Would WaniKani consider adding an extra thousand-or-so advanced kanji for students who are really serious about learning?
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I wouldn’t be surprised about any extra levels, but 1000 seems like a bit much. A lot of those kanji are only found in one or so words or only found in names. Business wise, it may not be the best choice, since a lot of people would probably rather opt to just learn those final kanji by consuming actual native material.
The “serious about learning” people go on to consume as much native material as possible rather than just sitting on here learning words not in context.
Leebo = d3str0y3d
Also, here are some “common” kanji not found on wk that were posted by polv in another thread of mine. You can put these into houhou (similar to wk) and study them alongside wk once you feel comfortable
嘘喋叩噂嬉屁珈琲繋檎舐噛癌蛙掴儲叶髭揃溜濡兎苺辿鞄奢仔捧喧撫洒涎嘩牢狼咳甥疹痒痺眩萄葡蕎薇薔吠蛛蜘覗諺貰飩飴饂楊櫛殆溢瀕爺牡疱痔瘡癪睫禿紐綴茄葱憑訛訣詫掻賑贄躓雀雛垢揉馴騙鮭鯛牽狸佇屍珊仇瑚嵌梟嵩嶺梯巌梳癇吊姦皺幌睨榊瞑瞼礫祷槌窺竪竿筏箒簾糊糞糠厭絆撼縞劫罹膏臥苔唸歪茸茹莫怯恍擢惚惹憊蘇虔蛋汲挽蛭蛾捏蝉蝸螺蟻蠅蠣袈袴裟褌壺姪浣娶諜呑讐淹喘昏踵漕輿轟轢嚢迦這釘鎧娼晒霞靡囁鞘焚燦餃餞餡撒馳爬駝駱晦牝髯鮫梁埃鰻鴨鶯鷲鷹黴鼠
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Probably not. It’s a huge amount of work on their part for very little return (a small number of paying members ever reach level 60 in the first place).
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Your ultimate goal should be consuming as much native content as possible and picking up kanji and words from there. After a point, it becomes useless to follow pre made vocabulary lists like the core decks and WaniKani because some of the words you might see often are not necessarily as common generally as words you see rarely. It depends on what you are reading from then on.
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Do 50% of the work again for 0.01% of customers? Not so sure about that one.
Even people who reach level 60 not necessarily have the ambition to really know 1000 more like the jouyou kanji. You will learn some by seeing them, and ON readings are getting more regular for tone marks once you leave the widely used ones, but actually cramming them? You do get furigana to learn them in the wild.
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I think the levels above 60 should be “theme” levels, like 61 could be Birds, 鷹、山鳩、不死鳥, and that’s all I got.
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Now that’s a cool word to know. 
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That would be incredibly cool, actually. I love learning the specific types of information, like animals, colors, and body parts, despite how useful (the kanji more so than the reading) may or may not be. My students never know 七面鳥 when Christmas comes around and I explain I’ve never eaten chicken for Christmas. One student inevitably comments to the rest of their clueless peers 「ターキー」and the light bulbs go off.
Colors, on the other hand, have been incredibly useful to learn, especially with my color deficiency. I don’t know half the kanji for the animal and color names I know, however, as words like 茜色 I always end up seeing in plain kana.
Edit: I just remembered, looking back at my 自己紹介 lesson, that, in every single class, I had a female student ask what my favorite flower was, and I had NO idea what the Japanese name was. In my area of the US, at least, conversations about flowers were super rare, but I’ve had a lot in Japan, so that’s another area I’d love to see if a “theme” system were made.
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There’s a show called 東大王 (King of Tokyo University, I guess) where 4 Tokyo University students compete in quiz show format against celebrities. A game that appears every other week or so is a kanji-reading othello game, where you get readings right to flip pieces like in othello. If you get a reading wrong, you are out of the game entirely, and obviously you don’t get to flip the piece.
These are often themed, birds, bugs, animals, etc. I would like to get better at these, because invariably I can only answer 8-10 of the 30 or so spots on the board, and they’re probably ones most Japanese people know too.
EDIT: One solution to the “few people will reach these” problem is if you charge a separate fee for them. So, a pack of 50 animal kanji for $10 or something. You would still need to have all the radicals guru’d as a prerequisite to learn them, but you could only get them by paying extra. Then the creators aren’t just tossing kanji out at the end that almost no one is clamoring for. But the people who do want it can just go get it.
I don’t know if they’ve ever talked about whether they’d consider something like that, but I’m sure they have thought about it.
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0.01% is dishonest. You over exaggeration here is not appreciated.
Wtf, that show sounds really cool, how can I watch it?
Would it really change that much if he said 5% instead of 0.01%. The point is that it is a prettty low number of beneficiaries for so much.
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It is just a guess, what number would you suggest? From the badges you can see that there are 39000 basic users. How many level 60 people are there? A few hundred?
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Do you live in Japan? If you do, it’s on Sundays at 7:00PM on TBS. Here’s the official website.
If you don’t live in Japan, I don’t know if there’s a legal way for you to watch it, and I doubt anyone is ripping and making these available by torrent or something.
Given the fact that if you were actually at 60 you’ll come across most of these things through general reading of Japanese the real answer is it trends towards 0.0%.
I think you shouldn’t put the cart before the horse here.
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Based on the post I’m linking below, 1% is about right. The top graph showed 28,000 users apparently, and an eye-estimate shows around 200-300 people at level 60. Assuming 280, that would be 1%
The difference is pretty great, considering 0.01% would be 2.8 people (meaning completely false based on Leebo, Syphus, and TameneginoKame alone, listing level 60s off the top of my head), while 5% would be over 1000 users, which seems unlikely.
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I was looking for that, thanks.
Edit: Ha, don’t worry about it. Just thankful for finding that link.
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5% is a much larger percentage than 0.01%, which is virtually no one. Practice intellectual honesty.
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That’s bullshit. I want to watch Japanese gameshows.
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Well, actually looks like a ton of eps are on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=東大王
Dunno if they’re blocked by region or anything, but you can try.
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