Why is the Kanji for “again” 又(また) taught at level 51? The Kanji is the exact same as the the “stool” radical, which is taught at level 2, yet the Kanji doesn’t appear until level 51? How come? Seems pretty nonsensical to me.
It should 100% be moved to level 2.
Because the kanji was taught earlier and was moved to 51.
It used to be in level 2. The word また is rarely written in kanji, which left beginners with the mistaken impression that it was more commonly used than it is.
For comparison, また in hiragana appears in 5404 entries on jpdb (which tracks word usage in fiction), which is almost 100%, and 又 appears in only 262.
Teaching it in level 2 (because it was) made learners use it more often, even though it’s a very rare kanji and you basically never see it
Aaaah now that makes a lot of sense! Well I guess that explains it.
Thanks for the answer!
Stuff like this makes me question why Wanikani bothers teaching the kanji writings of vocabulary that are, the vast majority of the time, written just in kana. Sure, you might see the kanji version pop up from time to time so it’s good to know at some point, but from my perspective it makes more sense to just learn first whichever writing is more common (kana or kanji.) I might just be ignorant and there’s a justifiable reason for WK’s way, but it seems like it runs the risk of confusing people into thinking that the kanji writings they see in the app are more common than they actually are in practice.
Because WK isn’t teaching you japanese, but how to read?
WK is a kanji learning tool, so it will only teach you kanji and how to read them. So even if a word is commonly written in kana, wanikani will only teach you the kanji and how to read it. That’s also why there are no kana-only words on wanikani.
又 as a radical in lots of different Kanji. It’s important to learn that it actually means something as well (また）if for no other reason than to provide another cognitive hook for recognition and production. It never hurts to know more!
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