This post also captures my biggest criticism with the platform. I am frustrated that I now have 山びこ (echo) and ビー玉 (marble) seared into my memory.
I asked my partner, who is native, the last time they used these words and I’m sure you can guess their response.
However, I am trusting in the process. Whilst some of the vocabulary itself is not useful, the concepts are. I don’t intend to rely on Wanikani as the mechanism through which I am picking up useful vocab.
I’m gonna guess that there’s a 0% chance she didn’t know the words though, right?
Sure, they might not be used in daily conversation, but they are still useful to know (+ reinforcing Kanji readings). I’d say that whether or not WaniKani is right for a person depends a lot on whether they just want to get conversationally fluent or actually want to eventually reach an advanced level in Japanese
yh quite strange criticism of vocabulary. wk main purposes to teach you kanji and reinforce it with vocab.
Besides natives on average use approximately 5000k words between themselves on a daily basis. Does it mean you should know only 5k words? no, you probably also want to consume news/media/games/books- in the long run, you will encounter a lot of words.
Wk just for the sake of beginner experience tries to represent easy kanji first and give you solid foundation of radicals so that you can learn complex kanji later. there is almost no connection between how useful a kanji is and how complex it is.
group 1
履 put on pants/ 歯 tooth/紫 purple/ 猿 monkey/ 顔 face/ 僕 /me/ 聞/ listen/ 鼻 nose
group 2
and 丹a color called ‘cinnibar,’ 屯 a garrison of 17th century troops under the command of a Shogun
斤 unit of measurement only used with bread loaves 杉 a specific kind of cedar
后 ‘dowager Empress’, a word only used by retainers in the Imperial Court. (c)
I still can’t figure out why people intentionally study a language and then get mad that they learned a word that exists in that language. There are probably thousands of english words I know but don’t use every day but I recognize them when I see them in a book or something. I mean, when was the last time you talked about marbles in English? Are you MAD that you know the world “marble?”
Also I have 100% seen the word ビー玉 used in manga and in shops in Japan.
A good example of this is the Jōyō Kanji 臼 (millstone/mortar) - which isn’t even in WaniKani, smh
Words that are used in conversation and words that people will and are expected to passively know are two entirely separate things. There are some things that are never used in conversation, but are used in some forms of media and the like.
For instance, I’ve never heard anyone talk about yodeling, but because of its depictions in cartoons and commercials here, almost everyone has a vague idea of what it is and can picture it in their minds. It would be almost absurd if a native didn’t have any idea at all what the word “yodeling” meant, as if it was their first time hearing the word.
Ohh, this is making me curious. What words do early Japanese learners of English think are useless words not used in conversation?
Looking at a list a Japanese person made of English vocabulary (英単語) that will never be used in ordinary conversations (日常会話では絶対使わない) and are useless to know (知っていてもあまり役立たない), but that are “somewhat cool” (なんかかっこいい), here are many of the examples:
“Most of the vocabulary I’ve learned is worthless, even though I’m only on level 5 and have done 12 percent of WaniKani. I mean, how often am I going to use the word “Diplomacy” in everyday conversation? FFS, WaniKani.”
I think it’s more about how often you make mistakes as it resets your progress and prevents from reaching the target in time. I didn’t know 7 days was possible to clear a level with the way the SRS works.
I didn’t believe that was true so I dug around a bit. As it turns out it is possible but as far as I can tell it happened once. I’d like to compile if others managed though. This is the person’s graph:
Now, I prefer to investigate things instead of believing what I’m told. From what I can tell, he did use a script which might skew the result depending on what it does. I’m not I understand how the script works and how it affects workflow so I’ll need to read more on it. If someone could confirm whether or not the script can allow a user to progress faster I’d like to know.
From what I understand, the script allows the user to change the order in which elements from which lesson are taught (radical, kanji, vocabulary). I don’t want to talk about something I don’t understand so I’ll need to look into this or get confirmation from someone else. If that person did use a script to speed things along, then it would of course invalidate how quickly someone reaches level 60 without a script.
Yeah, I’d really take general statements like those with a grain of salt and I doubt it would get pass any serious peer review. There’s just so many variables at play here that I don’t think you can sum it up at: asian languages = 4x study time.
