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

I actually joined because of the vocabs and I don’t like Anki deck. I tend not to remember standalone kanji and vocabs help me to remember it faster and longer. I wish I don’t have to learn radicals though. For the useless vocabs, I just cheat.

i think it depends a lot on how much one is studying. if one is doing active study for several hours every day, one will definitely get a lot of exposure to vocab using the kanji one’s just learned. in that case, one might well be more efficient by getting more exposure rather than spending time on WK vocab.

however, i dare say that most people here aren’t spending several hours a day on learning japanese. as a consequence, one doesn’t get much (if any) exposure to freshly learned kanji, and they don’t get reinforced much. and this is where WK vocab comes in: it provides exposure to and reinforcement of newly learned kanji in a useful timeframe.

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FWIW, if you talk to a native Japanese speaker, they will find the idea of learning kanji in isolation very strange and puzzling. Native speakers learn to speak first, then how to read kana, then only gradually how to read kanji. By the time they encounter kanji “in the wild” they already have quite a bit of experience with the vocabulary that uses it.

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I think of kanji as building blocks for the written language, and a useful way of understanding the underlying meaning of words. I find the vocab on WK to be very useful for my overall Japanese learning journey. I just wish four things:

1) that there were more vocab words that people use often in spoken Japanese and that I find often in the wild when reading Japanese or studying using Genki, Lingodeer, or Duolingo.

2) that vocab words included the common article in use, such a を、に、or で

3) that the example sentences were sentences I would actually use or come across, and weren’t so ridiculous or complex.

4) that the sample sentences had audio, so I could practice saying the word in context.

Instead, I find myself having to look up a lot of the vocab words introduced in Wanikani on other apps to find useful sentence examples with the articles the words use, as well as the audio to practice pronunciation in context.

I guess if you have a system of learning vocab outside of Wanikani, then it would be helpful for some to be able to skip the vocab sections all together in this app.

As for the cost of WaniKani, for the amount of value I get from this app, it is a ridiculous bargain. The developers deserve to be compensated well for the work they put into developing and maintaining it. I bought the lifetime subscription after the first few weeks because I could see the value of it. This way, even after completing the levels, I can continue to reference the kanji through this app, which I believe will be very helpful.

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Does this happen a lot? I understand the purpose of spaced repetition but I ideally I want to have something available to me daily, then using this reorder script is kind of a must for me.

And indeed, what is the script I should use for this?

Instead of kanji I meant to say radicals. You have some amount of residual vocabulary to complete before new radicals every time you level up, because the kanji that just reached guru to allow the level up also unlocked new vocabulary which WaniKani considers to be material from the previous level. The severity can vary by level and how quickly you’re completing them. As for which script I recommend:

Only the first few levels.

Does anyone question this?
For some kanji it’s better to learn the words formed with them than Wanikani’s mnemonics. Not to mention that it is a way to reinforce what you’ve previously studied.

There’s a userscript for that if you’re interested.

I think on top of that it would be very much recommended to learn vocab outside of WaniKani as well, because while WaniKani focuses on the most common readings, it doesn’t cover all of them and some do appear in common vocab. So it’s probably better to think of WaniKani as a launchpad to get started for real :smiley: .

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These aren’t articles, they are particles indicating the function that the word serves in a sentence. As such, asking you to associate a specific particle with any given word would be grammatically incorrect and quite likely to lead to problems later.

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Just wait a bit. Once you get going you’ll have as many lessons and reviews as you can handle.

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