Lack of Kanji

You don’t need any Japanese to just visit. I think N3 and above can be advantageous for getting into language programs within Japan. N2 and N1 are usually listed as requirements in various jobs at regular companies.

3 Likes

So, unless I’m working in Japan, the JLPT has no value?

1 Like

Some people use it as a measuring stick for their progress, or a means of staying motivated. I went all the way to N1 without ever really having a “need” for the certificate. I wanted to have a goal.

But this is kind of off topic from what this thread is about, so maybe continuing in a JLPT thread would be better.

4 Likes

You are right. Thanks for the info.

2 Likes

If I just read the furigana and don’t learn the kanji, there’s no point :confused:
I want to learn kanji so even when reading complex books I will be able to read them if there are no furigana.

1 Like

I get that, but my point is that the presence of a kanji in a manga like Kimetsu no Yaiba doesn’t mean the kanji is commonly used. The decision to use kanji or not is often determined by if you think the target audience can probably read the kanji or not. If you’ve already decided to put furigana on everything, then you can just use kanji willy nilly, no matter how rare they are, because there’s nothing stopping young readers from being able to understand the content.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s worth your time to know all those kanji.

4 Likes

(I am not attacking you or anything for questioning the amount of kanji taught by wanikani just to be clear. Also, I think the kanji you mentioned are indeed quite frequently used)

I guess something important to note is that even Japanese people come across unknown kanji as they read manga aimed towards adults. My Japanese conversation partner expresses that he personally just caries on reading and gets enough information from context in order to guess the general meaning of that word.

If you want to be able to read complex books, reading those complex books while looking up the frequently used vocabulary is probably going to be more efficient than having wanikani make you learn all the rarely used kanji (cause there are a lot). It would result in us plowing through hundreds of kanji that we might never encounter again just to be able to study the rare few we actually needed in the first place.

9 Likes

especially games and light novels often use uncommon kanji on purpose to look sophisticated or eccentric, it’s more a case of “adding character” than “adding characters” :wink:

kind of like in a sentence full of hiragana, we try to squeeze in kanji for aesthetic reasons, even if the kana version is probably more common.

6 Likes

Incidentally, I encountered 辿り着く today. But the book it was in is super kanji trigger-happy…

2 Likes

There are a fair number of “kanji not in wanikani that do get used in practice, even outside of names and obscure words”; here’s a thread that covers ~150 of them. But… a lot of them are only used in basically a single word, like 匂 or 吠. And some of those are really quite easy to learn, to the point where you hardly need mnemonics (吠 is possibly the most straightforward kanji I’ve ever seen. I mean, really, mouth + dog = bark. To quote Kanjidamage, “Think you can handle the linguistics by yourself, Noam Chomsky??”).

Some of them are also kanji where their only common use is in a word that uses neither their kun’yomi nor on’yomi reading, like 黄, so “learning the kanji” in the WaniKani sense serves even less purpose.

Beyond that, a lot of the remaining kanji tend to show up with furigana or rubitext. A recent example I ran into:

魔眼蒐集列車レール・ツェッペリン

This is absolute 中二病 nonsense, of course. Note for example the use of 集 to write 収集: probably done to make it look more demonic or magical, since 蒐 is a Jinmeiyo kanji that contains 鬼. And regardless, you don’t even need to read it, because it has rubitext on top with the actual name… which isn’t the reading of the kanji to begin with.

I find that unusual kanji that show up in hyper-specific contexts (e.g. in a single compound, like 黄昏) tend to be really easy to remember, since the context clues usually jog my memory well enough.

2 Likes

匂 is taught in level 30.

5 Likes

Did they add this recently? I don’t remember learning it in wk. Not that it matters, just curious. (I think I) learned it pretty quickly in the wild because it is fairly common, just like 貰.

2 Likes

lol this title tripped me up before i clicked on it because how would there be a lack of kanji on a kanji-learning website

7 Likes

Do you have outstanding lessons? Yeah, they added a handful of kanji last year.

2 Likes

Haha, yeah, I … got to level 60 and then focused on reading. I haven’t touched wk in almost a year now. Maybe I will go back at some point to refresh kanji though. Was that a good use of your time when you did it? I am considering it, but it seems like reading does enough in terms of refreshing my memory for what I want for now. Either way, that they added a few new things does make me slightly more interested in a second run through.

2 Likes

When I reset the first time, I still hadn’t even passed anything above N3. For me, going back made things a lot stronger than the first time.

This current reset is a little different. I say the words out loud when I do reviews, and if I get the pitch accent wrong, I mark myself wrong, whether I got the reading right or not.

9 Likes

What source have you been using to check your pitch accent?

3 Likes

The NHK pitch accent dictionary on my electronic dictionary.

4 Likes

Looks like they added that one in particular last summer!

1 Like

“ 50,000 is usually the number given for the number of Kanji characters since the dawn of time.

2,000 is roughly the number than comprises compulsory education.

5,000 is often assigned to particularly well-read persons (e.g. university professors).”
-some internet person on another forum platform.

I feel like the best way to go about things is to learn the basic 2000 characters, and then go along as you learn the language.

You could probably get away with just seeking out kanji that are important to you/come up a lot for the work/study/whatever else you do. I think going for a full 5000-10000 would be a bit pointless if they won’t ever apply to you.

2 Likes