It would be great if WaniKani had hiragana-only vocab, for example, ずっと or こっそり.
Pretty sure they’ve said multiple times that they want to avoid feature creep. WaniKani is the best kanji resource. They don’t want to dilute it.
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There is such a course on Memrise if I’m not mistaken. That being said, SRS doesn’t work for me when it comes to kana only vocab, after a while everything gets mixed up: なんて、なんと、なんとか、なんとなく、なんべん。。。 I’ll have to learn it in context, I suppose.
Rule number one of project management: Don’t let your goals creep, or you end up with a project failing 90% of the time.
Also, the aim of WK isn’t to teach vocabulary, even the vocabulary on here has differing levels of real-life usefulness.
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To be fair, that’s on WK.
WK actually does have a fair amount of vocab that you will see in kana 90% of the time, but which has a kanji version.
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They do advertise the vocab though.
WaniKani is a web application for learning Japanese kanji and vocabulary with the goal of teaching you around 1,700 kanji and 5,000 vocabulary words in about a one to two years. “What? That’s impossible!” you scream. “Okay, tell me more,” you continue after calming down.
Judging by their materials, it doesn’t seem that they treat the vocab as something unimportant.
They advertise it because it’d be kind of stupid not to, but the vocab is largely chosen as a way to teach kanji readings rather than purely for its usefulness in written or spoken Japanese. There are thousands of useful vocabulary that you can make from the top 500 and 1000 most common kanji that aren’t included, because they want to teach us another 1000 kanji rather than expanding the site to be twice its size.
I’ve literally NEVER heard anyone treat WaniKani as a way to learn vocabulary. Sure, you do. As a way to reinforce Kanji learning. Nothing more, nothing less. And if you expect most of the vocab words to actually be useful… well you’ll soon find out quite a lot of them are never used by natives or are considered to be archaic.
But either way. Kana only vocabulary is a <1% chance of being added. That’s more likely to be taught in EtoEto than anything.
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You might be surprised. I ran the WK vocab through frequency lists and parsed subtitles. Most WK words are there.
At the very least half, in anime subtitles.
That’s not a great percentage. If you were trying to focus on the most common vocab, your percentage would be well over 90%.
I’m currently going through level 54 vocab, and it seems like half of it isn’t even in the top 15000 words from this list.
The point is that it’s anime for teenagers, with a lot of colloquialisms, weird words and spoken words. And even there it’s at least half.
Well, there’s only 5000 words… a tiny fraction of an adult vocabulary. If it wasn’t at least 50% for anime, that would be a little sad.
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I think it’s about 8000 words now. 1700 Kanji and 5000 Vocabulary were back when they only had 50 levels. But I still agree that WaniKani is not an optimal Vocabulary source
It’s 6290 according to the stats site. I knew there were less than 9000 total items, so 8000 vocab would be too high. But I guess they need to update their landing page for new users.
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