Expanding beyond meaning and reading

[Bibb]

I was thinking that it might help the learning experience if in addition to being asked for meaning and reading (with the kanji shown), you could also be given the meaning and asked to give the reading, or maybe given the meaning or reading and then asked to pick the correct kanji from a few options.

Just an idea, still love the website regardless.

[d-hermit]

Check out KaniWani and KameSame.

[Bibb]

Thank you. This is a big help

[Gorbit99]

I find these to be much less useful than what wanikani is offering right now, even if you don’t have the “pick from a few options” part (wk already has an explanation about why they don’t let you pick from options ever).
reading → kanji, while it sounds useful at first, wk has no emphasis on writing, and that is maybe the most common scenario you would need this in. In reality, when writing, you might actually think of the kanji first, and type in the reading from that, so that you can get a list of options you can pick from.
meaning → kanji, when you think in english, and produce japanese from that, that’s often called “translating in your head”. It’s one of the biggest things you want to avoid, because translation is a slow process.

[Lahoje]

Indeed, long-term you should be aiming for thinking strictly in Japanese and don’t actually want to translate anything into English in your head, so training yourself to think Japanese through English can actually be pretty disadvantageous - if you want to aim for a high level in Japanese that is.

Japanese is very different from English as well, so there’s both the problem of different Japanese vocab having the same English translation as well as the problem of words not having the same nuance as the English translation. “勉強” doesn’t mean exactly the same as the “study”. Outside of things like scientific nouns most Japanese words actually have slightly difference nuances from the Japanese translations.

When lookin up words in Jisho/dictionaries, you will sometimes see more than 20 English translations of one single word - in my humble opinion it is way better to learn the Japanese word and think of it in Japanese, rather than trying to think of all the English translations when you see it

IMO one shouldn’t think of the English translations as “equivalents”, but rather as crutches - the way you will actually learn the nuances of the words will be from consuming (and understanding) Japanese.
⠀

[Bibb]

Thanks for the help. I was aware of the possibility that wanikani might not have what I was talking about for a certain reason, so thank you for the clarification. I think I will stick to wanikani then.