I have a quick question that I was hoping someone could help me with:
Although the words 跳躍 and 飛躍 have similar meanings, Wanikani says that the former is leap, but the latter is leaping – the “ing” must be there, or it will be marked wrong.
Just a matter of how the word is taught, I guess, and possibly an oversight in entering synonyms/meanings. I’d add a synonym for both, if the mods don’t beat you to it.
跳躍 has other meanings besides leaping/jumping, but in the sense of leaping, they’re synonyms. Goo even lists 跳躍 as a meaning/synonym for 飛躍:
Interesting. I fully expected to be missing some obscure grammar point here, and was already in the process of coming up with my own mnemonic to help me remember which one has “ing” and which one doesn’t…
Good to know, and even better if it helps future Wanikaners not agonize over it.
When in doubt, it’s good to check a dictionary, preferably a monolingual one.
In the end WaniKani just matches your input to what’s in their list of accepted answers, which is flawed to begin with since it’s all translations for out-of-context words so it’s never going to cover every possible nuance. Ideally it’d always be consistent and complete, but that’s not a reasonable expectation for anything built by humans
Whenever I see something like this, I just add “ing” to the English meaning or a synonym to cover for the fact that the noun expresses an action (for instance, “enlistment” vs “enlist” which doesn’t seem correct in general). That’s how I understand する compounds.
That’s not universal of course, because 緊張, for instance, expresses a state of being nervous (nervousness). Still, worth checking whether the word is a する compound or not.