Hi,
In the 50 levels, there are a lot of kanjis that has no vocabulary attached. Why? What is the advantage of knowing a kanji if you do not know any words with it? Is it just because the team have not yet gotten to add any vocab, or that they actually do not think any of the vocabulary is useful? I also noticed a lot of them are name (jinmei) kanjis. Maybe the vocabulary is very rare, but you often see them in names, and that is why you only learn the kanjis?
WaniKani used to be 1-50
Last 10 leves were added later. People wanted more, the more is a mixed bag with some jinmei kanji without vocab and other kanji “good to know”
They’ve talked about wanting to add associated name items before, but they haven’t done it. I’m not sure what’s taking so long, but that’s pretty much where they left it. For whatever reason, they don’t consider it to be possible to just add them the same way that other vocab are added. They have to change the system or something, in some way, but they haven’t expanded on what they mean by that.
Well, that one, in particular, will occasionally come up in names (for example, 山田綾乃, Japan’s representative at the Miss Earth pageant in 2015), but it also functions as the particle の in some archaic uses (for example, on gravestones - 之 perfoms the same function).
Here is a list of all the Jinmeiyo kanji on WaniKani.
WaniKani / Kanji / 大. This is pretty new though, isn’t it? At least I don’t think I remember it being there a couple of years ago. 
Are you referring to nanori readings? I can’t really remember a time when they didn’t exist, though maybe not for that specific kanji. I’m not sure.
Hmmm. Maybe I’m just misremembering…
How can they be “good to know” if you do not know the vocabulary or names containing them?
They have at least been there since I started WaniKani, 1.5 years ago.
Commonly enough seen, even if they haven’t added the vocab yet to help us remember them better. Memorising the kanji alone should be enough to be able to use it in context if you actually do remember it. The vocabs just help us see it in use and more times to better remember them.
I do hope they will add vocabs though.
Thank you. The reading you learn with 乃 is ない, so how would it actually help me when seeing it in a name, part from recognizing it actually a jinmei kanji (which is pretty useless in itself, because if I havent seen a kanji it is safe to assume it is a jinmei kanji).
Yeah, but these rare kanjis have especially many readings. I tried to look up vocabulary with many of them, but it is usually just different readings than what you learn with WaniKani. Therefore it does not seem that helpful to me.
It is better to have seen them a little bit than not at all. There will be a lot left to learn outside of WaniKani on all kanjis.
What makes you say that? There are about 600 jinmeiyou kanji (not including the ones that are just old versions of jouyou kanji) but thousands more that could appear in various things that aren’t.
Yeah, I got nothing in that regard. The J-J dictionaries list the primary definition as なんじ, but when it’s functioning in that regard, the reading is だい.
Though, fun fact: 乃 is the etymological origin of both ノ (it’s the first stroke) and の (the whole character written cursively).
Is there a list of all the kanji without vocabulary on wanikani? Once I am done with wanikani I want to look up all the kanji without vocabulary in my kanji book.
Arent hyougai kanjis pretty rare in most cases? I guess you will see them in very old texts and traditional settings, but most of the times when I do not recognize a kanji, it is a name.
I encounter them regularly enough. For instance I’m reading Dune in Japanese and there are plenty of hyougai kanji. (Enough that looking one up and seeing it’s hyougai is not surprising).
And maybe it’s just my bias, but I watch a lot of quiz shows. So it’s kind of unusual for hyougai kanji to not appear in them.
And off the top of my head, I saw 咆哮 (with furigana) on TV today, in closed captioning for hearing impaired viewers.
Well, there’s 乃至 (ないし), but probably not the most frequent reading. I’m indeed more used to see it as の in names.
I see it more often in names as well, but it seems like Japanese has two on’yomi for the kanji depending on what it means. だい for 汝 (which was a meaning I wasn’t aware of in Chinese), and ない for すなわち, which usually translates as ‘i.e.’ or ‘that is to say’, which is probably a little closer to appositional の, but can also mean ‘at that point’, ‘thence’ or ‘and so’. It’s read nǎi in Mandarin today anyhow (which is why I think both readings are on’yomi), but it usually only shows up in phrases that come from Classical Chinese, like 失敗乃成功之母 (shī bài nǎi chéng gōng zhī mǔ). (I don’t think I need to translate that provided everyone substitutes 之 with の and 乃 with すなわち or は. は is closer to the actual sense here.)
