Extracting current WK status to anki

Hey man, I understand your frustration. It’s very common to feel that the words you’re learning on here aren’t “useful” but please consider if you’ve given yourself enough time with the Japanese language to be a good judge of that.

I’ve used Anki to help with Genki vocab memorization. Even with a deck that was professionally designed, it was SUPER boring. For 99% of people, Anki reps are painful.

On WK, you’re getting vocab specifically chosen to be useful for drilling the kanji readings. You’re also getting gamification and access to probably the largest community of Japanese learners I’ve seen. You wouldn’t get that using Anki alone.

WKは本当に役に立ちます (that’s vocab I learnt from here btw, but what do i know I’ve only been here for 3 months)

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I was curious about this (even though, as several people explained, WaniKani is mainly a kanji learning tool), so I randomly picked a dozen words from the first 10 levels and looked them up on Jisho. Well, they were all tagged “common word”.

(I’m not implying that all WK words are useful, just that a lot of them are. Also, if you’re aiming for fluency, you’ll probably have to learn a few “uncommon words”.)

Well, to be fair there are plenty of weird words that are not that useful in every day Japanese, like 一本気 .

That’s because a lot of them ARE common words. Just not all of them. And even the uncommon ones are far from useless. I’ve run into 里心 a few times in the wild, and I’m glad WK taught me the word so I knew what it meant. You need to know a crap-ton of uncommon and rare words if you ever want to consume native materials - in fact, those words are arguably more important to learn via SRS because unlike the common words, you won’t pick them up organically just by consuming content, since they occur so rarely.

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Yeah, just after posting my comment I realized it could be misinterpreted; I did not imply that all of them are useful, but that most of them are. I edited it for more clarity. Dwarsen’s reply is interesting, too.

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hi. I would not phrase it like that. At the end of the day isn’t the goal to be able to read japanese (i.e. vocab)? I agree though with the idea that Kanjis drive the order as opposed to the vocab so that means that you don’t necessarily get the easiest or most frequently used vocab first. And yes, there are uncommon words in WK that I can only imagine are there for the sake of supporting the Kanji memorization.

Wanikani is not an end all be all for learning kanji, or vocabulary. If you want to study very common words for beginners, or the most common kanji, go for a textbook, and make an anki deck for it. At the end of the day, you need to learn to use what you are learning through Wanikani. Sure, there are three words for “preparation”, but they are used with slightly different meanings/conotations ( ex. mental preparation vs physical preparation ). Neither Anki nor Wanikani is going to help you catch these nuances.

Anki isn’t going to be any different. If anything it requires more practice, since all you do is review flashcards, rather than having to input the reading or meaning. You have to study the kanji reading yourself, and so on. Anki does have sentence examples that are more “in your face” rather than the wanikani ones ( with audio on certain decks ).

Think it’s best to use Wanikani/Anki/SRS tools in general with some other learning material, especially for vocabulary. Personally, I find reading to be the best way to hammer vocabulary in.

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No, they’re all there for the sake of the kanji. That common words tend to contain common kanji is fortuitous, but not exactly coincidental, but while it does mean that the WaniKani vocab gives you a fairly good vocab basis, it’s really not here for the vocab.

If WaniKani did teach vocab for vocab’s sake, it would include vocab that are typically written in kana only.

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WK’s is definitively structured around kanji but you learn kanji because you want to learn how to read in Japanese. It’s more about being able to read a decent amount of words in Japanese, not only about kanji as you said in your first post, the context is important. Maybe your definition of learning Kanji is broader than mine.

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