I know a lot of people complain about some vocabulary items like baseball terms, political terms, etc. because they feel they’re irrelevant to some peoples’ studies. I personally think that most of them are fine since politics and baseball and the like are a large part of Japanese culture and things that learners benefit from knowing about.
But words that represent ranks in the Japanese army, navy, etc. are extremely useless in my opinion and they tend to be harder to learn than other words as well. For example on level 48 there are three words, 大佐, 中佐, and 少佐 for “colonel“, “lieutenant colonel“, and “lieutenant commander“. And before that, there’s 主将, 総帥, 中尉, 少尉, and many, many more. Not only are these words I’ve never used (or even heard) in English, and not only are these words I’d never use or hear in Japanese, and not only are these words that are hard to learn because I don’t even know what they mean in English - but on top of all of that, they don’t even mean the same thing in English as they do in Japanese. A “lieutenant colonel“ in English is not even equivalent to a 中佐 in Japanese. They’re completely different ranks with completely different roles and responsibilities in completely different militaries.
Every time one of these words comes up in my lessons I have to
Look up what the word means in English
Create some kind of mnemonic to remember the English word
Create a mnemonic to associate the Japanese word with the English word
Look up what the word means in Japanese
Create some kind of mnemonic to remember the Japanese word
And all of this for what? Just so I can “learn“ how to refer to some random rank in the Japanese navy? And when the time comes 20 years from now when that word will come in handy a single time I won’t even remember it anymore anyway?
If you need a solution, I would set them all as having a generic synonym like “military” so you know they’re military related if they ever come up but you don’t have to know the specifics.
I agree that they are all still so confusing to me as well. I am not particularly interested in learning them, but I do like to try and keep them straight as I live in Japan and KFC is funny to say, well the guy is actually 大佐 Sanders (or is it 中佐 or… AUG_H)
Easiest way to avoid them is what @soggyboy said and give them a synonym called “military” and that way just blast through them. If you understand they are military and you don’t ever need to know the distinctions then that’s perfect.
I will say there are a few people who have different ideas of what should be removed and what is uncessary and what words they see a lot. I can see people who play video games surrounding war generals or have a general interest in military wanting to know these words in Japanese. Plus, it seems that the 佐 kanji is used mostly in military words, which makes sense why WaniKani put them there. I think they have only ever removed a few vocabulary before, but they usually will not remove vocab unless it’s extremely outdated or old Japanese. These military terms are still being used so best way to not review them, is to do the synonym work-around
That’s exactly what I did, although that’s still not a perfect solution and it’d be much nicer (for me, but for everyone else too) if they were just removed.
I am not disagreeing with you that these words might be better off removed. I haven’t gotten to them yet in wanikani. I will say that 大佐, 中佐, and 少佐 are “taisā,” “chūsā,” and “shōsā,” come up in one of my favorite Japanese musicals, 琥珀色の雨にぬれて and I had to look them up to understand that a character was being modest when correcting someone who thought he was of higher rank.
I saw someone else in a different thread say that waching Fullmetal Alchemist helped out the most for finally getting these words down. I might have to start watching it so I stop getting them confused. All I’ve got is colonel sanders to go off of
Perhaps, a better solution would be not to remove items, per say, but to add an option to mark the vocab items you don’t want to learn as such.
Of course, if such an option is added, one should use it with caution, because a lot of vocab items are used to teach various readings of kanji, so removing them might become a problem… Nevertheless, I think people should have option to do it. Would also solve the problem of kana-only vocab, which I know some people who are strongly against…
Yes one would think that 4 words all targeting the same reading サ, 3 of which are military ranks, are a little excessive if the goal is to remember the kanji.
I’m not so sure about that – I think, having a few more words to reinforce the reading is not a bad idea…
But again, I think people should have the option of skipping words they don’t think they need…
I also did not enjoy trying to figure out the difference between colonel, major, wing commander or whatever. I think I might just do what I did for baseball terminology if I keep getting them wrong. For all baseball stuff I just enter BS and get it right.
I’m just glad to hear other people are annoyed with the military ranks and baseball terms. I’m trying to think of other terms that drove me nuts and came up with the many synonyms for “surplus” or “remainder,” and the terms for inflation later “sudden rise” “sudden price jump.” There’s probably a kanji reason for it but it’s funny how some vocab has like, five interchangeable variants.
I think you make it sound more arduous than it is. You just need a browser extension to mouse over a word and get dictionary definitions, and when that’s that not good enough just ctrl+c, ctrl+t, start typing the address of your book marked favourite J-J dictionary, hit enter and then ctrl+V it in there and read the actual definition.
But yeah drop a generic synonym for these terms if they bother you. My goal is to get exposed to a wide range of vocabulary and military ranks have been mentioned from time to time in my reading. I will say though that they’re are really obviously being used as ranks in context and actually knowing where each one sits in the hierarchy isn’t necessary. The average native English speaker probably couldn’t correctly order a list of ranks either but that doesn’t mean we lost much information when they’re used most of the time.
To me it makes sense to keep them but I also have familiarity with the words in English. To me it seems that 佐 and 尉 combined with 大, 中, and 少 makes a really easy to understand rank structure.
It also seems like they would come up in anime or historical movies. They would make sense to know any time there are army or navy components to a story.
It might be more confusing that you’re mixing the English names for army ranks with navy ranks. In high to low order, Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel, and Major are army. Captain, Commander, and Lieutenant Commander are navy.
It would definitely be confusing to think about anything except Commander being the next higher than Lieutenant Commander.
And also air force. At least when it comes to the US armed forces - stuff gets different when you’re considering those of other nations. In Australia, for example, the equivalent air force ranks are Group Captain, Wing Commander and Squadron Leader.
(I learnt my navy ranks from Star Trek, my air force ranks from Stargate, and my JSDF ranks from Fullmetal Alchemist, so I got no issue remembering which is which. Clearly all y’all’s education is lacking. )
It’s always confused me that Major General is the rank below Lieutenant General. Major General sounds like greater-than-General to me. A Sergeant Major is higher than a Sergeant, after all.
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