Joyo kanji outside WaniKani?

WaniKani Requesting Help
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I just noticed that the Joyo kanjis consist of 2136 kanjis, while WaniKani has 2048. Initially I thought WaniKani included all the Joyo kanjis, but that turns out not to be true. Why are only about 90 kanjis left out of the Joyo kanjis? If the application already includes a comprehensive 2048, it seems silly not to include all the joyos, which seems like the common learning goal.

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In actual fact, WaniKani is missing 173 of the Joyo kanji - it also teaches 57 kanji that are jinmeyo, not joyo. And yeah, questions have indeed been raised as to why you’d get so close but not go all the way.

But the fact of the matter is, the remaining 173 joyo kanji are used so rarely in real life that odds are you’d never encounter them. It’s a case of diminishing returns, basically - you’d put a whole bunch of effort into learning the last few kanji for comparatively little benefit. Why learn, to pick a random example, éș“, which is used in precisely one word, namely éș“ (ごもず), when you could instead learn 瓜, which is used in many words?

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158

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There are many jouyou kanji that I have never encountered anywhere but while studying the jouyou kanji.

By the point you finish WaniKani, learning them yourself is not that much of a challenge, except that you won’t run into them in the wild often at all.

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Ah, I had a feeling that list was out of date


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Silkworm gate again?

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That’s not one of the ones I was thinking of in this case.

(He whispered and crawled away from the silkworm horde)

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Thank you for your answers!

Are there any good sources for learning the remaining kanjis, and are there any point to learning jinmeyo kanjis? I know the rest of them are very rare, but it would feel like a good acomplishment to learn them all.

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A lot of jinmeiyou kanji are, as the name implies, mostly used in names.

If you just want to learn them to say you learned them, eh, I guess whatever floats your boat. It wouldn’t be a detriment to anything.

But I guess ask yourself again after you finish WaniKani. You may not feel as adventurous.

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Hm ok. I have noticed however, that there are a lot of kajis that I would like to learn that is not in WaniKani. When I look up Japenese food stuff, the ingredients/fish/methods are often written in kanji that is not included in WaniKani. It would probably be wiser to learn these insted of jinmeiyou then? Do you know how I can track down certain types of kanjis like that, are there any sites that has good categorized kanjis after theme or something like that?

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It feels pretty unlikely there are structured lists out there that would be aimed at such a niche interest of kanji. I could be wrong, of course - it’s the internet, after all.

You can google around, or check if maybe there are cooking-related Anki decks. :slight_smile:

Otherwise, you’ll probably have to resort to making your own SRS review decks, in something like Torii, Kitsun, Anki, or other flashcard systems. Then you can add the kanji / vocab that’s not in WK as you encounter it and practice them. ^^

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Fish and animal names are indeed tricky. Most people just write them in katakana. For recipe books sometimes they do write them in kanji. WK will most probably never add too many kanji for animal names, because most people don’t need to know them. It can be helpful to learn some of the most popular ones, like éź­ or éźȘ.

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