I was watching a DBZ episode and found the word やまい, whose kanji is 病. I was surprised to find that it is not part of the vocabulary, even though this pronunciation appears in the kanji kun’yomi section.
Shouldn’t it be added to the vocabulary?
Edit: just found a sentence in a vocab page that contains the kanji alone.
Wanikani does not contain all kanji, let alone all words.
病 is top 5k by frequency according to my JPDB dataset, so possibly common enough to warrant inclusion (although I don’t recall encountering it in the wild myself). 病気 is top 2k however so significantly more common, both according to the database and my personal experience.
Top 5k for びょうor やまい？
edit: also asking, because I do not know how those frequency lists work…
For やまい; suffix びょう is top 11k. The way jpdb’s frequency list works is that it has automatically parsed all the text in a lot of books etc to split the sentences into words, which it then counts. The difficult part is that splitting into words isn’t something you can do 100% reliably with a computer, and so if it has misparsed sentences the counts can be off. Also when a word could be read two ways I think it just picks one and assumes they’re all read that way. In this specific case, quite a lot of the sentences it lists as examples for びょう are ones like 母は流行り病で早くに亡くなった which I’m pretty sure should be read はやりやまい, so here the びょう count will be too high. But even with that kind of issue the jpdb frequency counts can be helpful, because they’re based on a lot of light novels so they have a different bias compared to more traditional frequency lists that use newspaper corpuses.
(5K does seem higher than I would have expected, but maybe that’s just because 病気 is so much more common it makes 病 feel rare by comparison.)
Yeah precisely, you can’t fully trust these databases when multiple readings are possible, or when you can parse words and expressions in different ways due to lack of spaces. But even if you add together びょう and やまい it’s still a lot less common than 元気.
Yeah I tried this updated version of the JPDB database and it gives 病気 at top 1300.
Just checked, and this one is in the pipeline to be added.
Thanks @MichaelR, I think it makes sense. As some people are saying, I’ve found 病気 more often too, but after all, the kun’yomi reading is already present in the kanji, and it’s a single-kanji word.