I’ve touched on all N5 grammar and vocab from Bunpro and an N5 vocab Anki deck (plus about 200 words I’ve learned from talking with natives). Immersion at this point is still borderline impossible, and writing sentences to practice my grammar is also incredibly frustrating since I’m trying to create novel sentences that I haven’t encountered before.
I’ve been considering diving into the Genki 1&2 books to maybe fill in the gaps I may have missed along the way, plus get access to all of its sentences and audio content. Is it a waste of time to go down to Genki 1 though? I’m on something of a tight schedule because I’ve got a 2 month trip coming up in July so I have the (lofty and probably unobtainable) goal of getting a solid foundation so that by the time I get there, immersion is *not* incredibly painful.
4 comments
The order that Grammer gets introduced is somewhat arbitrary so if you did some N5 Grammer study, you almost certainly covered some of the same material in Genki 1, but likely not all of it. At the very least, you’d want to look through it and make sure that you didn’t miss any of the topics. It also might not hurt to review, either though, Genki is almost all pretty foundational stuff that you use all the time for output, so it doesn’t hurt to drill the material pretty hard.
If you are still trying to cut your teeth on reading, the reading exercises in the back of the book in Genki are a decent place to start. I’ve heard that there is a graded reader series that goes along with Genki now too, which might be good.
N5 grammar is absolutely everywhere, in basically every single sentence. You will get plenty of reviews by just moving on to N4 now. IMO if you already studied all the N5 grammar points in Bunpro, simply review a Genki 1 vocab deck and then directly start with Genki 2.
To me Genki really helped even if I had already completed N5 vocab and was in the middle of N4
The grammar in both Genki 1 and 2 is basically the vast vast majority of the grammar you will encounter normally; you will of course be surprised by stuff you’ve never seen before but not so much that it becomes an issue, at least in simple stuff
Genki 1&2 should take you to about N4. The readings and listening practice might be useful, if you’re preparing for the JLPT.
If you’re looking for a general base of proficiency, the activities in the textbook and workbook will help you in formulating sentences.