I haven’t been using WaniKani for very long, but I still don’t understand why it is that WaniKani doesn’t have all the Joyo and JLPT kanjis?
I just wanna say that this is not a complaint, just a question. 2000+ Kanji is definitely fine to start with, but I just don’t understand why it is that they would leave out some Kanji.
This has probably been asked and answered before, but I just want to ask myself.
If you’re looking at lists of say, N1 kanji… just know that there are no official lists. And the ones I’ve seen have some absolutely ridiculous kanji on them. Things that are only ever used in names, for instance. Ones I would never expect to see on an actual N1 test. How they ended up on the lists, I don’t know if anyone these days can tell you. Now, WK has some of those too, but I would never say that WK should go out of their way to add more name kanji.
As for jouyou kanji… just because a kanji is in the jouyou list doesn’t mean it’s actually common or all that useful. Sure, basically all of the absolutely critical kanji are jouyou, but not all jouyou kanji are critical.
You can always make some kind of argument for adding more kanji, but those arguments should be made on the basis of the usefulness of the words they appear in, etc, and not their presence on a given list.
This will always be the case, that WK doesn’t have all the kanji. There are thousands more kanji than just on those lists. And Japanese people know a lot of those other kanji as well, even if they are modest about their kanji knowledge. But as it is, very few people finish WaniKani in its current state. There’s no particular pressing need to make it longer.
Yes I do wish WK just had specialized packs after level 60, fixed on specific possible areas of interest (like names, law, mahjong, fantasy, etc).
Of course, having those would only make people that somehow ignore grammar until they finish WK ignore it even longer, so that is a problem. And like Leebo said, very few users even get to level 60 (seemingly something like 1200/85000). And by the 50’s most users are sick of WK.
That being said, if you ever reach level 60 and want to learn more kanji, there is an unofficial level 61-70 pack on kitsun which completes the jouyou, the listed (unnoficial) N1 kanji list, and finishes the to up to 2000 on the newspaper frequency list. I definitely plan on using it, but will be taking it way slower than I learned WK.
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