Blacklisting words / NSFW / Another 金玉 thread

I have my own opinions on this whole thread that I’ll hold back for good reason, but I still wanted to express my absolute despise for the stars… Lol!

I’m by no means someone who is into space stuff, so while the kanji pairings probably make a ton of sense to people who know, for me I CONSTANTLY get the names wrong. Readings are fine, but I’ll be damned if I can remember the names… They’re actually the only thing I have ever cheated on in my reviews… Well that and 中 radical name “Middle” … (My brain literally can not think of anything other than ‘inside’ when I see this)

So the TL;DR is I would love to erase the star vocab from my reviews XD

EDIT: I meant planets… oops :sweat_smile:

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It happens that the only Japanese person I know is literally an old Japanese grandma, so yes, I feel that some of the words may be unnecessary, if not unbelonging as some others may say. Do consider that WK as a service isn’t used by a homogenous group with a very specific goal, which is evidenced further by the wide variety of people you can see and interact with on the forums.

Another tangent: I speak Thai as my second language, but pretty much only with my family. Everyone else, I speak English with. This is another scenario in which it makes sense that such words (especially colloquial/vulgar vocabulary) are not always a priority, if not a necessity, for one to speak a language mostly fluently.

I don’t think anyone’s saying there’s no merit or that it’s inappropriate to learn such terms in another language, anyway. The subjectivity comes down to whether an online flashcard platform for learning languages should have a feature to hide some of these words, if the users want. Doesn’t this whole debacle seem a bit blown out of proportion once one rephrases it that way?

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This whole debate is weird to me because it’s not like WK is the only way to learn a word. If OP wants to learn crude language (which is completely valid btw I love learning swears), they can do so in private throught other means. Filtering an item on wk won’t make you never learn it ever again

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I’m sure the doctor wouldn’t mind if you had to take 5 seconds to Google it

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Unfortunately it seems I cannot delete this thread as it has gotten too long with random spam so I’ll be flagging this whole post for a mod to delete it or close it.

Sinyaven has made a separate app post, so any mods lurking, please just go ahead and close/delete this thread

The… planets? I don’t recall WaniKani teaching any star names, though those do have names in Japanese too. For example, Sirius is 天狼星, Altair is 彦星, and Vega is 織女星. Fortunately, they’re also known by their English names too, transliterated into katakana.

Well, my mnemonic for the planets is:

  • mercury (the element) is a liquid, so 水星
  • Venus is bright like gold (brightest object in the sky after the sun and the moon), so 金星
  • Mars is red like fire, so 火星
  • Saturn shares its name with Saturday, which is 土曜日, so 土星
  • Jupiter is the last one left, so 木星 (also, it looks kinda like woodgrain, I guess)

The three outer planets are translations of their English namesakes:

  • Uranus is the ruler of the sky in Greek mythology, so 天王星 (heaven-king planet)
  • Neptune is the ruler of the sea, so 海王星 (sea-king planet)
  • Pluto is the ruler of the underworld, so 冥王星 (underworld-king planet)
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Random bit of trivia: if I’m not wrong, some of the days of the week in Japanese actually get their names from these planets. The same system was used in China at one point. You’ll also notice that they line up if you use the names of the days of the week in a Latin-based language like French. Here’s what I mean:

Monday=lundi=lunar day=moon day=月曜日
Tuesday=mardi=Mars day=火曜日
Wednesday=mercredi=Mercury day=水曜日
Thursday=jeudi=Jupiter day=木曜日
Friday=vendredi=Venus day=金曜日

I’m not too certain about how to explain the links for the last two, because the etymology doesn’t seem obvious, and I’m pretty sure the names for Sunday in most Romance languages come from ‘dominus’=‘lord’ (for ‘the Lord’s Day’), so I’ll stop there, but I guess you could just go back to English for those two and get 土 and 日.

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Thor is the Germanic god of thunder, equivalent to Jove (Jupiter) in Rome. That’s why Thursday is Donnerstag in German (thunder day).

Frigg is the goddess of love in Germanic mythology, same as Venus in Rome.

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“The last two” are Saturday and Sunday. Not “the last two on the list” but “the last two, which are not on the list”. :stuck_out_tongue:

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どっ why didn’t I ever notice that?

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The etymology goes back to ancient astrology which held that each hour mod 7 belonged to one of the 7 main stars, which proceeded in order farthest from the earth to closest (at the time believed to be Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon in that order). Then, if you check the first hour of each day in this order you get Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus, in that order.

English has Saturday (from saturn), Sunday (from the sun), Monday (from moonday), Tuesday (from Tiwday, old God of Mars), Wednesday (from Wodensday which is for the God Oden who was Mercury), Thursday (from Thorsday where Thor is equated to the god Jupiter), and Friday (from Frigga’s day for the equivalent to Venus).

Japanese inherited from China, which had the same logic but different associations for the planets. They named the 5 other celestial bodies after the 5 elements of fire, water, wood, metal, and earth

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@metrikfire It looks like some users have suggested third-party scripts already and unfortunately we don’t have any features on WaniKani that does what you’re looking for at the moment.

It looks like the thread’s derailed a bit and I’ll be closing it since we have a lot of flags for off-topic here.

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