Kanji don't exist in a bubble - The argument for doing your vocab reviews

WaniKani
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G’day All,

After reading a lot of comments and discussions around racing to level 60; and in particular, using a script to reorder reviews to facilitate this process; I thought I would make the following comments.

Kanji do not exist in a bubble. What do I mean by this? Japanese is not kanji; rather, kanji are some of the tools used to convey the written Japanese language. Learning kanji in a bubble is cool, you can tell your friends that you know what that kanji means and maybe both kunyomi and onyomi readings; however, can you read it when these kanji are in articles? Can you read the sentences and understand them at a moderate pace? Can you use this singular kanji understanding to express something in spoken Japanese?

I think one of Wanikani’s greatest attributes is the vocab training. The key to unlocking Japanese is to understand the vocabulary. Ignoring vocab reviews in order to race to level 60 is, in my view, a wasted opportunity. The vocab reviews are designed for two purposes:

  1. To teach you new vocab
  2. To teach you the kanji - YES! To teach you the kanji!!
    For me personally, by doing the vocab reviews at the same, I understand the kanji far better, I remember the readings more often and most of all, I get to review the particular kanji more often.
    The vocab isn’t there to bulk up the program, or to distract you from remember the individual kanji… the vocab is there to help you learn and understand.

I recently made some other comments about learning and understanding versus speed; particularly how I did the great RESET. See link

Smash your vocab reviews! If your goal is to learn Japanese then these are vital. Do them in concert with the radicals and kanji and I guarantee you will improve.

Cheers,
Deibido

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Reorder scripts don’t get level 60 faster by skipping vocab. They get it faster by allowing you to do the previous level’s 60 remaining vocab lessons after the new Kanji, instead of vocab → kanji → wait for several days with 0 lessons available.

If users are skipping vocab, that’s a separate decision they’re making.

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I can see why you think it pointless. However, for many people, they are in different position and learning methods. It might not work for you but it could work for others, just saying.

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The reason why I partly agree with you because I can see if one have a lot of time and foundation to consume native material, or prior Japanese knowledge before studying WK. They will be exposed to a lot of vocab above their level. At some point they will feel like vocab lesson on WaniKani is a waste of time.

I’m in a similar situation but I’m still taking all of the vocab lesson on WK anyway as a way to recheck my vocab understanding and it would not take a lot of my time because I tend to answer them correctly.

However, for most people. They don’t have that much time and prior knowledge in Japanese. If WK just teach them Kanji and skip vocab, I doubt they would learn anything meaningful.

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I’m too lazy to dig up the right threads on 河豚 or 里心 to link here so I’ll go with the most recent big one I can remember. Most of the vocab on WK is selected as way of adding additional meanings or readings to the associated kanji lessons (or reinforcing the existing ones). This is why we inevitably have people arguing about “useless vocab” and funny pictures of people highlighting them in books later. They really aren’t something to be skipped.

There are learning methods that try to cram kanji alone in a shorter period of time, but I would argue that people that are interested in those probably shouldn’t be using WaniKani. It just doesn’t make sense to me to pay for a service that is opposite of someone’s learning goals when other systems (often free) do what’s needed.

Personally, WK vocab is not amazing. It’s fine for what it is, but definitely not a substitute for digging into the core 2k/6k/10k, mining vocab on your own, taking advantage of wordlists (eg. book clubs, koohi cafe, JLPT), or digging into native dictionary when possible. I still think it’s worth to learn the WK vocab as presented, but I take it with a grain of salt and a general understanding that I will improve upon whatever I learn here as I continue immersive activities.

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Yeah that’s why I can see this would be the case for you and some people. Moreover, we can all agree that example sentences on WaniKani are just a little bit better than useless lol.

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The thing is; It’s better to learn how to use those Kanji when it still fresh. That’s why I think vocab lesson on WK is still valueable for most WK users. If they just learn Kanji and skip vocab and then see those vocabs in the wild later. They might already forgot what they’ve learned.

And for some (if not most) vocab, they won’t be able to read them correctly, because WK just teach them On’yomi or Kun’yomi on their kanji lesson.

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What’s the most popular script that allows me to do this? I don’t mind having a big backlog of vocab to work through, and I would like to go through radicals/kanji quickly.

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I’m also interested in this please

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I can see where you’re coming from but this is the part where we disagree.

