I’ve noticed some inconsistencies on wanikani’s kanji definitions and I wanted some clarification before I start making user meanings for them.
wanikani defines 若 as meaning ‘young’, an adjective, and doesn’t define it as ‘youth’, a concept.
wanikani defines 死 as meaning ‘death’, a concept, and doesn’t define it as ‘dead’, an adjective.
My impression is that kanji represent concepts, and not parts of speech, which are left to vocabulary. Am I correct in this? Is it wrong to say 若 means ‘youth’? I want to make a user meaning for 若 to mean that, but I want to make sure it’s actually correct before I do so. Is there a reason why wanikani defines 若 and 死 differently in this way?
WK is simply inconsistent like that. You’ll see it too with nouns that also can be used as verbs with する: some will have both noun and verb forms of the glosses, some have only noun forms, some have only verb forms. With な-adjectives too, for that matter.
And, yes, kanji represent concepts rather than are words themselves.
Don’t feel bad adding more forms as user synonyms. I’ll often do that plus abbreviations or other shortenings, including for other valid glosses that WK doesn’t teach.
Ah but there’s an ulterior motive. Wanikani uses the keywords later in mnemonics.
Example: 若布 わかめ A young cloth for some reason is the seaweed wakame. If you’ve never heard of wakame before, go look it up. It’s delicious and really good for you. Seaweed is kind of like cloth in the sea, right? Well, this young cloth is nice and soft and thin, like wakame. I imagine young people are soft and thin too, which is why the young cloth gets to be wakame.
“Youth cloth” doesn’t work as well. (Arguably that one isn’t very good anyway, but you know what I mean)
They’re not going for “linguistically correct, cite it in your master’s thesis” here, it’s just “can you remember it.” To be fair, some style consistency would make it easier to guess right when you get the concept but forgot exactly what WK wrote for the keyword.
Kanji “meanings” are more a general theme of vocab that uses the kanji than anything official, so the difference between adjective and noun meanings is within the acceptable range of variance IMO.
There are some kanji that are used in words that are composed of only a single kanji, but WK only sometimes assigns the meaning of that word to the kanji meaning practice - if there’s a bunch of words using that kanji with others that have a strong general theme that the WK authors think fit better, they do sometimes give the kanji a different “meaning” than the vocab that consists of just that kanji.
This isn’t really WK’s fault. The team tries to apply the widely used meanings that were assigned to kanji (which are also somewhat arbitrary). If you look on for example jisho, 若 comes up like so:
死 comes up like so:
With 死, kanjipedia defines it as しぬ (to die) and し (death), but not with something like “dead” because that would be しんでいる and would kind of feel weird for a Japanese definition of a kanji to me.
The major takeaway is that defining kanji with English words is imperfect to begin with, since there isn’t a one-to-one relationship in part of speech or grammar or meaning to fall back on.
When I started learning kanji, I expected each kanji to have a unique meaning. However, I now believe that this notion is incorrect and has rather hindered my understanding.
The more kanji I learned, the more I wondered about the ambiguities and unclear definitions. The problem arises because the first kanji one learns, like fire 火 and water 水, etc., actually correspond to real words and therefore have a “real” meaning.
But at higher levels, more and more kanji appear, which all supposedly have the same or similar or multiple meanings. It makes less sense to ask about the exact meaning of these kanji. They often only appear as parts of vocabulary and have only a rather “unclear” or “conceptual” meaning themselves.
I now believe that the earlier one realizes that only vocabulary has a “real meaning” and that kanji are mostly just building blocks to form words, the fewer questions one will have about these ambiguities.
