Well, that massively depends on what you read. For LNs, probably near 100% of the time because LNs tend to opt for furigana a lot
For VNs, probably near 0% since they only put furi on hard words, which 他所 wouldn’t classify as I imagine.
Other things i don’t have enough experience with to say.
Regular games are a free for all. They assume the player knows how to read stuff.
According to this link both readings existed before Feb 16, 2023. And that’s how I remember it, at least they were present this year. But maybe some time before that. Maybe even since the beginning. You just learned the first one. We can’t rule that out.
Return to Apprentice is exactly what you want if you really want to learn the words. But if you’re doing it, say, for a badge, then yes, you want the system to forgive you.
Now that’s bad. Not specific to Wanikani though. SRS sounds like an easy way to learn kanji. But a hard way seems to be easier. Or so I think at the moment. Or may be not a good way for me. I like it more how it goes without SRS. Because then I can do the learning when I have time. And I don’t have this pressure that they’ll keep piling up. Basically yes. I can’t do it every day, or once in two days. And it’s hard to control how many will pop up, AFAIR.
Can you elaborate? Give examples? I’m curious.
You’re a level ten, I mean, you had to have seen lots already, no?
Edit: Part of the complaint here is that the sentences are supposed to be funny/ strange sentences written in english and translated to Japanese. They aren’t useful. They feature characters like koichi, salmon, ect. Who these people are I dont know. From a cartoon?
And many of the later/ more difficult words you will find don’t help you determine when to use a certain word.
I only recently started learning the grammar, and with the translation, rikaichamp and God’s help I more or less understand sentences. For now I just ignore them. Maybe at some point I’ll return to them.
Come to think of it, ideally, they should consist of the words I know, but considering that at the beginning I knew little to no words, different users know different words, and frequently used words are not learned first, it’s hard to achieve. But yeah, rikaichamp helps, which I discovered recently. And still some understanding of the grammar is needed.
If they have such sentences, that doesn’t look useful. If you stumble into one of those, drop a link please.
Koichi is supposedly the creator, by the way. The rest are fictional (invented) characters.
To really determine when to use a word you need an explanatory dictionary, I think. The context sentences… I think the idea was just to give some examples that give some idea of it. It’s either a couple of examples or an explanatory dictionary entry. The latter sounds like too much. And I don’t see a middle ground here.
Looking at the 他所’s page, the examples looks good/nice/okay. (I don’t know Japanese enough to make an educated judgment.). One is interesting, the rest are more, say, casual.
This sounds like a request for sentences from a phrase book. But that doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Some of the sentences are actually okay because they aren’t made up for “laughs” but it seems extracted from other dictionary example sentences. As you linked, that is one such example.
I use Takaboto to look up more questionable words and see the example sentences given. Sometimes there are dozens.
Just because the dictionary has english meanings, it doesn’t mean anything without true context. And for that, you must have a dictionary with such example sentences available.
This is especially true for words that have multiple meanings. Seeing various sentences gives a far better example of how and when to use a word.
Edit: Level 15 has actually been okay for sentences, but when I run across some of the bad ones ill show you.
Edit 2: I’m multitasking…badly You basically said the same thing in what I quoted. Sorry
Edit 3: The middle ground is to provide very simple, clear uses of the word. Three sentences is about good to see what is best to memorize the words meaning in english. More complicated words should accommodate one or two additional sentences. Shouldn’t be a problem, as they have Japanese speakers working for the company.
This is unfortunately very true. I was recently discussing with my teacher the Japanese equivalents of “closing a company” and there were at least 5-6, each with a slightly different nuance, but 2 among them being actual synonyms.
The context sentences as they are now are either too abstract or the English translation doesn’t match them well enough.
Speaking of “yoso”, not quite sure why it wasn’t the default reading in the first place.
I only speak English, so I don’t know if its like this for all languages, but Japanese has so many synonyms or words with very slight nuance changes. And you really need to know them all it seems because they’re used everywhere.
German is quite similar in this respect - you have tons of words which are almost synonyms and just like in Japanese, some expressions are oddly specific.
I don’t think you should focus on learning all the meanings right away. I believe the main goal of WaniKani is to make you learn the kanji. What I came to is, ideally I want to learn one meaning and one reading. Because the more you learn, the harder it’s to check if you gave a correct answer during review. But since we’re living in a real world 
I’m trying to remember a couple of meanings and a couple of readings. Or let me start from the other end, you want to do reviews often (e.g. once a day) and don’t spend much time on it. For that you need a quick way to check if you gave a correct answer. In this respect I’d prefer WaniKani to be more specific about which meanings and readings to learn.
