An issue I’m facing is that we learn the reading and meaning of vocabulary based on kanji in the word. However, we never really establish a connection between the reading and meaning themselves. This is usually not needed when reading; however it becomes troublesome when listening or trying to read Japanese written without kanji.
So, you may think to yourself: “Well, duh. WaniKani is for learning kanji.”
And to that I say: Yeah, you’re mostly right.
However, when WaniKani also teaches us vocabulary it is kind of a missed opportunity to not link the meaning and reading as well. You kinda have to learn that separately. (Also, WaniKani stopped being about kanji only as soon as the kana words showed up, but that’s a debate for another day)
I know that’s not really a thing that can be changed, but I wonder what everyone thinks about this. Is it an issue? Are you facing it as well? Would it be worth addressing if WaniKani ever evolves into something bigger?
That’s absolutely normal when you learn vocab using kanji and an extremely common issue for me. Kanji-light content is often harder for me to read than kanji-heavy text. I will look up a kana word in the dictionary, see the kanji spelling pop up and immediately remember what the word means.
As you say you need to build the pathways in your brain to effectively understand the words as a unit of sound and meaning and not merely an amalgamation of kanji.
The solution is just to read more and listen more. One of the games I finished playing recently had a character who was a child raised by wolves and in order to convey her lack of education she spoke only in kana which was a fun way to practice that.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, WK has audio for all the vocabulary, and you have to enter the meaning and the reading for it all.
Do you mean kana->meaning? That has a whole list of problems. not least that for many words you’d need a sensible context sentence to pin down exactly what word you meant.
Yeah, I’ve definitely had/have this problem, especially since 90%+ of my studying has been focused on reading. I think you just need to spend enough time on other study methods (e.g. listening practice) to make up for it.
Personally, I used a reorder script so I could answer the reading and meaning back-to-back in hopes that they would associate with each other more - not sure if it made much difference though.
You could also try something like KaniWani, but it has issues because of synonyms and such.
I kind of doubt WaniKani will do much about it since they are explicitly focused on teaching how to read, not teaching Japanese in general - though maybe that will change some day.
This is one of the reasons why only doing WK won’t get you to fluency, to understand spoken language you need to hear it a lot and slowly start to understand it.
But as studies show, reading weirdly does help with listening a lot, it just is a different skill and needs to still be built up. After all, everything you do strengthens your “japanese network” in your brain and if there is already a lot through WK/Reading, listening will come way easier as there is already a structure to put the information into and connect meaning, visual information and all the other sub-skills.
Learning vocabulary with WK in general is pretty useless, there are a lot of weird words and not enough context to really get an understanding. But the way it’s built up does help a lot with solidifying Kanji in my opinion. This constant exposure to Kanji through the building blocks, learning the kanji itself and combinations through words is one of the few actually useful SRS tools to actually keep important information.
KameSame (same idea as KaniWani - production vs. recognition - at least the part of it I use) mostly takes care of this issue. E.g. all the variations of “reply/response/answer” in WK that always confuse me. It does a very good job of being aware of those cases and rather than an answer being wrong you get a “yeah, that could also be it, but not the one that is expected for this particular item”. Plus, when it comes back around you can get a “Hint - it is NOT xxxx”, where xxxx is what you just tried a few minutes ago.
That’s just an issue of what angle you’re approaching the language from. I learned Japanese mostly by speaking and now have the opposite problem. Can’t read all that many kanji yet, but a lot of the words I can’t read I actually do understand once I know the pronunciation.
It makes more sense to me to supplement Wanikani with listening to podcasts etc. than to expand Wanikani, which is by design a kanji learning platform, to try to fill its gaps, all the while diminishing its strengths (looking at you, kana vocabulary). Anyway Wanikani isn’t meant to be used on its own.
One thing I try is to say each word out loud as I answer it, both during reading and meaning. There’s been a couple times when I’m stuck on the meaning, but then I say it and that helps me remember it. Also, I second (third?) that immersion would probably help a lot.
