I’ve recently been coming across N1 kanji that are not yet part of WK.
Do you guys intend to eventually include all of the N1 kanji, and perhaps even some kanji beyond the Ns?
Would be super cool!
Cheers!
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I would love that, although i can already foresee flocks of speed runners complaining this will delay their finishing of wanikani or trying to convince us all these kanjis are not needed and best learnt in the wild or something like that. That being said I’d be all for it.
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To each their own, though personally I use Wanikani as a long term, super cool supplementary resource. I study grammar and read material elsewhere, and WK aids in every immersion asset of course. So being able to learn all the Kanji through WK would be super nice.
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Nah, the big issue is that a large amount of WK users NEVER finish. Clearly, getting to lv 50 was quite an ordeal and adding 10 more levels up to lv 60 has made it even more daunting for many. For many, they just decide on an arbitrary level when they’re “done” with SRS learning (around lv 40-50), since you need to focus mainly on immersion toward the end anyway. So, the return of just doing WK goes down the longer you go.
That being said, it’s been suggested before to add more levels to WK and some really want that. For me, i think it might just not be that useful. If you’ve managed to complete most of WK, by then you should have a solid foundation for how to learn/memorize kanji going forward. You need to move on from WK sooner or later, and the biggest lesson is developing a method for learning new kanji as you encounter them.
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Sorry, but you’ll never, ever be able to learn “all the kanji”. That’s not a realistic goal in the slightest.
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60 levels of kanji is already a hell lot and it’s anyhow just a number. The diminishing returns of adding even more kanji into WaniKani make it into an endeavor which very likely wouldn’t pay off 
.
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It might be interesting if WaniKani can make a curated set of “most” Kanji and supporting vocabularies. But first of all, WaniKani might need more vocabularies to cover for additional readings and unexpected meanings of pre-existing higher level Kanji, even down to quite a lot in lower levels.
I can see this being possible, if WaniKani is willing to make several decks of optional expansion packs; because that would be a lot, many times more than 9000.
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Should have specified all the commonly used Kanji.
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I gotta agree I would definitely appreciate some kind of option for more advanced kanji. 叶 is one that’s actually useful, I mean I just ran into 叶える the other day and had to look it up, though not all the remaining N1 kanji are nearly as common. Looked at the list and there’s some food ones that I definitely see all the time in Japan, like 茄(子)、鯛、栗, etc.
I guess the common argument you see is that once you get to that level, you kind of slow down on SRS stuff and start learning other ways — and that’s definitely true — but there’s some I’ll eventually need to drill to learn properly. Like all the fish ones. A few unlockable bonus categories after level 60 could make WK a more comprehensive resource, thought I’m guessing that would be pretty low priority given the relatively small number of users who get that far.
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Which, interestingly enough, the vast majority of demand seems to come people who aren’t even level 60 and couldnt access that content anyways. Then, statically, and majority of those people never even make it to 60 in the first place -_-
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I feel like the community would be better off making an anki deck you can download or something. The remaining joyo kanji aren’t that many, but just enough where simply adding them to a deck isn’t so simple a task, but I am not as saavy with Anki, so maybe someone out there would be up for it.
I do believe @polv or someone else did this a little while back actually.
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oh. Perfect.
I made one back in 2017, but the someone made it on Kitsun.io as well, which is probably more updated.
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most people who get to level 60 stops paying and using the service, why would they care coming to the forum to discuss about it or make suggestions? It is a tiny minority of those who reach level 60 that hangs around, most just move on and never look back. Probably most of them would have been more than happy to hang around a little longer to get to level 70, and those who didn’t want to wouldn’t be any different from the many that in the current wanikani stop at level 50.
Really? I that’s not the vibe I got from the level 60 posts I read.
Would you like to elaborate on why this minority is not a valid sample set? Does getting to level 60 and staying around make you more biased towards not wanting more content on wanikani? I don’t think it does, but if you do then I would like you to help me understand why.
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If anything, you’d think that the folks who reach level 60 and stick around the community would feel more inclined toward wanting WK to have more content, compared to users who reach level 60 and then dip, so the fact that so many level 60 folks here don’t want it should stand out…
For the record, I’m in the camp of not wanting more levels. I’ve said this before in another thread, but there are so, so many kanji out there that aren’t in WaniKani, once you’ve gotten 2,000 of the most common ones down, it’s really hard to predict which ones you’ll need to learn besides those. That part depends on what you’re doing in your life, what kinds of media you’re reading/watching, etc. If Tofugu made more levels, they’d be making an attempt to guess which kanji would be the most useful to the largest number of people, but inevitably, they’d be leaving out kanji that you need, and they’d be teaching you other kanji that you don’t personally need at that time.
I’ve personally found that the non-WK kanji I’ve encountered so far don’t really line up with JLPT/joyo/frequency lists. When I last looked at all the kanji cards I had in Anki, only about half of those kanji were included on those lists. The rest of them weren’t on any list, but I still had to know them anyway if I wanted to read the stuff I wanted to read. So really you reach a certain point where you just have to learn how to learn kanji on your own because no predetermined list will have everything that you need on it.
I do see the utility in WK letting users create their own “level 61” and such, though, and add in their own kanji and vocab so that people can have all of their kanji reviews in one SRS if they wanted to. I think that’d be far more useful than completing the joyo set or the JLPT set (which I believe isn’t even fully known, anyway; there’s no official list or anything for it, so it’s all guesswork).
When I was a beginner, I did want to learn all the JLPT/joyo kanji, but I’ve since realized how pointless that is. I’m sure I’ll eventually learn them all if I keep up a habit of reading Japanese for enough years, but at this point, it would be a waste of my time to prioritize them instead of just learning the specific kanji that I happen to encounter.
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I have come across roughly 3300 kanji from reading that I had in words I srsed. Theres probably an extra 100 or so I know from various names and talking with other learners. Theres about 600 more I know just from learning a bunch of random kanken 1 words and yojijukugo. So excusing any forgetfulness, I would have known at least 1 word for 4000 kanji that I could have read for you.
I still don’t know all the joyo kanji or N1 kanji
(and neither do the japanese people I’ve asked)
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Well, since WK sticks to JLPT Kanji, I think it would be useful to keep growing that list first.
Sure, you might not find use for all of them, but then again, that may already apply to some of the Kanji in these 60 levels. Or the curated vocabulary WK chooses to teach…
Having the ability to add custom Kanji from a database would be great too, and if mnemonics for those would grow as well, would be even awesome.
Just my 2cs
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Where does it stick to JLPT kanji? WaniKani’s kanji ordering is independent of JLPT.
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