The rest is out of scope of WaniKani. Or out of scope of reviews to be more precise. You want to better understand what a word means? That’s good. You can use the context sentences. If that’s not enough there are dictionaries. But if you try to set the bar too high, you’ll burn out. It’s best to accept that it’s not going to be fast, and do it one step at a time. I’m taking about this:
To a lesser extent to this:
This also sounds like an optimistic way of thinking, though I can’t be sure:
You’ll learn the nuances in time. The bar should be not too high and not too low.
One other thing why the context sentences can be useful is, they make you read Japanese. Reading helps remembering words. I.e. it’s best to start making use of words as soon as you can. But not too soon.
Translations are often wrong. At the beginning you have to rely on them, but you should start trying to understand what it means, not how it translates, as soon as you can (think explanatory dictionaries).
One possible explanation, they sort of imported the readings from a dictionary, and now whenever they see an issue, they fix it by hand. Or it might have been a human error. For all I know たしょ can still be used in some dialects.
The following article seems to be relevant here. It’s probably longer then it should be. So maybe there’s not much sense in reading till the end. But it speaks about stages of learning a language among other things. And by the way, that’s the resource I use to learn about the grammar. It’s certainly far from being ideal, sometimes too complex, but it’s interesting, at least to me.
It should be obvious, but just in case, all of that of course is my opinion.
As for the joke sentences, I disagree. They’re a waste of time. As such, I’ve taken to ignoring them completely. Fortunately, I read enough practical Japanese outside of WK to get enough exposure to seeing them in context, which is what’s actually helpful. And again, useful examples have included weather forecasts, news stories, e-mail you might receive from a customer or a boss, having to explain a traffic accident to a police officer or a medical emergency to a 1-1-9 operator. There are a world of actually useful ways to incorporate these words without the kind of weird and juvenile stuff we’ve all see in the example sentences.
I also read something about how things changed in February of this year or something else changed after four months. Some of these items are “Enlightenment” level for some users, so they may not see certain kanji for a very long time, and when they were first taught, it might have been years ago (such as in my case. I believe 他所 first appeared for me in 2021). So when it the change was made or announced doesn’t matter really when it comes to the UX I’ve described of suddenly dropping an “Enlightenment”-level word to “Apprentice” because the user was never taught–by this system–the now-only-valid reading of the word in the first place.
The only UX that would have made sense in this case would simply have been to response in the review system: “we changed this, but you don’t know that, so next time, we’re looking for the answer: Xyz” rather than taking a word that, based on SRS, should still be “Enlightened”-level and dropping it to the lowest level in the system.
Right, but is this about context sentences in general or about the ones in WaniKani specifically? I understand the context sentences in WaniKani are supposed to be funny to make learning a more entertaining process (which is a good idea in general I think), but they often (I guess anecdotally…) end up being so abstract that they provide poor context for the correct usage of the taught word. Not to mention that if the translation either uses a word not among the accepted English meanings for the vocabulary card or is so detached from the Japanese sentence you can’t possible align them, their usefulness decreases further.
They end up being a catch 22 situation - if you can understand the context sentence in Japanese, you need neither the translation nor the vocabulary you’re trying to memorize.
Many of the kanji and vocab cards in WaniKani seem like they’ve been handcrafted, often to their detriment. There are some words (already reported many times) where dictionaries contain the correct English equivalent, but WaniKani featured an incorrect one. Stuff like 都庁, which means a very specific building (easy to google also), but that’s not what the English gloss in WaniKani claimed. Also, some kanji originally had meanings which neither aligned with how they’re used in words, nor how their meanings are given in dictionaries.
Similarly, I feel the たしょ is a “rookie mistake”. To me as a beginner then it felt okay, but a couple of more advanced users already noticed how weird it is and it would’ve been equally weird to a native speaker most likely.
Dropping it to Apprentice might be painful for some users, but it’s possible the most accurate “corrective” approach. When running an Anki deck I would do something similar. If I went through several SRS stages with an incorrect reading/meaning, I would drop the item down to re-learn it.
Dropping it to Apprentice might be painful for some users, but it’s possible the most accurate “corrective” approach.
Except, in this case, たしょ is not strictly an incorrect reading (that would have been even more egregious). It is now considered the no-longer-preferred reading. This was the reason it wasn’t rejected as a “red” wrong answer but instead refused with a “warning shake” response instead.
