Hi I’m not sure about this but I think the Saki 先 vocabulary is accepting the wrong answer…
The purple vocabulary not the kanji.
The kanji means past, ahead, former
The vocabulary さき teaches the meanings: tip, ahead, first, future
But it accepts the pink kanji answer past which confuses me everytime I see it.
Attached is a screenshot, let me know what you think.
Thanks
Past (or previous, or former, or anything basically related to something coming before something else) is also a concept expressed with 先 (as a word, not just as a kanji). So it’s not so much that WaniKani accepts a wrong answer, it’s more that not all the right answers are listed.
As for why that particular meaning isn’t listed, I’m not sure. It would be a bit much to list all the possible meanings for 先 as there are a lot, but the general concept of “previous” or “past” is probably the most common one I’ve encountered it in, off the top of my head.
I could have sworn that in the past that it accepted 先 as meaning past or previous for the vocabulary meaning. Maybe it was changed or updated at some point.
Are you not mixing up the kanji lesson and the vocab lesson?
The vocabulary used to only have “past” and “previous” as valid answers, if I remember correctly. They fixed it relatively recently.
Past is permitted because this meaning is in the allow list.
Screenshot from the Item Inspector script.
If I’m not mistaken when I learnt that vocab the reading mnemonic was something like “in the previous episode of the TV series there was a saw and a key”. I actually never learnt those alternatives meanings for it. It must have been updated recently but it keeps the old meaning for those who learnt it.
So to be sure; the vocabulary 先 can mean previous, past but also tip, ahead, future?
So it means both past and future? lol
That looks to be the case, yes. It also has a lot more meanings than that, Goo lists seventeen different meanings. Context will clarify which is meant.
Note that there’s nuance to every single meaning, which is not always clear from the English translation - it’s not possible to use 先 in every instance where you speak of “future” (or past, or tip, or ahead, or destination, or any of the other meanings it has) in English.
In that way, it’s similar to “before”
I think it might make sense to look at this kanji in a more meta way. You’re looking at the end result - past and future. What if you consider the kanji more metaphorically and use the “tip” or “point” meaning for that? As in, thinking of “a point in time”:
さっき - at some point in time (a short whie ago)
さきほど - just like that point (a while ago)
先ほどから - from that point onwards (since some time ago, for a while)
これから先 - from this point on (from now on)
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