I don’t think you can learn Kanji without learning vocab because the part that you should remember is the vocab and not the kanji.

This becomes readily apparent on these forums because we discuss kanji on it’s own and have to type it out. And if the discussion is on 滅 for example, I’ll type 滅亡 and delete 亡 because that’s how I remember it. I don’t remember any of the mnemonics at this point but I do remember 滅ぼす if I had to recall a kun’yomi reading.

What I don’t do is look at that kanji and think メツ is the on’yomi and ほろ is the kun’yomi.

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I also wish to chime in that I also only find WK vocab to be of middling importance.

I’m taking Japanese classes right now, spending 2-5 hours everyday on Japanese study. I’m working ahead through Genki, and already have Anki decks of vocab I need to learn in the context of the grammar and sentences I am learning. It’s great that 心配 has shown up in my WK vocab list, as I’ve learned it elsewhere and can now recognize it as Heart-Distribute and remember it more easily, but learning transitive and intransitive forms of “to throw” in isolation is not a good use of my time right now.

Also, especially in the early levels, there are a number of items that should be taught in sequential lists, not in individual flashcard form. I spent months struggling with awkward readings for “things” counters, days of the months, and days of the weeks. I finally grew a brain and memorized them in order like a kindergartner would, and it took me just a couple days to have them down pat. Did the previous exposure through WK help? Yes. Did 50-100 repetitions of the same numbers on flashcards help me memorize them? No. The format and context of learning these things is important.

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Ah, ok, I think I have a better understanding of your position now.

So do you think stopping at Guru would be enough for vocab?

I’m not opposed to the idea. I honestly had very little trouble with vocab during master/enlightened/burn reviews.

That said I’m still not sure if it’s better to stop the reviews early.

I can’t argue with the results you get from reading native material, but I don’t think it works out unless WK provides companion material geared towards how much knowledge it is able to assume you have based on your level.

But then, my experience is probably atypical. I only did WK plus some grammar here and there until I finished. Plus, I don’t do any SRS when I’m reading. I look things up as I go and vocab just isn’t that difficult to look up. Sentence structure, on the other hand, is what slows down reading the most for me.

So I’m glad I front loaded a lot of it with WK and I think it’s a viable method. It may not be optimal but it’s much easier to consistently follow.

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I disagree. You could use that argument for Wanikani as a whole - What is the purpose of Wanikani teaching you anything? - money. But it’s the other way around → what is the purpose of your spending money on Wanikani? - leaning japanese.

I agree with this one actually. Frustrates me to see a radical that was a Kanji a few levels ago.

This is even worse if you only focus on Kanji. If you isolate the Kanji and never learn a single word you won’t be able to read a single thing in contexts you enjoy. Whereas building a vocabulary of ~6.000 helps you a lot in reading stuff.
EDIT: I wanted to add an example, where even Wanikani staff show how unrelated Kanji meaning vs. Vocab meaning can be: 高瀬 - shallows. The meaming mnemonic reads something like “I have no idea how this one makes sense, but…”

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Yeah I say this every now and then on here, but people have this idea of “learning” kanji like its some part of being able to read. Its not. Its a part of vocab, and vocab is whats a part of reading.

What you’re really doing on here isn’t best described as learning kanji imo but rather familiarizing yourself with them. Thats it. And when you are familiar with a kanji thats in a word, its easier to learn the word. It doesn’t mean you know the word, even if the word is just comprised of that single kanji. It makes it easier, though.

So really, at the end of the day, all this is is a roundabout way for learning vocab that makes the actual vocab learning part easier. Its not the fastest way to learn vocab, but it makes it feel easier by giving you some familiarity beforehand with what will be in the words.

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I can’t really see Wanikani as inefficient, because unless you run into leeches you’ll probably only ever see each item around 10 times, not 50 or 100, and spread out over the course of many months. After the first week, an item won’t come back to bother you for a long time, so it’s really not taking much of your time.

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I usually remember the on’yomi for kanji by recalling the jukugo words that contain them. I don’t think the various pronunciations would stick after so many months if I wasn’t presented vocabulary to tether them to.

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I definitely agree with OP. I would even say learning vocab is more important than learning kanji alone in a vacuum.

I noticed that with time I stop remembering the individual glosses for kanji and kind of understand the overall intent or emotion behind a character and mostly retain the reading, which too will heavily depend on word context.