I suppose an inaccurate teaching in the first place is the bigger problem. You certainly don’t get the time lost learning it incorrectly for three years either way.
Similarly, I feel the たしょ is a “rookie mistake”. To me as a beginner then it felt okay, but a couple of more advanced users already noticed how weird it is and it would’ve been equally weird to a native speaker most likely.
This is so often the case that I almost never attempt to use newly-learned words when speaking in the classes I also take, because when I do, the context is almost never correct. Instead, I use WK as a way to better remember the properly taught vocabulary I learn during my classes and while using Pimsleur.
Because the really hard part about classroom Japanese study is you’re shown 30 words one time when it’s actually necessary to be exposed to anything at least nine times in order to memorize it. Also, the way words are taught to foreign speakers (as romaji or hiragana with no connection to the sound of the word to their visual, idea-based kanji) is that it makes it super hard to avoid confusing similar-sounding words.
My favorite example of this is type and document, しゅるい and しょるい. Because しゅ and しょ are extremely sonically close to one another, an English speaker, for example, very easily confuses the two words in a way that is probably surprising to Japanese native speakers. But when one understands しょ＝書 and that 書 is basically “writing,” and also that 種 (as しゅ) is basically “kind [of]” then it gets tremendously easier to instinctively say the correct word as a reflex while speaking. It becomes perfectly logical that ‘document’ is 書類 and ‘variety [of]’ means 種類.
This is the kind of thing that makes using WK a God-send, because it serves as a good re-enforcement tool for the studying a learner is already doing elsewhere. But yes, I would never recommend or characterize WK as a tool for learning the Japanese language in a way that renders learning with a teacher and textbook unnecessary. That is very far from being the case.
I meant the context sentences in WaniKani specifically. But since I basically never read them, I can only speculate what their intention was.
Actually, I think WaniKani is too funny and entertaining. I’d prefer it to be more… composed? Moreover I think remembering a story is overkill. I got a feeling after using WaniKani for a while that a couple of words, maybe a sentence, should be enough. At least for me. What kind of confirms my idea is the KanjiDamage website, where they give you a mnemonic. But there’s no app there and well, I don’t really like the language they use.
As for the rest, you give no examples. As such, I have to either believe you or not. But I understand that you might not want to spend time on this.
I think that translation might help even if it’s not perfect, which never is. I’m not sure I’m at the point where I can always understand what a sentence means with a dictionary alone (without a translation).
From what I can see you don’t want to memorize たしょ even it’s sometimes used. At least that shouldn’t be you preferred reading.
I believe they said it themselves somewhere. At the very least you can see what information they provide to Google:
To add to the point, I don’t think that if they made you learn all the used meanings, the contexts where the words are used, all that needs to be learned to use a word, that’ll be a good thing. Ideally you want to learn every day for short periods of time. For that you need to give a quick answer and a quick way to figure out if you were correct. Which means simplification, which makes it incorrect to some degree. Whether they were able to find the right balance… Apparently it’s not perfect. But is not bad either.
P.S. The main reason I joined the conversation was, say, exaggerated claims like “at no point in the past had WaniKani ever taught the vocabulary reading of 他所 as よそ.” You don’t want to blame a website too eagerly. To err is human. If a website gets hacked, do you prefer it to notify you about the case or not? On the other hand, I also have a feeling that there’s room for improvement. Actually I think the method itself (SRS) is not really good. These days I use the Self-Study Quiz userscript. Or my fork of it, to be precise. Because it’s not perfect either Anyway, where was I… room for improvement, and I can believe there are long-standing issues. But if not WaniKani, then what?
Oooh, that’s why this よそ reading felt so odd suddenly. That felt weird when it came back for reviews.
That being said out of all the reasons to complain about WK’s recent changes, I feel like them prioritizing more popular readings for vocab is completely reasonable.
At least they have now added two more sentences to explain 進撃. Previously, it was just one sentence where 進撃 is a part of a title. So at least there’s that.
Where it wasn’t even correctly translated, because the English translation of the title (Attack on Titan) doesn’t make sense 
I guess the translators thought it made sense given the events in season 1 before it became clear that the series is not about people and Titans attacking each other but about a specific titan called the Attack Titan
Yeah, I think the problem here is also that using a title translation as a way to demonstrate how a word is used or for general teaching purposes like Duolingo does it sometimes in the Japanese course is always a BadIdea™ 
More like superlazy