The kanji meaning is “Think” and the Voc meaning (purple) is “think about”. The voc states that you should not use “think” because that’s 思.
I had a few mistakes on the voc word because I wrote “Think” instead of “Think about”.
Buit now I got the kanji and pridefully typed “Think about” thinking :“HA! You won’t get me this time” but to my surprise it’s… Wrong…
How I understand it is that 考える is really thinking about something and considering it, while the broader term 思う is more like “think” like “It pops like that in my mind like this because it’s my opinion or it is the way I understood it”,
This confuses me to no end and I would like to have some tips or tricks to make me remember this kanji…
My tip for these things is always the same: don’t worry about it and use undo scripts/synonyms/whatever to accept both.
Learning the nuances of vocabulary like this in a vacuum is a waste of time and brain capacity, you’ll get all that when you encounter the words in content that you read. Especially for ultra-common words like 考える and 思う.
I believe 思う is for “I think this should have been explained better”, and 考える is for “I am thinking about how this could have been explained better”. The first is an opinion and the second is the action of thinking. In English these are the same, but in Japanese they use different words, as is often the case. These differences are very hard to capture when you need short translations without context.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. Humans do not learn well through lists and especially not acquire the nuances of a word in a vacuum. I honestly do not even care about the exact meaning of a kanji or word as long as I have the reading and general idea of it down.
Wanikani SRS is about creating what I call “hooks”, essentially a carved out puzzle space for a vocabulary word before it gets acquired through immersion. WK will never make you fluent in Japanese, it will just make learning it way easier by clearing the trees and roots for when the road crew eventually comes through.
