Is it necessary to translate every vocabulary sentence?

I find it tremendously time consuming to go through vocabulary lessons. There are always kanji and words i don’t know yet. Is it ok to skip them or it will affect my learning process badly? How do you handle your vocabulary lessons?

vocab lessons are exactly made to show you new words so you learn them that exact moment,

you are not supposed to know them before.

And they always show with kanji previously learned, I have never seen a case otherwise.

Personally I only scan the sentences in English to get an idea of how the word is used. If I have time to spare, I will try to pick out other words that I know or familiar grammar points in the sentence. It hasn’t hurt my retention so far :slight_smile:

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I used to read these, but now I simply don’t have the time. They’re great for ‘forcing’ your mind to adapt to japanese, so I would recommend it, but if you find that it actually affects how many lessons you’re able to do I’d say just read a sentence here and there, maybe? If you wanna learn japanese you have to deal with this uncomfortableness sooner or later, but it’s all what you’ve got time for I guess.

Do you mean the context sentences? They’re just there as examples for the vocab, rather than something you need to learn. Personally, although I love and appreciate WK, I find the context sentences extremely poor and rarely look at them - I find the majority of them too difficult for my language level, they include kanji I haven’t studied yet with no furigana, and the translation is often so natural that it’s difficult to find which word is meant to be the vocab word I’ve just studied.

I wish WK included a low-level sentence, along with a more literal translation, each time so I could actually find them helpful!

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Oh sweet summer child.

Basically from level 21 and up the context sentences not only have kanji that haven’t been previously learned, but kanji that is not in WaniKani in the first place.

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I do read through one or two of the context sentences. Earlier there’s usually an easier one, a moderately hard one and a weird one. It does help to see some of the vocab in context and also gets you used to reading whole sentences if you haven’t done much of that before.

However, I would definitely recommend installing this add-on, specifically the modified version of the script shown in the attached post:

It highlights kanji you’ve already learned up to the current level in a different colour. If you hover your mouse over them it will give you the meaning and reading, and it links to the WK page if you click them. It also adds browser text-to-speech so you can listen to the sentences (not always 100% accurate but good if you’re starting out).

Feel free to skip the context sentences; they are definitely overly complicated. I always read them just to improve my hiragana/katakana recognition and basically nothing else.

I never even looked at the context sentence unless the word was weird and I wasn’t sure how it could be used. I get my reading content outside of WK.

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one more here to say since level 1 I realized those sentences dont help at all

advanced context for reviews, yes! very useful!

Sometimes I forget the answer and the other words in the sentence help me to remember.

Don’t skip them.

First of all just kanji is not real vocab. Many vocab consists of kanjis attached to each other or kanjis attached with hiragana.

I know, there are a lot of vocab lessons and you could totally just skip all vocab just by using an re-order user script and only do the essential radicals and kanji to level up. But in my experience the vocab lessons really reinforce your retention and recognition.
I remember the meaning of a word in English for more easy, but I struggle with readings and vocab lessons are perfect to work on the last thing.

I advice you to do radicals and kanji first, but be sure to do all the vocab lessons by the end of every level. It’s totally worth it. And remember: Japanese learning is something that is life-long so take your time.

Have a great day and may the crabigator be with you!

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