I saw this kanji today 簪 and I don’t know if it’s important in the Japanese culture, I saw that it means “hair pin”.
I couldn’t find it on WaniKani, just wondering about your thoughts about this.
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It seems like it’s quite specific and only used in a few words, so I personally think that it’s not worth adding it.
I couldn’t find it on WaniKani, just wondering about your thoughts about this.
There are actually a TON of Kanji that are not taught on WaniKani. I played only two visual novels in Japanese so far, and just within these two visual novels, I found over 100 Kanji not taught on WaniKani. So I would say that there’s no need to worry about it too much 
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“Ton” is one word for it. WaniKani currently teaches two thousand (and change) kanji. While there’s no official count of the total number of kanji in Japanese, “comprehensive” dictionaries usually contain somewhere around fifty thousand kanji. So yeah, 96% of kanji go untaught by WaniKani. Most of those kanji also go almost completely unused in the real world too, but that’s another matter. 
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What are some vocabs we could teach using this kanji, besides the kanji as a standalone?
It’s used pretty much exclusively for かんざし and for a few obvious compounds of that word (like 簪屋 hairpin shop). And かんざし is quite often written in kana. (It’s not in the jouyou set, which increases the chances that it will have furigana too.)
I would say this kanji is in the long tail of “you might well encounter it[*], but it’s not important enough to be in the set WK teaches”. Since WK isn’t an open ended learning system, at some point while you’re using it you’ll develop your own approach to dealing with vocab and kanji that aren’t in it. This is one of those.
[*] Depends quite a bit on your input material. I read a lot of historical fiction, and this is a word that does come up in that kind of novel, so it’s in my jpdb deck. But if you don’t read historical or fantasy it’s not going to come up much.
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Teach 禿 first. It’s simpler and removes the need for hairpins completely.
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We’re gonna need a few more levels, boss.
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The 本好きの下剋上 novel series is superb for learning 簪. It shows up 20 times just in the first book alone 
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Yeah, I looked at the “used in” stats for the word in jpdb, and it’s not used in very many books, but 本好き and 薬屋のひとりごと both use it a ton (way more often than even the average historical novel). I think some authors just have oddball pet words and phrases that turn up much more often in their output than in the language in general.
If it turns up 20 times that’s plenty of reinforcement
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Maybe the authors are like me and really like 簪. I have many in my collection. 
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