I got this Kanji (跳) a little bit ago and I keep getting it wrong…
As I’ve only really seen this kanji in the word 跳ぶ, I keep putting jump, however the only officially correct solution from Wanikani is hop. I was thinking there was some reason for why jump wasn’t added, so I decided not to put it as a user synonym until today, when I looked at the “Found In Vocabulary” section.
All of the vocabulary examples mention jumping, so I’m not exactly sure why jump hasn’t already been put in for this kanji… does anyone have any insight for why this might be?
There’s nothing official about that – it’s just the KANJIDIC database’s “meanings” list, which in turn is an amalgamation of meaning glosses from various other sources. There’s no process beyond “email Jim Breen” for suggesting revisions, though, so I suspect oddities in the meaning field tend to linger on a long time.
IMHO “kanji meanings” are not worth worrying about – vocabulary is where the important stuff is.
Sometimes they just do that when there are two kanji with similar meanings, and they want you to keep the keywords separate. Like all the “see”, “look at”, “view” etc. It’s probably fine to add it as a synonym.
Like a vocabulary word I just reviewed today. “Ordinary”, not “normal”, what was I thinking? Sometimes I add a synonym, sometimes I just humor the all-knowing Crabigator’s infinite wisdom in choosing key words and roll with it.
Use Anki mode for meanings, people, especially for kanji. I get second hand frustration from seeing all these meaning-related threads. Whether you remember 跳 as jump or hop will have zero bearing on your ability to read and write Japanese. Making this distinction is a complete waste of time and mental bandwidth.
From my experience, Wanikani would normally add synonyms as secondary translations (especially for instances like this, when the primary translation of hop is a more nuanced word than jump) so I was wondering if there was an explanation in the connotation of the vocabulary using this kanji, or something to a similar effect. Luckily I have both the time and mental bandwidth to question these things as I learn a new language!
I looked around a bit online using jisho.org and some other sites that came up when I searched the question in Japanese and put it in the summary here since it got kinda long with links.
Links to online sources talking about the differences between 飛ぶ 跳ぶ 跳ねる etc
I also looked at the example sentences there with 跳ねる in them and it appears to define mostly animals or inanimate objects like hair.
I also found a link describing the difference between 跳ぶ and 跳ねる because the second word I learned it as “to hop” and this is what was written 跳ぶ（とぶ）の類語・言い換え - 類語辞書 - goo辞書
Basically this kanji here refers to a jump that is known to be shorter, with an immediate return to the ground. Yeah jump is close but to capture the nuance of the word I believe WK only allows hop as a definition.
Albeit this is just from looking online. We can also ask the mods themselves about why it’s not an allowed word. After all, if it was able to be put into user synonyms, that means it’s not a hidden blocked word for the kanji itself.
Thanks for the tag–you may be right that we wanted to convey the nuance here, but I can also see it being an oversight. I’m asking the content team to take a look, thanks!
Hello, the content team has made updates to this item’s meaning and relaying the specifics of the update below:
Added “jump,” “bounce,” “hopping,” “leaping,” “jumping,” and “bouncing” to the allow list, added “hope” and “hoping” to the block list, and added “spring,” “skip,” “skipping,” “splash,” “splashing,” “bound,” and “bounding” to the warning list.
Sometimes I add a synonym, sometimes I just humor the all-knowing Crabigator’s infinite wisdom in choosing key words and roll with it.