How to remember verb vocabs in wanikani?

I’m at lv 10 and is facing difficulty in remember verb. There are no rule for verb !
I know when I learn from genki or tae kim there will be a hint to conjugate the verb. But I haven’t touch these materials. Is there any way to remember this???
Maybe the mmemonic in wanikani only work with kanji, not verb in vocabulary !

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For verb conjugations, the best way is to use some text (Genki for example, as you mentioned) material to study the conjugation rules. Wanikani is really only equipped to teach you kanji and vocab, and all verbs (as far as I can tell) are given in plain (dictionary) form.

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yes, wanikani is total useless in mmemonic the verbs, the confusion began when the reading and meaning not correlated and there are many same voca in one verb !

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Do you mean you don’t recognize which vocab are verbs and which are nouns (or adjectives)? Or you just don’t know how to conjugate the verbs you are learning?

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Can you describe a concrete example of a problem you had? I am having a hard time figuring out what you are referring to.

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I only know verb are ending with う
Many words in vocabulary is easy to confused

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You can see what is happening here


for example, verb with “life” (sei) is totally confusing. Also is “outside”

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Verbs can end in almost any hiragana that ends in ‘u’. う る す are probably the most common, but く ぐ ぶ む ぬ つ are also used.

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せい is the onyomi, and so it’s not going to be used for verbs most of the time. You have to learn a separate reading mnemonic for each separate reading.

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There are many kanji that change pronunciation once they become verbs or nouns or adjectives; there’s no rule. You have to use the mnemonics.

I will try to switch to genki to see what if it helps me solve the verb mmemonic, won’t I?

Practicing using the verbs (all the vocabulary really) within some context/sentences would definitely help with remembering them.

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Genki is a grammar book, so it won’t be teach you any mnemonics on how to remember the kun’yomi reading of kanji. Unless I misunderstand, that sounds to me to be your problem?

As I understand it: you’re having a hard time with the fact that vocab and especially verbs often have a different reading than the kanji reading that is taught.

Grammar resources won’t be teaching you ways to specifically remember readings. It can be useful in the sense that grammar studies or reading of native material will have you use those verbs, so that you can have extra exposure to their correct meanings.

And I’m curious:

Do the wanikani mnemonics for the radicals and kanji work for you? If so, I wonder why vocab mnemonics would be any different? It’s hard to remember different readings for all the kanji, but having both on’yomi and kun’yomi will unfortunately never not be a part of learning Japanese.

So I do think that pursuing more grammar could potentially help, because using the verbs for yourself is always a good way to remember things. Just know up front that something like genki offers zero mnemonics. They just define a verb/word, and use it in the grammar exercises.

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Like, you know, if after a kanji is a different kata it will become a total different verb ( maybe both meaning and reading change !). This is one of flaw of wanikani when there are no rule and you just rote learning these

Verbs aren’t special. There are reading mnemonics for everything.

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I mean, remember kata after kanji in verb is no way, kanji is easier in this case

For example, are you referring to:

生 = life

生く = to live = いく

生む = to give birth = うむ

Stuff like that? That woudn’t be WaniKani’s fault though, would it? :thinking: WK is teaching Japanese. In convenience of reading Japanese, Japanese often makes no sense. WK can’t change the words that Japanese has.

They use heir mnemonics the same way for vocab as they do with kanji, so I don’t fully understand why you consider the vocab mnemonics useless, but the other mnemonics good enough.

The only difference I see is that kun’yomi about doubles the amount of things we have to learn, but that’s still an idiosyncrasy of the Japanese language. Wouldn’t be very helpful if WK cut out all the verbs, the meat of the language in many ways, just because the verb readings are hard to remember.

Do you use a computer for reviews? Maybe look into some of the scripts. There are some great ways to work on your leeches (words you just can’t seem to remember right). Or maybe write the troublesome ones out by hand?

And you probably already do so: but I find that listening to a lot of native material really helps. Even if it’s with subtitles. That has made me somewhat familiar with a lot of the verbs that WK teaches, so it’s easier to recognize and remember them.

Best of luck!

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Yes, that’s exactly what I mentioning. Verb don’t like noun and adj, it should be uniformed and have rules. But with these kind of rule, it is totally a mess.
But I will learn more about verb and try some native content ( maybe I should get that when I was around lv 20 ? lv 10 is too early )
Thanks

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Anything can have a separate reading from the lesson reading. Not just verbs. It’s not consistent because it’s a natural language…

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This is what makes Japanese such a challenging language to learn. I’ve been living in Japan for years and there are many kanji I’ve learned only one reading for. But when I see the same kanji in a different combination, I have no idea what it says and sometimes only a vague notion of what it means. This is why I decided to start learning with wanikani- it (generally) systematically teaches kun and on yomi readings. It’s a headache to remember everything, but the mnemonics help and using different types of content-written and spoken will help with becoming familiar with all the different readings. It’s frustrating but think of how satisfying it’ll be once you finish it all! Good luck!

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