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delusions of grandeur. the world’s full of it. I think I want to live in a cave.
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I find it slightly odd that you’re getting personally offended by a kanji learning site. The intention is to get us used to reading Japanese. Unless you’re being forced to learn Japanese against your will, I don’t see how it’s disrespectful?
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Not sure who needs to hear this, but WaniKani isn’t a magic wand that’ll make you good at Japanese. Not even a human teacher can do that. It’s going to diverge from your goals and needs every now and then. If you really want to reach fluency in Japanese, then the onus remains on you to shore up your weaknesses in other ways, like immersion practice, passive listening, and creating other SRS decks.
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Thanks for posting this, I was about to otherwise!
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No idea how you’ve achieved to avoid baseball in 4 years of Japan.
It’s really no different than my home country, Canada. Hockey is HUGE over there, but my friends and family all understood that I am not a hockey fan. For that reason alone, they would never use terms like “slap shot” or “forecheck” with me because they know I’m not a hockey fan. I had to actually google “hockey terms” just to throw a couple at them at you as an example, because I’m not even familiar with the English terminology.
And why stop at Baseball? I read the arguments on here every day that common vocab words are NOT the goal of Wanikani, so why not throw in some rare terminology used for knitting competitions, cucumber throwing, and laughing-yoga? Why are the baseball terms appreciated by you for their common use in Japan, when common vocab is not the objective here anyway?
BTW I just made up cucumber throwing… but maybe it’s a real thing?
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Yes I’m already aware of WK objectives. I was responding to the contradictive arguments made that the baseball vocabulary is useful due to the sport’s popularity in Japan. My response still stands that even if it’s popular, people don’t use such specific terms outside of their fan circles. It is pretty much guaranteed that someone who is not interested in baseball will never encounter such terms, no matter who they talk to. Even the argument made that it’s useful vocab to begin with is in fact contradictive to WK objectives…
I like the idea of adding the synonym to cheat the system. I’ll try that – thanks.
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Guess I might as well respond here even though I deleted the other post.
I mean… Unless they watch the news (there’s a Ohtani Shohei segment every day). Or read manga / watch anime, etc (club activities appear in things that aren’t directly related to sports). Or hear people talking around them.
Like… If somehow there was no way for me to be exposed to things I personally had no interest in, I would know nothing about the girl group NiziU, and yet that’s not the case.
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And again… Even the argument made that it’s useful vocab to begin with is in fact contradictive to WK objectives… so why stop at baseball? Let’s learn terms for cucumber throwing if it’s good Kanji practice…
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“the focus is kanji” is an explanation of why WK doesn’t have only common words. The words that get complained about do appear in some contexts, usually just not conversation.
It’s not a suggestion that every word here is or should be as useless as things you made up. Such words would actually be literally useless to everyone.
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Well, if you can make cucumber throwing as popular in Japan as baseball is, then sure, so right ahead.
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So you’re saying that it should be useful then…
I see the circle of false logic we’re in here…
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All the words that are listed are useful in some regard. But not every useful word is going to appear here.
This isn’t contradictory.
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“Useful” and “useful-to-you” need not be the same thing. If the lack of “useful-to-you” is causing you anguish, then perhaps the point we’re circling is “maybe WaniKani isn’t the best system for you”. Certainly we wouldn’t want you to be so stressed out by Japanese learning that you’re starting to think Koichi woke up one morning in 2012 and thought “gee, I wonder how I can personally insult some guy who’s living in 2021”.
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If you have suggestions for how to make the site better, send them an email and they’ll probably take it into consideration.
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I came across 他所 today. The primary reading is たしょ, which is useless in modern Japanese. Most Japanese people don’t even know what たしょ means. The second reading, よそ is the useful one that is actually spoken and written.
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I can assure you that I am not personally insulted. I like Wanikani and plan on staying subscribed until level 60. You have to hear me bitch about useless vocab words once in awhile though. 
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Oh, my bad - it’s someone else who was feeling personally insulted. Too many people in this thread with the same avatar arguing basically the same point. 
Fun fact: according to the Nippon Professional Baseball league, there were 26.85 million baseball fans in Japan in 2019 - that’s more than the entire population of Australia in that year. Though granted, that’s down from 36.85 million in 2011, so maybe there’ll be a power vacuum opening up for cucumber throwing sometime soon.
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よそ is certainly a common word, but this article doesn’t make it sound like たしょ is useless or unknown, and that there is actually a slight nuance in meaning that may be relevant to choosing which one to use. In fact it’s likely to get read that way by some people merely due to the fact that よそ is a “harder” reading.
But as I said, if you email them they’ll consider it. They’re less likely to stumble upon your comment here.
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I’m not going to e-mail them because I don’t care about that reading specifically. I was just referencing it as an example… I do challenge anyone here to ask any Japanese person what たしょ means, just for fun…
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