Just learning kanji alone isn’t very helpful I would say.

Whether the vocab taught on WaniKani is in general useful or not is another matter. One could probably circumvent the entire system by creating a tailored Anki deck with words explicitly chosen to cover the most common readings of each kanji and being common words used daily. Sorted by proficiency level, not kanji complexity. But I guess one would need to go through WaniKani first to make an informed decision on that? :stuck_out_tongue:

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heh, I mean when you consider the fact that you don’t need to learn the kanji in isolation, you’re learning vocab in isolation, and the vocab you learn is far from being in an order optimized for what will come in handy for immersion…I think you gotta be wearing a pretty thick blindfold to not see wanikani as inefficient as a whole to learning how to read.

It trades off efficiency for comfort and accessibility, and thats ok. Theres no reason to pretend like it doesnt.

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@visionmixerjr @TheBestAround
I use WaniKani Lesson Filter.

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For me personally, a huge part of the value of WK for me is that it sort of taught me how to learn Japanese. Or at least, it gave me some tools that were enough to help me get started reading Japanese in the wild, and my other learning followed from there.

I started WK with very little knowledge of Japanese outside of how to read hiragana and katakana. I knew nothing about on and kun readings, rendaku, radicals, semantic-phonetic composition, stroke order, pitch accent, different forms of adjectives, transitive/intransitive verbs, する verbs, or even what verbs looked like in general.

WaniKani was my introduction to every single one of those things. A lot of them took me a lot of exposure before I started to get the basic idea of them! Of course, I’m using a heavily modified version of WK with a lot of scripts that add extra information to reviews, but I’m still learning that extra information following WK’s structure.

By the time I started learning grammar and trying to read more than just occasional words in tweets, I had some idea of what I was looking at when I encountered a new vocab word. Even if I didn’t know the kanji, I could sometimes make a guess at the reading based on the composition of the kanji, and if I couldn’t, I could at least look at the kanji and remember the shape of it because I could remember the radicals. This is useful if you’re trying to recognize a name that contains kanji you don’t know, haha.

I was able to go right from WK to pre-learning vocab in Anki in preparation for reading a specific book. I’ve learned a lot of words at this point that contain kanji I’ve yet to learn in WK, and although I can read those words if they have furigana, it’s hard for me to read them on twitter or in magazines or on TV without furigana.

I do need to spend extra time studying the kanji specifically if I want to remember how to spell the words I’m learning. In the future, I’m going to be responsible for structuring my own study there (I’ve already started working on memorizing some kanji I’ve encountered that aren’t in WK), but that takes work to set up, so I’m happy to let WK do a lot of the work for me.

I guess it probably depends on your goals how “efficient” WK is or isn’t. My main interest is learning the language so that I can watch wrestling and read tweets and interviews, but my medium of choice is one that can be enjoyed without words, so there’s not really any reason why I have to become fluent as soon as possible, as long as I’m making steady progress. I also want to be able to read manga in a bunch of different genres, play video games, and watch unsubtitled anime. I don’t mind learning unusual or obscure vocab, because I’m interested in learning the language very broadly. WK also taught me a genuine love of kanji, so I love learning kanji just for the sake of learning them.

I just started learning Japanese a little over a year ago, and I’ve only been working on it diligently for the past seven months, but I’m already at a point where I can effortlessly read some tweets, which is far more progress than I expected to have made. Would my studying have been more efficient if I hadn’t used WK? I doubt it. I wouldn’t have known even where to start learning kanji if I hadn’t tried WK. I’d probably be completely tied to Yomichan (if I’d even discovered it without these forums), and would be absolutely helpless trying to read from a print magazine or from the TV screen with no furigana. I’d also be very annoyed and frustrated with kanji, probably, because I had to spend a lot of time with them before I started to love them.

I guess to make a long post short, I am definitely in favor of doing your vocab lessons, and at least for me personally, I’ve had better luck learning vocab through WK than I have either through a textbook, or through mining words with unknown kanji from manga with Yomichan/Anki. I don’t mind learning “useless” words or uncommon kanji because I genuinely really enjoy learning kanji and any new words, at this point, and even if I don’t see them in native media, they’re often valuable to me for what they teach me about the components of other kanji, or stroke order, or rendaku patterns and such in the case of vocab.

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