Of course being able to read vocab in sentences is vastly important, but I think that always having the context of a sentence to provide clues can be another crutch and make it harder to read the word by itself. It’s kind of like how I’ve known the word 綺麗 for ages and have a 100% correctness rate on WK, but I have less than a 90% correctness rate for each kanji, and I still haven’t burned 綺 yet.
That’s a solid argument.
but that’s how it works. japanese people recognize words instantly, while figuring out a kanji takes a moment, if the kanji itself is not a word on it’s own.
you can almost see them rummage through their memories 
and then, they remember it not as a single unit, they remember words it pops up in.
the reason is, they don’t learn kanji one by one after the first 2-3 years in school anymore. they learn words only. they’ll never encounter them standalone, so learning them like that wouldn’t make sense.
i think some people don’t know this and just trust that “koichi knows best”, while others are aware and try to be more japanese than the japanese.
learning them as single kanji is useful imo, but don’t beat yourself up for not recognizing them when they pop up with no context on a flashcard website.
I see individual kanji on those little chalkboards they use for teaching the stroke order and important elements (hane, harai, etc) in all elementary school grades, not just 1st to 3rd grade. Obviously they also do drills in booklets that mostly focus on how the kanji appear in words, but all grades do that too.
But once they’re in middle school, yes, they stop doing the thing where the form of new kanji is focused on in a lesson.
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some people do this even as adults, when learning for the 漢検. kids also learn them mostly by drill via handwriting, so the situations aren’t the same at all, i get that. what i meant though is that it doesn’t make sense for wk students to lose hair when they don’t recognize a kanji from a word they get right every time.
it will come. sometimes it takes a little, but that’s no problem. that’s where i would recommend the addon “vocab beyond”, at least to people with some vocab knowledge. it shows you a long list of words the kanji pops up in that don’t appear on wk, and if you see the thing in several words, your knowledge of it’s meaning becomes clearer and the memory stronger.
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Right, I agree that people need to be able to recognize the vocab instantly even if there’s no sentence surrounding it to provide context, which was what I was arguing for. The kanji was just an example I used because it was a similar situation, I don’t actually care much about recognizing those two super rare kanji in isolation. Besides, WK is already lenient towards kanji readings…
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yeah, vocabulary is way more important in my opinion, which is why i’d couple level ups with vocab, too.
some people do only kanji/radicals and think they’re good, they’ll get vocab through reading or anki or black magic, but i wouldn’t count on it.
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Yeah, I don’t understand why people would do that, lol
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Has anyone actually gotten to lvl 60 doing that? I know there’s several people that say they do but I don’t hear from them again after a while so I figure they’ve already given up.
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yeah, lol. it strikes me as kind of naive to expect to pick up vocabulary by learning individual kanji. many kanji have so abstract contexts that it’s quite a stretch to fit them in a word, meaning-wise.
it’s way better to do all the vocab here, and maybe some elsewhere, too. iknow for example is great, has words, sentences, speech, activities for listening comprehension and such.
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i can’t imagine. i’ve seen a lot of people come and go here, and quite some said they’d do their vocab on memrise or by reading or playing games. there’s not so many 60ers, and i only recently returned to WK after 3 years of absence.
i know that i wouldn’t do it that way. i do all my vocab and i use “vocab beyond”/ can never have enough vocab.
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Yea that’d certainly be crazy, that’d be quite the commitment to being stubborn too. While WaniKani vocab isn’t the best (looking at you military, religious, political, and baseball terms) it’s certainly a huge help. I think I really started diving deep into reading somewhere around lvl 20-30 and it certainly would have been a much bigger struggle without all the vocab I got from WaniKani.
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the main selling point for me is not so much the radicals to build kanji (it’s certainly great, but heisig, kanjidamage or KKLC and others do this, too), but that you get targeted vocab items with the kanji you learn. just a few days after having memorized the kanji, wk delivers you words to reinforce them, and that’s what i believe to be the strongest factor for success here.
when learning vocab elsewhere, you’d have to find all those words yourself to learn them, or you’re at the mercy of RNGesus for what vocab will pop up.
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Yup, I’m up to 1577 words in my Anki deck built from words I have encountered and then looked up, and I have probably 100 tabs open in my phone’s browser for words that I looked up but haven’t added yet
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that’s dedication 
i tried sentence mining, too, but stopped at some point. was too much work, and i’m lazy, hehe. that’s what you read for i guess.
You should try adding them to a spreadsheet or note taking application!
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Yea I feel like I’m probably at roughly around 10k words from WaniKani and other areas and it still feels like I have a long way to go. The only Japanese I can really read comfortably is manga and even that really depends on the content and whether I’m familiar with vocab related to the theme or not.
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I probably will at some point so I have them in an easily accessible reference. Do you use an application to track them? How do you use the resulting spreadsheet/notes?
I really need to read more, looking up all the words actually slows me down too much and then I don’t cover much material before my motivation runs out.
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i play a lot of games and have them all in japanese, if possible. even if i can’t read it all yet (being a lowly lvl 20 peasant), i get to see them all the time, and when they then pop up here, it’s a little epiphany every time.
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I export them to make Anki cards. Since I’m only 1/3 of the way through WaniKani, I’m only lightly using this system, but if you’re heavily reading I think it really helps your get through larger books as they often use similar vocabulary throughout, once you get past the first page [0]. Just make sure you don’t add so many new items that you have to spend more time using the spaced repetition than reading. This might not be the way you use it, but regardless, I think it’s a really good system for collecting more vocabulary.
There are plenty of tutorials on how to use a spreadsheet to quickly create Anki cards [1]. If you just want more information on this in general though, I’d recommend checking out the Tofugu guide on spaced repetition [2].
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