Because the example sentences will only use kanji that have been covered so far by the user, some words that are say normally written with two kanji might be written with only one, with the remainder of the word being written in hiragana. Thus words that would normally be recognized easily suddenly require an exercise in having to recognize that the hiragana probably map to a particular kanji or part of word and mental backtracking to what the word actually is.
Trying to go through 100 lessons while also reading the example sentences thus becomes a bit of a pain and I become tempted to skip the example sentences entirely for this reason.
I think a happy medium is to label unlearned kanji with furigana so that at least the word can be recognized by the kanji it’s actually written in.
The crux of the problem I think is that the way the sentences are written, excluding kanji that haven’t been covered yet, reads and feels really awkward and unnatural. I think for a Japanese learning site it’s okay to present sentences as they would normally be written.
For furigana to be viewed as a “crutch” in this case doesn’t make sense because the sentences should exclude furigana for kanji that have been covered by the user.
That’s at higher levels. Levels 1-20 have two “simpler” sentences plus the original one which is usually crazy. After level 20 they only have the one crazy sentence.
They actually do. They will even have weird Frankenstein words that are part kana part kanji even though they would never normally be written that way.
Yeah, the part kana/kanji thing also gets really confusing especially for new learners. I get why they did it since people used to complain about too much kanji that you hadn’t already learned, but the frankenstein words are almost worse.
I would say they are definitively worse. You generally can’t find those words using an extension like Yomichan or in jisho. At least you can look up words with unknown kanji in a dictionary.
This has bothered me too, to the point where I stopped reading the example sentences. I understand the black hole that furigana is, but considering that it could be blurred out in spoiler text (like this) means that we could take advantage of it for what we don’t know, hopefully exercising enough self control to not rely on it as a crutch.
Somewhat like Satori reader, I think it’d be good if furigana was used, but removed dynamically once you do the lesson for a given kanji or vocab word. It’d take a lot of work to implement that here, but one can dream.
Yes, it is wildly inconsistent. That’s part of the problem. On the other hand, there are also sentences like this one:
女の人としゃべるのがにが手です。
If you were to feed that into something like ichi.moe it won’t parse にが手 correctly as 苦手 because it thinks the に and が are particles rather than the reading of 苦. The sentence would be better off just having the entire word be in kana rather than half and half.
Considering that that’s about 70% of the whole USP behind Satori Reader, that team obviously thought the idea substantial enough to warrant it’s own platform. I hate to admit it, but I don’t know if it’s worth it for WK, as much as I would like to see it myself.
My issue with the example sentences isn’t exactly the ‘Frankensteined’ kanji/hiragana words, but since I’m only at level 1, it’s actually that the sentences are too hard to read, leaving me a bit confused how much attention I should be paying to them.
I say that especially because the unofficial WaniKani FAQ seems to suggest outside studying could be ‘detrimental’ to your SRS learning. I get that the vocab/kanji featured in the example sentences are techncially ‘part’ of WaniKani’s SRS learning, but how much time should I dedicate to studying/understanding each sentence?
It also seems the sentences can be quite grammatically complex/diverse for a beginner, making me question what the standard order of words in a sentence is. I am already doing outside lessons anyhow, but the grammar I have learned so far isn’t advanced enough for some of these sentences.
The sentence content itself is also very unusual at times. I understand the humor and weird scenarios work very well for mnemonics, but not when I’m trying to figure out which part of an example is about one eyed goblins or some other thing that I won’t use in day to day conversation.
The more time I spend on the examples, the less I have for the (crab)meat of WaniKani: learning radicals and specific kanji.
Yes, the example sentences are not pedagogically developed for the learning levels.
They may provide random context and examples… but they are hard to understand… and the way WK is set up, it makes sense to skip them, for the most part, and find other sentences to use the vocabulary.
We actually just started changing these to all kana as we agree that they’re hard to read and not really common to see with the half/half!
It’ll take us some time though to go through all of them so if you have any others that you remember, just post the link of the vocab in this thread or email and we’ll get around to it
