Hi everyone! a newbie here
First off, thanks to the creators: I’m absolutely enjoying Tofugu!
I like Wanikani a lot, everything’s fine so far, but I’ve encountered one problem: SRSing pronunciation of kanji seems a waste of time. They all combine in words after all, resulting in a number of various pronunciations. Doesn’t it make more sense to learn pronunciation only for words?
Does anybody know an app, a website or a script for Wanikani which excludes Kanji pronunciation?
I wouldn’t call it useless, it can give you a pretty good guess for the reading of a word you don’t know using kanji you do know.
If anything, it’s more useful than the kanji meaning, because whether the words actually have anything to do with the meaning of the kanji it’s made up of is a bit of a crap shoot tbh.
Of course whether you should be learning either of these in isolation is a matter of some debate. If you do insist on learning kanji meanings in isolation but not readings, a more generic SRS like Anki or Kitsun might be of help.
thanks for replying!
at least kanji “meanings” help me with memorization haha
It’s definitely not useless. I mean you can just learn vocab without knowing how the kanji is pronounced obviously, but WaniKani’s focus is on kanji and using kanji knowledge for vocab, so learning the kanji pronunciation is a major part of the curriculum. If you’re not interested in learning kanji that way, Anki might be a better fit for you.
Some benefits of learning kanji pronunciation:
Honestly that’s gonna be a long list of kanji in a lot of cases, and I haven’t always found it to work. A better and faster way is writing a word using the kanji and just delete the others (if any)
Oh true, it definitely depends on the kanji (looking at you こう kanji)
ありがとう！pronunciation patterns definetely make sense
You make an interesting point. But to take your point further - why bother learning the meanings of individual kanji? Why not just learn the meaning of words. ?
My personal opinion (I didn’t do WaniKani) is that yes, there’s not a great deal of benefit to explicitly learning a kanji pronunciation. I find that you get that more or less “for free” by learning vocabulary (and the advantages of being able to guess a reading given the single kanji are only nice-to-have things anyway). Similarly, “meaning” of an individual kanji is a bit of a slippery concept and also not necessarily something you need to memorize.
On the other hand, the WK system is what it is and it is deliberately not very flexible, so if you’re going to use the tool it’s probably better to try to go with the grain of how it wants to work rather than against it.
I would suggest that if you can find a better way of learning to read Japanese its probably better if you pursue that way. I dont mean to say this in a mean way i just say it as a person who has come to Wanikani after failing at other ways of learning to read Japanese
hmm Idk yet as I’m just starting out, but at this point Wanikani seems to be one of the best tools if not the best
thanks! could you recommend some tools that you used?
heh some time ago I watched a video by a native Japanese sensei, where he said excactly the same: learn the words and their pronunciations. back then, not knowing anything about Japanese, I understood it vaguely, but now I see clearly haha. I don’t mind learning radicals and kanji since it aids the process tremendously. the only issue for me is kanji pronunciation. recent example: kanji below 下 pronounced か preposition below 下 - した verb to lower 下げる - さげる so we’ve got ka shita and sa for the same kanji… and that’s only the tip of the iceberg
Not really, because my learning path was a bit all over the place. I did a bit of “just learn characters as you go along, with the traditional repeated writing approach” to start with, I tried real paper flashcards (don’t bother with this in the 21st century even if you’re feeling retro), I did Remembering The Kanji (which is definitely not really something I would recommend in retrospect), I did a bunch of vocabulary learning first with Anki and now with jpdb.io, and I did a lot of reading (highly recommended as soon as you can get to a point where it’s feasible).
If you want a fully customisable and flexible SRS app, Anki is the main thing out there, but you do need to do some mix of finding good decks for it, cribbing good workflows for card creation from reddit and blog posts, and so on. It’s definitely not a “just works” experience.
Note that the “ton of different readings” problem is most acute for the very basic kanji you learn initially. Most kanji are not like that and the norm I think is one on reading and one kun reading. So it gets better once you get out of that initial hyper-common-kanji stage.
I have tried immersion and looking up kanji as i go along but i found the kanji and vocabulary didn’t stick in my mind.I hear what you are saying and you are right in what you are saying but i have found that Wanikani has worked really well for me. I know that not using Wanikani has worked well for other people. My suggestion is that you choose a method, Wanikani or not and stick at it for a while and see how you get on.
It’s not very reliable for single kanji, but for compounds it can save some time.
It’s also handy in cases where you know the pronunciation of one of the kanji, and you have a decent idea about the other one (because you recognize the apparent phonetic component).
Sort of - the end goal is sight reading, where the composition of the words is only important to your subconscious.
What you’re doing here (I think) is learning a pronunciation of a character, then applying that to some words until you remember them. Then using those words to remember the pronunciation of the kanji so that when you come across new words their pronunciation is easier to decode, then remember, then read.
So, you find a new word, 携帯, and maybe you recognise the kanji from 携行 and 地帯. You look it up and it’s pronounced as expected so it’s easy to remember and you’ve got the meaning. Next time you see it, you might not be able to sight read it, but you’ll be able to work out how to say it. Eventually, you’ll be able to sight read it, and you’ll not really be aware of the kanji anyway. But that started when you briefly memorised the reading of the Kanji so you could read 地帯.
You don’t have to do it like that. You could just learn words, or you could properly memorize the kanji, if either of those fit more with how you want to learn.
Brilliant reply
My opinion is that knowing the reading of individual kanji is a very useful crutch while I build “true” vocabulary knowledge. When I learned English in school they had us memorize lists of irregular verbs like “catch caught caught, eat ate eaten, read read read, bring brought brought” etc… Do I need those lists now? No, but for a while it was that or say stuff like “I sayed that the cat eated the fish”.
There are layers to it too, for instance today in a game I encountered the word 鑑識室 for the first time. There were no furigana and I didn’t know the first kanji. Now that’s pretty annoying to look up usually, except that in this case I guessed the reading correctly first try.
I knew that the last two kanji were しきしつ but what about the unknown first kanji? Well I can see that there’s the 監 which is often used as a phonetic component for かん. So I guessed かんしきしつ and it was correct.
Would it have been better to just know the word own its on off the cuff? Well yeah, but I didn’t. I knew the kanji though.
What I will say however is that the value of knowing individual kanji readings varies a lot depending on the kanji. Knowing the reading of 監 is useful because it’s a fairly common phonetic component, knowing the reading of 識 is useful because it’s used in many words but knowing the reading of more niche kanji that are only used in a handful of words is less worthwhile.
My go-to example is 挨拶 which contains two kanji that are almost never used outside of this specific word. In this case you may as well memorize the word directly…