I’ve seen multiple posts of people who have done it, and I’ve seen someone finish WK in just a year without using a single script as well! (don’t remember who it was though)
Reorder scripts are pretty common and are mostly used to bypass the random selection of lessons/reviews. They can’t be used to make things faster than was possible normally (imagine doing all of the lessons as soon as they are available, then doing all of the reviews as soon as they come up). Another way of looking at this is an application of critical path scheduling. With reorder scripting you can do a relatively consistent number of daily lessons since you can do critical path items (radicals & kanji) first, then do the vocab lessons while waiting for new items to unlock.
I think most users would agree that accuracy is critical in general. As far as fast leveling goes you only need to be concerned with getting the first few reviews until guru correct, which isn’t that bad when focusing on good memorization tricks. There are also scripts/apps with an undo feature, which can be used to keep pace. 7 day progress really just represents the minimum amount of time to get from Apprentice 1 to Guru 1 (4 + 8 + 24 + 48 hours) for radicals and kanji.
A lot of charts start out like his, but from what I’ve seen many people slow down in the later levels for many different reasons (preferred pace, leech squashing, being satisfied with their progress and having no need of fast levels, focusing on other aspects of study, ect…). It might be hard to find examples of doing WK in around a year, but it is possible. I think it’s more an issue that the vast majority of people either don’t have a reason to do so or change their minds partway.
Edit: Another application of reordering that is really, really good is for tackling reviews after an absence without vacation mode.
You can definitely do it without the script as well, so it doesn’t really invalidate it. Mostly what the end-result of the script is, that you can space out the content relatively evenly, instead of having a massive vocab backlog that you have to plow through in a day to get the next kanji.
If you want to be fluent and consume native content almost every vocabulary word in WaniKani is going to be useful. Yes, some words are not used in daily conversation but they are used in books and manga. Also, I found that more common words appear after level 10, so it’s a bit early to criticize WK after just 6 levels in… if your goal is just to reach “conversation level”, Kanji is not even necessary (as someone else pointed out), learn some common words and study grammar (there are a lot of resources and platforms, output comes last) and that’s it but you have to put in the work regardless. (and 10 years to fluency is an exaggeration IMO).
The only valid way to learn Japanese is the good ol’ way - without the internet - and taking at least 30 years to learn it. You aren’t a real learner if you optimize things. Shortcuts - more like shortcheats :^)
Those are numbers from the American foreign service institute, which both match their experience training diplomats and have passed peer review.
This is a fun list! Where did it come from?
I think it indicates that tons of “uncommon” words are entirely worth knowing. You might rarely need these in conversation (although I’ve certainly seen them come up often enough), but imagine trying to read anything worthwhile in English that isn’t filled with words of about this level of commonality.
These topics regarding learning “less useful” vocabulary seem to crop up all the time. I get the sense that the people who get frustrated are those who are looking to produce Japanese and get conversationally fluent as quickly as possible, while those who defend learning words as esoteric as 河豚 
are focused more on reading and improving comprehension.
The truth of the matter is that if you want to be truly fluent, you’ll have to learn these weird words sooner or later, and there’s no way around it. And there are SO MANY of them. It’s hard and takes time. A particular uncommon word may only come up once every other novel, but in a vocabulary of 10,000+ of these rare words, they’ll collectively come up almost every other sentence.
That being said, for those whose first (even if it’s not their ultimate) priority is reaching conversational fluency, WaniKani is a horribly inefficient way to get there. I’ve put in ~2+ hours of Japanese study per day for the past two years and I can barely hold the most basic conversation, just because I’ve directed my efforts elsewhere.
Actually, the best thing I need right now is to BE corrected, they’re giving me backlash but also giving me advice LOL
The blog kakkoii-yougosyuu - “創作に使えるかもしれない用語集” - “Vocabulary that might be used in literary works”, one of the sections on the site is for English words (英語・英単語)
Here’s a link the the US Foreign Service Institute’s language tier breakdown. Precise numbers obviously depend on a lot of factors, but yes, in general, it is expected that an English speaker could reach proficiency in Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish in approximately the same amount of time as reaching proficiency in Japanese alone.
Could you provide links to the studies which were peer reviewed? The data I mean. I’d like to read them.
@jhol613 I looked at the link but couldn’t find the studies that were done and how they were done. Maybe I didn’t look at the right place.
