Even in English I can hardly tell apart any army words from each other haha, currently on level 38 and the amount of General, Commander, Leader related words keep throwing me for a loop lol.
For example, 大将: General or commander? They both mean the same thing in my mind because I have no idea what the nuance is. Certainly a personal difficulty with learning the language, not the fault of wanikani, but I want to know if anyone experiences a similar thing. Cheers!
I have found that these terms actually come up in reading. Japanese culture is obsessed with rank and order, so once I ran into some of the terms in the wild I tried to at least understand them, but not really memorize all of them. I find the best way to think of 大将 is to think it of it as the top rank of the top tier of ranks.
That makes sense - im sure if I were listening closer to my current rewatch of 鋼の錬金術師 I’d pick up on the differences more… In terms of reading I tend to stick to slice of life stories (好きな作家は川上未映子さん) so I can’t say I’ve seen the terms come up in those 
I remember the struggle from when I did WaniKani as I wasn’t aware of all the English ranks either
Funnily enough, it’s much easier to get an understanding of the Japanese terms than of the English terms 
The names like 少将, 中将, 大将 indicate the ranking with their first kanji quite clearly (small → middle → big), same thing with 少佐, 中佐, 大佐
In the end, I don’t think you really need to worry about being able to map that to the corresponding English terms if you somewhat see the connection between the terms
Actually I got it wrong. Taishou 大将is the top of the second of the three tiers. Shoukan 将官 is the top of the top.
Personally I try to adapt how much nuance I get from a Japanese word to match well enough to how I understand them in English. I also don’t really know the difference between all the ranks so if it was me, I’d give them all a synonym of military person or something and pass them all, because that’s all they might as well be to me. Later on if you’re watching/reading something where it matters, you can pick up the vibe of who is above and below who pretty easily based on how they interact and decide from there if you want to commit that to memory better when you have it in a meaningful context.
quickly glances at my profile picture
yep
