I would prefer that if sentences are added, the previous ones are kept as well. Would be nice to have a mix of easy and challenging examples.
I agree with OP. Current examples are amusing, but too difficult so I largely ignore them.
I would prefer that if sentences are added, the previous ones are kept as well. Would be nice to have a mix of easy and challenging examples.
I agree with OP. Current examples are amusing, but too difficult so I largely ignore them.
I can usually understand the first example sentences, but the second ones are (purposely?) ridiculous Though as long as I “bleep” out the kanji I don’t know I can usually guess which one means what based on the translation, and see sentence-building that way.
I wish you could hide the English translations at first though! Sometimes (from watching subbed anime) I see an English word and read it in Japanese in my head.
Have you tried out using this site?
I haven’t played around with it much, but from what I have done with it, it’s really cool!
After level 10 they don’t have the simple sentences. That’s the main problem.
It’s often pointed out that since the sentences on that site come from a somewhat unreliable source (the Tanaka Corpus), it’s not necessarily a good idea to take the sentences at face value as being accurate.
Oh, I had no idea! Thanks for mentioning that
Try this userscript.
This. I really need practice in context, but the sentences are so weird and winding, and often contain so many words I haven’t learned that the only part of the sentence I can actually understand is the vocabulary word itself, which completely defeats the purpose of reading a word in context. I understand that only having completed a third of WaniKani means that I probably don’t have enough vocabulary to expect to understand EVERYTHING, but I think we can agree that the sentences could be much simpler than they are.
There’s no need to get rid of the sentences that are already there, but just add some really, really basic ones for those of us who are coming to WaniKani at the beginning of our journey through Japanese, rather than assuming that we’re all people with some mastery of the language already just hoping to get better at Kanji.
Yes Please!
I stopped even trying to read them ages ago and hoped eventually I’d catch up to the level of the example sentences. I’m a third of the way through WaniKani and still can’t read them.
It’s definitely possible to use words in more understandable, still useful sentences. I can read almost everything on NHK Easy News now, why can’t I read the damn WaniKani example sentences?!
We should bump more threads on the same topic.
Glad to hear they’re working on new sentences. Still, it worries me that they only mention the kanji, not grammar difficulty. It’s very easy to make sentences with the kanji at early levels that are still incomprehensible because no one at that level of kanji knowledge would be expected to understand the grammar being used.
Any of the “simple” sentences they’re adding are likely to be things like はやく文をよんでください for 文
If you write sentences without using kanji, you almost have to make them super simplistic, because they become nearly unreadable in the other direction when you just have a string of hiragana.
But I don’t think they should worry too much about grammar… they’re already translating the sentences for people. No one needs to figure out the grammar on their own.
Plenty of people get to the late levels without proper grammar study. Can’t waste too many resources catering to them.
If they aren’t going to worry about grammar at all, adding new sentences is a waste in my opinion.
Did you read the first part of what I wrote?
Maybe I don’t understand how to use it, but the 2nd sentence it gave me was “大したことはないよ” and it told me it means “no bones broken.”
This is a cool idea but now I’m skeptical.
As was noted (by me) back when it was posted, that site uses sentences from something called the Tanaka Corpus. A lot of the sentences aren’t written by native speakers, so the Japanese and English are often unnatural or just wrong.
I saw your post. Just wanted to share what I thought, too.
Yup. But because most (all?) grammar is kana, even by level 10, you can make all sorts of really tough sentences to someone who’s not N1 or N2.
My main thing is, WaniKani already has sample sentences that don’t worry about grammar, and some people aren’t using them because they’re difficult to understand. So I just don’t see the benefit of adding more sentences like that, since WK already has them. What I’d like to see as a Japanese learner, and what I think a lot of other people would want to see as well, are sentences we can understand without reading the English translation first.
At the very least, I would love to see N5 kanji paired with N5 sentences, N4 with N4, and so on. Something like this:
Level 1-4: pre-N5 (even simpler than the example you gave)
Level 4-10: N5
Level 10-20: N4
Level 20-35: N3
Level 35-50: N2
Level 50+: N1 / Native
I feel like this would be a reasonable progression for someone who’s learning Japanese with outside resources while using WaniKani as a supplement. Just my opinion though.
We just completely disagree on the purpose of these sentences, so we’re not going to see eye to eye on it. WK isn’t a comprehensive Japanese learning site, so I don’t have an issue with the current sentences, and I take Mami at her word when she says they’re making simpler ones, even though I don’t think they’re needed except in a few examples where the current sentences don’t use the part of speech given by WK in the lesson.
If you’re wondering what I mean by not agreeing on the purpose, let’s look at a sentence that surely most WK users would have trouble reading because of the kanji it uses.
緯度0度の緯線のことを、赤道と呼びます。
The 0 degree parallel is called the equator.
This is for the word 緯線, which WK only gives the definition of “parallel” for. If someone didn’t look at the part of speech, they can glean from the English here that this is not the adjective “parallel,” but rather the noun “parallel” which simply means “line of latitude.” That’s what the sentence is there for. I don’t think they need more sentences with it to cater to unknown levels of grammar in the various WK users that will make it to that point.
So you’re saying we should take arbitrary lists, since there are no official JLPT lists for Kanji and arbitrarily slap some kind of Grammar gate on them?