Well, yeah, you should definitely learn stuff on WK rather to rely on a heuristic.
Still, anything that helps is worth knowing. Those rules have helped me a lot in the wild.
I guess. I would not go all the way down to 51%, but correct 2 times out of 3 is good enough for me.
Sure, I’m not going to argue against finding ways to give yourself an edge in the wild, or when you’re sitting for an exam or something. But we see a lot of topics here that are basically “I was told there’s this rule, and now WK is telling me something else, what gives.” So I wish WK either stopped half-assing this element or removed mentions of it altogether in the early levels.
I definitely agree here. I think it would be better to just change the usual READING text for kanji specifically to KUN’YOMI or ON’YOMI. That way one doesn’t have to constantly get “bumped” for the “wrong” reading unless they’re inattentive. 大 single-handedly made me give up on trying to remember a “rule” for kun’yomi or on’yomi.
Ultimately though, I think it’s a bigger problem of people understanding kanji readings the same way as vocabulary readings which is inherently flawed. One may think “すい means water” and “みず also means water” and, while they wouldn’t be wrong, if they don’t separate that すい means water and みず is water (cold, at least), then it makes sense the switching between kun’yomi and on’yomi would make sense. Sometimes the kun’yomi can be read alone, but even most kun’yomi at least need kana to make a comprehensible word.
In English, it would be quite strange if I said I “smoking is bad for your pneumonos,” both to native and non-native English speakers. “Pneumono” may mean “lung,” but we don’t just use it alone. Just like Japanese though, English often employs “normal” words in compounds, especially in cases of German roots. Latin roots act normally like on’yomi while English/German roots are far enough removed from PIE stems that we just mash them together.
Japanese, of course, doesn’t simply equate, as both kun’yomi and on’yomi quite frequently merge with either other kanji or kana. It’s a shame one can’t simply give attributive meanings to the kanji (such as 水 being “aquatic” rather than “water”), as that wouldn’t work with a lot of kanji, especially once meanings become more abstract.
No, and for some of these i needed a few more days to get them right consistently.
But the first 6 levels have ~200 Kanji.
10 or even 20 out of 200 being an exception is a good rule for the other 90%.
Are you speaking in absolute or relative numbers?
Having a few hundred or even a four-digit number of exceptions doenst sound like much compared
to the entire pool of words in a language.
There are exceptions to any rule.
But calling out against something that can be used as a guideline for maybe 80% or atleast well above 50%
of all cases seems like the wrong move to me.
If i can get things right 3 out of 4 times by learning a general rule instead of individual parts thats a huge win.
The other 25% will come over time.
From what i can tell after 10 weeks thats not the only thing WK is half-assing.
My successrate with verbs went up alot after i no longer needed to try and brute-force memorize which is which in alot of the do/recieve verb pairs.
Teaching these as two seperate vocabulary without any mention that it might be time for some grammar study if one has trouble telling rise/raise and fall/drop apart is lazy.
These certainly aren’t described to people as “hey maybe it’ll help 50.1% of the time so what’s the harm in considering it a rule” when they learn them.
Again, I feel like these percentages are coming out of thin air too, so I don’t put much weight in them.
There are a bunch of “rules” in English too, and some, like “i before e except after c”, are actually backwards if you do the straight percentages.
Well… I mean, I don’t disagree that WK isn’t a proper grammar resource, but it’s not trying to be. It is trying to be a proper kanji reading resource, and that’s what the kun/on thing is about.
Luckily there’s a user script for that 
I too sometimes get confused between on’yomi and kun’yomi, but what often helps me with this is the phonetic differences between the two groups. あか isn’t likely to be an on’yomi, and じょお isn’t likely to be a kun’yomi. It isn’t perfect, of course, but it’s another bit of information.
Really, in the end you do have to just learn each vocabulary word separately—even though remembering the kun’yomi and on’yomi guidelines, and all the other things, does help. After all, there are often more than two readings of a kanji.
I like the “arbitrary” choice, myself; I trust that although there surely isn’t a clear line that caused Koichi to choose one over the other in every case, that overall he has a good handle on this.
Doesn’t the lesson page for each kanji character state whether it’s the kun or the on reading that is being taught? I don’t have any pending lessons, so I can’t check, but I thought it did. The reference pages for each character definitely indicates whether the preferred reading is kun or on.
And since you understand the rules of thumb for readings, can’t you infer which is which from the vocab in most cases? If a reading keeps showing up in the jukugo vocab, it’s probably on’yomi. If it keeps showing up single-kanji words or those with hiragana attached, it’s probably kun’yomi. That, more than anything else, is what drives it home for me. If you need reinforcement, there is a userscript that will specify for each kanji review whether WK wants the kun or on reading for each character.
I had a lot of frustration with this when I was just starting out, but it gets better as you do more reps. And the “cure”–always learning the on’yomi first, even when there are no (or almost no) vocab words that use it–would be far worse than the disease, IMHO.