The truth is that lots of languages have the pattern “X pleases me” rather than “I like X”.
French is unusual in having both as very everyday language: j’aime ça; ça me plaît.
But understanding the Japanese properly entails learning how the language works, and “X is pleasing to me” is how it works (likewise with 欲しい - is wanted, and 嫌い - is hated, although it’s much more common to encounter 好きじゃない - “not my favourite” :)).
This is a very common saying in American English, but what’s more interesting is how few people know the meaning of the individual words, in spite of completely understanding the idiom and its moral.
A petard is an explosive device used for breaching castle walls and similar fortifications. If you’re standing too close to it when it goes off, you get thrown into the air - which is to say, “hoist with his own petard”.
It’s Shakespeare who coined the phrase. Hamlet Act 3, Scene 4.
Yes, you’re right of course, there are expressions using baseball terms, but I feel like I don’t really have to know the rules to the sport to understand them (because if you hear them enough time in context, they just become regular expressions, if you see what I mean. You can attach a meaning to them outside of what you know and don’t know about baseball). Of course I have a basic understanding of the stakes at baseball, also picked up through pop culture, so it’s not impossible for me to interpret your examples in the context of a baseball match either.
I guess I was complaining because I didn’t want to have to make a conscious effort to learn baseball terms and expressions~
Interesting how meaning slowly changes with time… From a bomb that can breach castle walls and throw people into the air to small firecracker for making loud noise
P. S. I wonder if this thread should be moved into Campfire section…
I got 33k in English and 14k in my mother tongue on another site . Don’t know how accurate that is but I guess it could make sense since I’ve pretty much done my Uni education and read a ton more books in English than in my native tongue. Although Finnish does have a pretty small corpus, and the more difficult words tend to be loanwords.
The vocab they choose is (mostly) chosen for a specific reason, which has to do with the Jōyō and other commonly used words in Japan. You might think you don’t need some random word, but, again, since these are the most commonly used ones, I’m at a loss to figure out why you wouldn’t want to learn them. There are a lot of advantages I can see to learning as many common words as possible.
Reinforcement: learning words that are in other words reinforces both. (In your example, やまびこ, reinforces 山.)
Language is dynamic: You say “I don’t need these.” How could you know that? Language isn’t that straightforward. With simple systems, maybe you could configure and tweak things a certain way, but it would be extremely hard to predict the course of a conversation or what you will or won’t see in a book or show or what have you.
Why not?: I don’t really understand why you’re using this application if you want to pick and choose a very specific set of words. At your level, you’re a paid member. If you want ONLY certain words, why not save your cash and use a normal flashcard app? In terms of time, there’s not a massive time cost in learning each word, and, as I mentioned above, the more words you know, the more prepped you are for reading, listening, etc. So… why not just learn the word?
I guess at the end of the day, it seems like a weird complaint to say the app is teaching you too much. I could understand if it was teaching completely obscure words, but I don’t think “echo” is that weird a choice.
FWIW, in my 20 or so books I’ve read and thousands of hours of immersion I’ve never encountered that word. Not that I think it’s a bad addition.
Well, WK doesn’t choose words based on the commonness. They choose the ones that they think reinforce the kanji. And that’s fine.
Only thing I don’t really like is the addition of transitive/intransitive pairs, as I don’t think it’s the SRS systems responsibility to teach that and it can just lead to frustration and leeches. But I guess that’s a matter of learning philosophy. Not that I’m even doing WK anymore. Just makes me less likely to come back to burn stuff, I guess.
Hey man, just came here to ask if everything is ok. I can sense a lot of anger and frustration going the way of wanikani and to be honest it seems very silly and unwarranted. Do you have someone to talk to?