enough.

    I’m personally using Wanikani, Anki and 2 other tools called Jalup (n+1 sentences basically) and Ringotan (for writing kanji). I recently dropped Bunpro because the load of too many SRS is too much for me right now, but it was a fine tool and i learned a lot from it.

    That said, I think the value of Wanikani after around a year of using it and 1000 kanji learned is the highest for me so far. Knowing most of the used kanji helps a lot while reading a bunch of stuff. Onen thing that was lacking was learning sentence structure, which I was able to learn through Tango Anki decks and Jalup.

  7. NativShark has great resources and the explanations are really great too! I bought a lifetime license back when it was $300, and don’t regret it.

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