I appreciate that the sentences are mainly in hiragana but I doubt I would ever come across sentences like:
ズボンが下がるようにベルトをゆるめなさい。
Unfasten your belt so that your pants will hang down.
あの二人はいつも二人でくみたがる。
Those two want to be a couple all the time.
ぼくはせかいで一ばんよわい。
I’m the weakest man in the world.
Just saying, at least for me, they do not always help to reinforce the kanji.
Don’t say us veterans never did anything for ya:
Also note: Tatoeba contains many sentences that are varying degrees of bad. More explicit explanation
Thanks, I will give that a try… my grammar is not up to a lot of the longer phrases.
Why do you think the sentences don’t demonstrate the usage of the kanji?
To be fair, sometimes, they don’t.
I just got 頼み as a noun, and the example sentence was
コウイチはビエトに窓を開けるよう頼みましたが、ビエトは仕事に集中していて聞こえませんでした。
in which they just use the past tense of 頼む, the verb.
But even besides situations like that, often the example sentences do use an alternative meaning of the word that isn’t listed as one of possible definitions by the site, or as part of colloquial phrases, or as like half to a third of a 熟語.
I mean, granted, it is using the kanji, but if you’re being drilled on a discrete vocabulary item, the example sentence should theoretically use that vocabulary item and not just the kanji in it.
As a corollary, it’d be like if you were learning English and I gave you the vocab word “viscera” and the example sentence “Jon Stewart straight up eviscerated President Bush on last night’s Daily Show, ammirite?” I mean the two terms are definitely related, but it’d be super confusing to an EFL student and would be potentially misleading about the context for the usage of the word you’re supposed to be being taught.
EDIT: Apropros, the vocab I literally just learned was
遺伝子 (genes), but the sentence was
本当に彼らは父親を鑑定する遺伝子検査を受けたいんでしょうか.
in which 遺伝子検査 does not mean “karyotype” but “paternity test,” and that still leaves me without an example of the word 遺伝子 being used in a sentence so I don’t know if its colloquial like “genes” is in English, or technical, like “genomes” is. Granted, I can probably infer that based off the english translation, but I couldn’t do that for example with WK’s 4 different versions of “consent” or 3 different versions of “reality” or “truth”
I’m sure there are some examples, but I’m not sure where you’re getting “paternity test” as the only meaning of 遺伝子検査. The example sentence uses it in a way that suggests wanting to know their paternity status is a reason for having the testing done, but a brief googling suggests it has a generic meaning. In the sentence it just means “genetic testing”.
I’m getting that from the translation provided by WANIKANI ITSELF:
and that’s my whole point–> if you have to open a new tab to google up other example sentences for context, than by definition it’s not a good context sentence.
You’re reading too much into it to say that it doesn’t mean “genetic testing” though. A paternity test is one kind of genetic test, and that is something you can take up with the English translation, which is a separate issue from whether the word shows up in the Japanese sentence accurately. I prefer natural translations to literal ones when possible, so changing the transitivity, tweaking the nuance, that stuff doesn’t bother me.
Again dude, all that is besides the point tho. The word is “Genes,” so
whether the example sentence is translated as “genetic testing” or
“paternity testing,” its not actually an example sentence of the word
they’re intending to teach. And it’s great that you at level 60, don’t have
problems with being introduced to new vocabulary out of context because you
can do legwork independently to make up for it, but your ability to work
around that doesn’t mean that it’s not being presented out of context and
that you’re not doing work as a result, and it doesn’t invalidate the
complaint that the OP and myself and others users may have. It is a
problem, an obvious obstacle to learning, that the “context sentences” WK
provides don’t actually provide a context in which the vocabulary is being
used. So yeah, as a “context sentence” it isn’t good. This is not even a
controversial opinion; the whole reason the first ten levels each have a
second, easier to read and more useful example sentence is because somebody
at WK went back and wrote them in, for that exact reason.
The fact that we don’t say gene test in English isn’t relevant to whether the sentence is an accurate usage of the word in my opinion. You disagree.
The accusation was they used a different meaning than was taught, in the Japanese sentence. I don’t think they did.
I think we all agree that they can improve the sentences. I just nitpicked that example.
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