I am little confused

If you take a look at JJ dictionaries, the meanings of a Kanji are vocabularies themselves. The readings are also derived from vocabularies, and can be made comparison to later-on vocabularies.

Readings only need to be remembered specifically only when making mnemonics (to associate with the pictograms, aka Kanji / phonetic components).

Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say

…did you? I scrolled back through the thread and didn’t see anything from you saying isolated kanji reading study is not a necessity.

If you just learn the vocabulary reading “Shita”, you now know one word.

Later when you have to learn the word, say 靴下, you have to learn it as a whole new word. An when you next encounter the word 地下鉄, you have to learnt it as a whole new word as well. This happens to every word you encounter that contains “下” since you only learnt “Shita” as the reading.

However if you learn the on’yomi readings for the individual kanjis, such as 下, 地, 鉄, 靴 etc, then you will need no extra effort to learn all the word combinations using those kanji.

So while in the beginning you feel like you are learning extra, over time the number of words you already know will keep increasing exponentially. This is why learning on Wanikani becomes effortless once you have reached around level 10, and all your energy will be spent just remembering exceptions.

Typically in every level there are just a handful of exceptions, the rest just flow nicely with combination of readings you already know.

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it is what I meant

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ah yeah didnt see that. Have a like

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I’m not part of the WaniKani team, nor am I using the SRS, but if you ask me… well, I would mention a few individual readings when teaching kanji, especially to a beginner, just so that that person becomes aware of the fact that the readings of kanji compounds can be broken down. I mean, I think everyone will probably naturally realise at some point that most compounds are [reading of kanji 1] + [reading of kanji 2], but not everyone does so immediately and might just keep learning kanji compound readings as monolithic things (i.e. as a single unit). This is a bit of a stretch as an illustration, but I’ve seen someone learning Korean with Duolingo like that, having absolutely no clue that the characters could actually be broken into individual letters. Heck, she didn’t even know that each stack of hangul characters was a single syllable. Was that her fault? No. But the point is, if no one points this out to you at least one time, it might take you a while before you notice it on your own.

As many other people have said, you don’t need to learn ‘vocabulary readings’ separately. But knowing that they are readings for one kanji, as opposed to a part of some indivisible whole, can be very helpful for working things out later on, even if you don’t have to memorise any readings to acquire that knowledge.

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Yes, a little explicit learning about how the “system” of kanji and the writing system generally works is really useful. Similarly it’s good to know that kanji are built out of smaller parts that turn up again and again, and that sometimes the parts indicate area of meaning and sometimes pronunciation. That’s helpful whether or not you choose to take an RTK like route of assigning each part a unique keyword and memorizing them so you can writer them from memory.

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I spent a long time trying to just learn kanji through vocab and exposure and it worked quite well for about 200-300 of them, but then I found I didn’t have confidence guessing readings when encountering new words in the wild. I knew that different words had different meanings and about on/kunyomi but it still felt really mysterious, especially as most common words have a load of different uses and readings. I didn’t understand how to guess what a reading might be since in my head all the different readings were equally valid.

Wanikani really helped with that for me although I don’t learn readings out of context - for onyomi I always check a list of words containing the kanji and there’s usually at least one or two I’ve encountered in my studies before and I can say, from then on, “ah, this kanji is the へん in 返事” and then I don’t forget it easily once I make that connection. I have loads more confidence with unknown words since breaking it down into readings/vocab removed a lot of the confusion! There are exceptions of course, like 靴下 being read as した, but knowing the general rules is just comforting. Just my two cents!

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Why would you need to do that? If you don’t know a word just use an offline dictionary on your phone. No need to guess it

Words written with multiple kanji and no kana are almost always read with on’yomi, words with a single kanji or kana attached are almost always read with kun’yomi. Kun’yomi generally have more syllables because on’yomi all only had one syllable, and that was adapted to JP pronunciation rules as best as possible. (many even before ん so you have う and む). If this still doesn’t mean anything just open a list of readings for 20 random kanji and compare the on with the kun readings.
There. No special software needed ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

The point might be that it is a lot easier to look up a word if you know the reading of it. Drawing kanji can be quite the challenge depending on what tools you have at hand and whether the software decides to recognize your drawing or not. And radical search can be a pain too.

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i agree with vocab → kanji readings making it easier! sometimes once ive guru’d a kanji and i’m having trouble remembering the reading in later reviews, i try to remember a vocab word that has the kanji in it that uses the onyomi and that really helps, which reinforces the word as well. constant cycles of memory!

honestly in terms of guessing how a word is pronounced/what it means using the onyomi that wanikani teaches is way better. if i’m practicing duolingo but i don’t have my headphones, for example, i can remember the reading for a kanji/vocab word and thus connect it to the meaning in my head - just cause duolingo just throws kanji at you without explanation except the listening aspect. and if i’m doing duolingo using a dictionary feels like cheating lol

to me i think it’s just easier to come up with a system that lets me get the right answer most times, instead of brute-force memorizing any word i need to use. i felt the same way in physics - way easier to remember that distance is the integral of velocity/etc and use that to find formulas than memorize every formula that could exist. i just need a system with enough reference points to get me to the final answer. so in that way wanikani is really helpful for me :smiley:

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not trying to speak for anyone but i think what torkey is trying to say is that wanikani helped teach them those rules, and also what readings are onyomi vs what readings are kunyomi, and when those apply … wanikani’s definitely not for everyone so if it’s not helpful to you that’s okay?

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In some ways I think this is kind of the best way to come to structured kanji-learning programmes like WK and RTK. You start with learning the language in a more traditional way, so you have a clearer understanding of how kanji as a part of the writing system fit into the language as a whole. And by doing some learn-by-exposure/rote of kanji you gain a very clear understanding of what the structured learning programmes are bringing to the table and motivation for using them. I think that makes it easier to decide how to fit them into the rest of your Japanese learning efforts and what parts of them are more or less important to you.

But again to some extent I’m just advocating the path I happened to take :slight_smile:

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or you could learn the words first and then learn how they are written

Personally I tried it for a very long time and made no progress. However, I agree for many people that might be the right way. WK is not for them though.

人 is にん or じん

Funnily this exact word is one that depressed me. I would constantly be getting it wrong whenever I come across this word whether it should be read as にん , じん or ひと (And God forbid if it was part of ひとり, ふたり, etc). This particular letter really depressed me. With WK, these words were drilled into me with both readings and mnemonics (like nintendo or jeans etc) right from the free levels!

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Never had problems with either of these. Hitori because the metal gear song starts with this word and futari because I knew what futa is and I hope God forgives me for that

so I just had to attach the previously learned ri.

About what didn’t work for you, since you also felt sad about 人, maybe the best method for you was RTK + vocab cram. But whatever teaches you teaches you, so no worries.

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“you can’t search them unless you can copy and paste”

method 1- google’s writing detection, either on google translate or on the keyboard of android phones
method 2- radical search on any online dictionary

I know you deleted your post, but this is a misconception that other people might have

Sorry what is RTK ?

It’s a book named “Remembering the Kanji” by somebody I think named Heisig.

From what I’ve heard, it teaches a set of radicals and uses them for mnemonics just like Wanikani, but it doesn’t teach readings, only meanings.

It can be much faster than WaniKani since there’s no SRS, it’s just a book, and you can go at whatever pace you like.

James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji. Pretend book 2 doesn’t exist tho.