I’m at Level 11 now, do you know if the progression of the Kanji we learn is also the progression of Kanji that is actually useful in daily life?
I mean I’m quite the beginner still, but words like 番号札 (numbered tag), 池 (pond), or 交番 (police box), and many others, I don’t think I will ever use them in spoken Japanese. Rarely if at all.
Because I also almost never use them in my native language.
I mean the vocab in this course is very thorough, but is it also useful?
Sometimes I encounter words that I will remember easily because they are also very important / commonly used! But many I would say, not so much.
If you go to Japan, knowing the word 交番 would be pretty important. To be fair, when you see them (all over the place) then you’ll also see “Koban” in romaji. It’s just a “small local police station.”
Small man-made water features can be called 池, so they’re not that rare. I mean… not that ponds are rare in the first place, but I guess if you need convincing.
But at the end of the day, the vocab is selected to help you learn how to read the kanji. You seem concerned with spoken Japanese, but that’s not what this site is focused on. This is meant to help you learn to read Japanese, and any written language is full of things we don’t use in conversation.
Consider the vocab important practice for many on’yomi, and important exposure for common kun’yomi that tend to come up with certain kanji.
Vocab isn’t necessarily added for its daily use - it’s to reinforce what you learn.
And while you might not use certain words in day-to-day conversation, if you pick up a book, a game, or a show without subs, you run into swathes of different topics. I’ve certainly run into seemingly useless vocab in my reading.
Other than that, between level 20 and level 40, I feel like the vocab hugely contributed to my reading. I was encountering so many things that I was unlocking, so on that sense, I think level 20+ content opens up a lot of doors.
It also appears in some bad internet slang, namely 池沼. (Not blurred because it’s also a legitimate word… but you are more likely to find the slang meaning online)
Wanikani is a kanji app, not a vocab app. The vocab wanikani teaches is meant to help you to remember the kanji, not to be useful in daily life. If you’re looking for daily life vocab, try duolingo or a more conventional language textbook.
I got stuck on 偉大 today, thought I saw it before in reading practice but then realized it only gets presented with 偉 on level 51. Seems too useful be buried later in WK (those radicals are learned far earlier too). Contrary, presenting lesser known N1 kanji early seems perfectly reasonable to me so perhaps this just got pushed back for those reasons.
As others have said, it depends a bit on what “daily life” means. Not every vocab item (and not every kanji, by way of its related vocabulary) are ones that will be regularly tossed around in every day conversation. If you’re a beginner, this disconnect might seem particularly extreme, since the site throws some rather obscure vocabulary in early on in order to provide reading practice for its simpler kanji. You’ll have to pair it with more all-purpose elementary resources for foundational grammar and vocab.
But I don’t think there’s a character on the site I haven’t seen in reading, even if it’s just in proper nouns. Knowing the onyomi also makes looking up unknown compounds, or even hearing them in conversation and being able to guess at a meaning, muuuuch easier. And you start to get a rash of kanji that are extremely useful for daily life in Japan between levels 20 and 40. They’re just a little more visually complicated.
As someone who had gotten much farther than his current level before resetting on WK, the kanji are all super useful. Like people above have said 交番 is particularly common. Also if you are reading books, watching tv, or playing games in Japanese you will be better able to recognize the onyomi and put together meanings of the words you are seeing.
Maybe there are more obscure ones coming in the next nine levels for me. At a glance, the remaining levels seemed like an odd mix of relatively common and fairly obscure ones. (Really dragging my feet at the end here, both with summer travel and also the fact that kanji don’t feel like an impediment to reading/daily life anymore.)
