If, say, you have no interest in learning a word, and thus can’t remember it? Say, for example, “pitcher”, which I consistently get wrong, because I have no intention of ever being in a position to need it. I figure that “some baseball guy” will get me close enough, and will work for all positions. Of course, since I’m refusing to learn the word “baseball” (ya-something, I think…), that’s going to be tricky too…
Unfortunately no, you cannot turn off a card. The best you can do is add a synonym like ‘a’ so you can always just type that to get it right.
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Fabulous idea! I’ll use “um”, because that’s my invariable response to baseball conversations.
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WK was designed to teach you baseball vocab.
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It is clearly a mind control device. Look how we all leap to do reviews whenever they say.
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I guess the Japanese love baseball, so it would make sense to learn some baseball related vocab along the way.
Anyway, the vocab for pitcher does have some value, I think. reenforcing the hand=person aspect of the kanji. So maybe add ‘throw person’, or ‘thrower’ to the synonyms. It’s not pitcher, but does connect to the meaning of the kanji.
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Yeah, that’s kind of an elegant workaround, just adding a synonym like “ignore” to all the ones you don’t want to learn. I would say though, that some of the vocab WK has isn’t there to teach you the word, per se, it’s to reinforce the kanji readings. 投手：とう and しゅ. You’ll forget them quickly if you don’t know any words that use them.
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You may not want to use the word, but what if someone says it to you? What if it’s in something you’re reading?
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I’d probably think, “oh, this is about baseball” and stop reading it.
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What if your boss/coworker/taxi driver/date/friendly person making small talk/etc mentions it. Would you just say “Don’t care, but we can make small talk with a pre-approved list of topics I deem acceptable?”
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Well, I don’t have any conversations in English about sacrifice flies and pitcher’s stuff, so I’m not expecting them in Japanese either.
野球について全然わからない。
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That’ll make for fun time with the language if you only learn how to understand things you find interesting. So many gaps will appear in entertainment consumed, not to mention trying to hold a conversation.
I find it hard to believe a topic of baseball, or any other thing you don’t personally enjoy, has never come up. Do you not have coworkers/friends into things that you aren’t, but have to pretend to have mild interest in when they’re telling you all about something. Or, you bring things up they couldn’t care less about, but fake interest to be nice.
Last time I got my haircut, the lady was chatting about some football game that night. I gave no :
s, and its not a topic I’d ever bring up, but there I was, having to fake it. I guess I could have just stared blankly at her.
Just saying, you never know when something will come up. Better to be prepared, than to limit yourself.
There’s something about baseball that people feel the need to let us know they don’t care, unlike all the other words they’ll also never use from here.
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I’ll learn 野球、投手、選手、etc., but there are much more important things I can be spending my time on than specialized vocab for a sport I don’t care about in my 2nd language. (I know baseball is big in Japan, but I don’t care about football in America, either.)
Also, @Leebo, my favorite word to complain about here happens to be 稿料. It’s so obscure that it was the 15th option in my IME just now.
Probably because baseball is a mindbogglingly dull sport 
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Yeah I’m with you there, like I know the basic stuff such as a strike, a homerun, and what a pitch is, but this sacrifice fly, double play, pitcher’s stuff I have no idea about.
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Baseball is all about the exciting suspense between plays. If you don’t know much about baseball, that’s all lost.
Well, then don’t all of you want to be able to be annoying about it in Japanese too 
There are plenty of opportunities, at school, when discussing the news, etc
You have to be able to recognize people are discussing baseball to be able to tell them off.
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Because people who don’t like “sportsball” tend to need to make it aware they are ‘too good’ for that stuff. I found at least, a lot of people for whatever reason, think they’re smarter/more sophisticated for not being into sports. The whole ‘meathead jock’ thing is beneath them, etc.
The only baseball vocabulary you need in Japan is “Ootani Shouhei”
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