Anyone else feel like the order we learn vocab is... interesting?

Wanikani will teach those readings when you start learning vocabulary, but the readings that you are learning now are used in a whole lot of other words that the kanji form a part of.
Basically every kanji has two or more ways to be read, which depend on which word they’re a part of.

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Oh okay, that makes sense! Thank you!

It’s nothing special, it’s just the word that is used for experience points. Its 経験値 けいけんち, where the last Kanji means value. It comes up a looooot.

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I can: You’re at a summer festival and you want to ask where you can buy one. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I gotta say, I’m intrigued as to how it came to this.

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This is a new record for erroneous claims against WaniKani’s vocab. There is literally no way any Japanese person thinks 大した is a word no one uses.

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Copying and pasting what I wrote in another thread, but I actually think 飴細工 was a pretty good addition (it was added as a vocab recently):

  1. it teaches the く onyomi of 工
  2. “name of craft”+ 細工 is a fairly common pattern. Just by going with words already in Wanikani there is 紙細工(paper craft), 竹細工(bamboo work​), 真珠細工(pearl work​), 象牙細工(ivory carving​), 革細工(leathercraft), 貝細工 (shellwork)… Probably any kind of craft + 細工 will be understood by a Japanese person even if not common.
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Also this is exactly the kind of word where someone says “I’ll never hear or use that word in my life” and then they tell us the next day they were watching Japanese news and there was some candy sculpting event or something.

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For what it’s worth, I’m a native English speaker and I’ve never heard (or read) this word before. I’m not particularly religious, though.

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It actually happened to me.
I was reviewing Level 43 高炉 (blast furnace, admittedly not a very common word) and a native speaker was dumbfounded and told me something like:
“I have NEVER even used that word in my entire life!”. And then not even one month after that we were watching TV, it was a documentary about one of the prefecture and they used it many times !!

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Honestly though, that kind of nuance will only come once you know all of the vocab and you are trying to immersive-learn the language. For example; why do we have murder, kill, homicide, manslaughter, assassinate, and to end life? It’s just that we use some words sometimes and other words other times for no apparent reason. Similar things happen in all languages so it’s best to just accept it as fact and read a lot so you can naturally pick up on it. Personally, i’ma just rote memorize the kanji with wk and then try and immerse myself so that I can actually contextualize the grammar and nuance. (That’s my not-so-humble opinion at least)

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Grain of salt. I worked in IT and I heard エンジニア more often but there was a fair amount of people who used 工学 工学者 など as well. Saw it in contracts more often than not too. Same with 開発 more people said 開発 than the basterdized develolper im not even gonna try in katakana lol. but some people used either or.

But, you will hear both. Any teacher who tells you otherwise is probably just a native speaker trying their hand at being a teacher and they might be perfectly fine for getting better but they dont even realize theyre saying a false hood.

One of the first things they try to slap out of you when youre studying to be an actual language teacher is that just because YOU dont speak that way or your country doesnt speak that way doesnt mean its wrong. You have to be aware of others and how they speak as well.

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I agree with a lot of what you said. However, I would say that I hear and use ALOT of the words I have picked up in wanikani every single day. A lot of them ARE used in everyday speech and you hear people say them all the time. 反省 for example i hear once or twice a day at work. 想像 I hear daily. 創造 I hear at least 3 times a week.

And these are just a few examples. Sure there are some words youre more likely to find in a written manual but now that im reading a lot I see them all the time. 連日 for example. My colleagues were impressed I knew this one but it also shows up in our daily schedule forms that we recieve and it shows up in email alot. Ironically, I was very suspect of this word when i first learned it on wanikani.

The words youre learing (Not all) but a lot of them are very useful in real life. VERY useful. It has expanded my ability to speak, read and function and I was already N2 (passed in 2009) before doing wanikani.

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And yet, it comes in as 6,180th most frequently used word in one database 7,631st in another. Hardly what I would expect to be learning in level one.

It’s not that uncommon. I know people that have been here longer than me that barely speak the language, let alone read it. I had one boss that had been running a business here for 40 years, yet he was barely able to order in an izakaya.

By contrast, the 6180th most common word in English is “danish”. So, not a word I’d expect to use daily, per se, but one I would not be surprised if kindergarten-age kids knew, at least in the context of fruit pastries. 7631st is “kidney”.

But yeah, the other consideration is that WaniKani runs on the philosophy that we’re adult learners, and can deal with complicated concepts. So if a word like, say, “antidisestablishmentarianism” could be written in Japanese entirely with level-one kanji, you can bet it’d appear in level one.

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If the purpose of WaniKani was to teach vocabulary in order of frequency, then there’d be some kind of argument for waiting to learn 大した.

But that’s not what WaniKani is for. WaniKani is teaching how to read kanji, and 大 is an extremely common, basic kanji. And 大した is a common word that uses that kanji. It would be silly to wait, what, 20 levels or something?

It’s a JLPT N3 word, though even that seems late to me. Anyone who is at an intermediate level of Japanese should be plenty comfortable with it.

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People who have played Pokémon Sword or Shield probably know the Pokémon Milcery, which evolves using certain “sweets”. Guess what these sweets are called in the Japanese version?

In the description Kanji are used, but not for 飴. So I guess, if anything is rare it’s that Kanji, not the word.

In the game Utawaterumono candy on a stick in different shapes also came up. 99% that was 飴細工 too in the original Japanese version.

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飴 is actually not a joyo kanji, so it’s probably not going to appear in games, but it’s a reasonably common word, so you might encounter the kanji on the more traditional shop signs.

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I can’t resist. I love this word. A friend actually used it in a book, and I harassed him about it for a long time. (he is a scholar of Chinese religions and their interactions with the West, so it was entirely reasonable for him to casually use this word.)
Thank you for using here on WK. :slight_smile:

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