If they took away a couple thousand vocab, it would be a lot less useful. You’d have no idea how to pronounce half of what you read.
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For intransative vs transative I highly recommend looking at the supporting hiragana, like あげるversus 上がる. Even if it isn’t accurate, I have noticed that the ga and ka words seem to indicate transative while the ke and ge (just for example) supporting hiragana indicate intransative. Even if you find patterns that aren’t always true, it helps you to remember!
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You got that backwards. In a pair, the ～ある one is intransitive and the ～える one is transitive. The other really useful pair pattern is where ～える is intransitive and す is transitive. (So basically, ～ある and す are the true indicators while ～える is just “the other one”.)
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The ～ある・～える patterns I have figured out, as well as remembering that if the word ends with す it’s going to be transitive. It’s stuff like 傷つける・傷つく or 解く・解ける that throw me off.
I’ve watched the Cure Dolly video where she gives some tips to help differentiate, and it helped a little, but there was a section of the video that went right over my head. I’ll have to re-watch her video. In the meantime, I’m trying to make mnemonics to help me.
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You can remember these two by the fact that 付く is intransitive while 付ける is transitive.
For this one, I use CD’s suggestion that -える verbs are kind of like れる/られる where you receive the action. So 解ける is receiving the action of solving so it’s intransitive.
This doesn’t always work but it’s helped me keep them straight.
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Okay, maybe not a couple thousand, but if they cut lots and lots of vocab, WK would be more usable.
It tries to do too much. It says it will teach you to read the kanji, and the giant pile of vocab works as a marketing hook. But the system’s design just buries people in unnecessary reviews.
Examples: level 40 has 宜しく as well as 宜しくお願いします. Pick one, or neither-- both are Day 1 In Japan vocab. 40 also has 隣 and gives 4 different vocab for that reading, which is the one you learn for the kanji’s review . I will always know how to pronounce them when I read them, none has an unusual form. So pick one or two, not four. Level 42 gifts us with:
口笛を吹く
吹き出す
吹き込む
吹き飛ばす
Easy to read, and easy to figure out their nuances of meaning from context in a book. That’s three examples, I could find more. I’m nearing an end with this app and it is just so irritating that it’s padded out with unnecessary vocab and reviews. It’s careless learning design. It’s bad pedagogy. It sucks as an experience, and I think there’s a ton of feedback I see every day on these forums that says so. Maybe fixing the SRS is a bigger lift, but they could cull this vocab list and make it a lot better right away.
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Yes, it is. prior to this I was in the high 80s and had 90-120 apprentice items.
Re mnemonics, I know they’re a big sell for WK, but they don’t work for my brain. Right up until this moment I was using my momentum to get through the kanji and vocab, but I guess without continued learning I just forgot everything!
Thanks @kenbongort @alo and @Jun-ko for the advice. I am back on vacay mode while I figure out what my next move is. FWIW my Torii SRS learning has hardly been affected by the hiatus and I’m managing with the vocab there no problem.
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In what way are they failing to work for you?
What WK needs is not a cap of reviews but some kind of warning before doing lessons when the number of apprentice items exceeds 200. This way you are not forbidden, but discouraged to do lessons until you get apprentice under control.
If you decide to ignore the warning, you can level-up faster (provided you spend a lot of time every day reviewing), but the workload can get overwhelming. On the other hand, you can stop doing lessons, spend more time in each level, and avoid burnout.
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The majority of posts I’ve seen from people who have 500+ Apprentice items are reorder script usage and letting vocab items pile up.
If you use reorder script to level-up faster (not recommendable but oh well), then you should also use it for lessons, i.e. ignore all vocab lessons. Doing vocab lessons but then ignoring vocab reviews is a recipe for disaster.
I think it’s the fact that the vocab comes around much later than the associated Kanji. The reinforcement isn’t there and accuracy seems to suffer as a result. Rinse and repeat.
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Yeah, as I said it’s not recommendable, but some people will do it anyway because they bought 1-year subscription and don’t want to extend.
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This reply is generally for others down the line who are looking into where to go forward if they come across a similiar situation as me (otherwise they wouldn’t be here in the first place). I think it was for the best I hold off on WaniKani for the foreseeable future as I’m severely bottlenecked in other places. I’ve been doing the usual lessons in https://www.japan-activator.com/ (Cannot recommend enough. $50 for the lifetime pass) as well as getting more heavily in grammar. It’s hard to get started watching something to study in something like Voracious for example but I can already tell I’m getting much more comfortable with some pieces I wasn’t preciously and I’ve yet to see any kanji I couldn’t read (I actually have trouble reading katakana still) and it’s only been a week.
So that my experience as you will.
Late to the party but just wanted to chime in and agree that ignoring the mnemonics is the reason certain kanji trip me up. If the mnemonic WK uses doesn’t make sense, I have to take the time and come up with my own. It’s made a lot of difference in retention.
Eventually my brain no longer needs the mnemonics at all, it just sees the radicals arranged and intuitively knows the meaning. That always feels good.
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