This is very confusing to me. I always put “Suffering” for the vocabulary and got punished for it many times saying it was “painful”. Then I got the Kanji and I get punished again because it is suffering and not painful.
Any tips on how to distinguish these? because I find this almost borderline trolling.
I also find it weird that “Suffering” for 苦しい is considered incorrect, because in a song once I heard “苦しくて” and the woman was really singing about the pain she felt, not just a head bump, but really a deep pain, so I find it strange that 苦しい is not considered more severe than 痛い according to wanikani. What are your thoughts?
I’d add “painful” as a user synonym for 苦. Kanji don’t really have specific meanings the way vocab will because they more represent concepts. Whenever there’s a single-kanji word with definitions that WK doesn’t teach with its kanji, I’ll end up adding those definitions to the kanji. I’m here to learn Japanese, not what specific English gloss among many valid ones WK wants for an item.
But while 苦しさ (noun form of 苦しい) or 苦しみ (noun form of 苦しむ) could be “suffering,” 苦しい itself isn’t since it’s an adjective.
