WK teaches you to read. You’ll encounter most of the vocab when reading native content.
But of course it sounds weird if you try using a literary word in an everyday conversation. The Japanese people would never expect you to use a “complicated” word instead of a common synonym.
To learn conversational Japanese you need to talk to people and listen to a lot of spoken Japanese. Eventually you’ll understand which words and phrases are actually common in everyday conversations.
That aside of the thousands of words not all of them can be everyday terms like 犠飛 and 球威.
A lot of the early vocabulary seems to be partly what is on the JLPT N5 and some of it is simpler looking kanji as the main issue that most new learners of Japanese seem to have (i.e. those that dont have a background in logographic languages) is how kanji functions. Simpler looking kanji is easier for people to wrap their head around. The corresponding vocabulary is also to give new students an idea of how kanji be used to make a vocab word into a noun, verb or adjective, or what happens when you put multiple kanji together.
…To be very fair, coming up with an odd, obscure word just to make a native speaker frown and go, “Actually, we use [this]” is good practice. It might sound silly, but it’s subliminal sabotage that, yes, teaches you how to pick apart a word’s meaning from the kanji that makes it up (which is good practice to develop logic to try to interpret unfamiliar words) but might be the least common of a word you’d use a lot – someone’s “water closet” is a great example – but will vary wildly depending on where you are. No one really says ‘water closet’ in real usage, but if you call it a bathroom, restroom, toilet, loo, or… Any of the above, you have still learned how to say [water closet] in whatever the local lingo is. We know what you meant, and you are taught the new, more popular/contextually accepted variant. I can think of a dozen ways to refer to a man’s testes, but we don’t use that phrasing unless you’re in a hospital. Is it wrong? Not technically. But no one uses it. But it also teaches you (in a roundabout way) a more natural way of learning appropriate vocabulary – by using the wrong word and being corrected. This is part of the whole “the best way to learn a new language is by osmosis” concept – you can say an archaic, technically correct “$50 US American Dollars” and someone’s going to say, “It’s just 50 bucks, man.” And now you know that ‘bucks’ is a colloquial term for the local currency. I mean, people in the UK don’t really call their money ‘pounds’ in most usage. It’s ‘quid’ or ‘a tenner’ and things of that variety.
I concur. I should have been more clear in my post as I am not complaining about it. I should have said that I could have written a post with a similar title, except that instead of skeptical, I just find it interesting.
There are few though that seem to be the equivalent, if it were English, of teaching an old Shakespeare era word. Which is still interesting. I would find it userful if such vocab words were flagged as such. I believe that in some cases they are. At any rate, the vocab that are used are selelcted to help with learning the kanji as that is what KW is all about. It is a tool to learn the most frequently used kanji, not the most frequently used vocab.
There are a few words that… haven’t been used in hundreds of years?
Whenever I hear that kind of complaint one thing comes to my mind: your Japanese “person” knows the damn word.
If you’d prefer to immediately learn the commonly used words then you’re better off just having an anki deck, use a Japanese dictionary written in romaji (eeww), or have a Japanese tutor (i.e. your SO) in order to practice speaking casually as early as possible. Why waste time in learning rarely used words to reinforce the Kanji to memory, right?
Anyways, what’s your goal anyways? If you want to learn to read Japanese, then I can attest that WaniKani is extremely helpful for me. Otherwise, I think there are better starting points in learning Japanese if reading is not your first goal.
As people have already said, the content is just to help you memorize the parts of the kanji better. They kinda have to keep it easy from the start so that people don’t rage quit too easily from the start. I actually ran into a similar situation when I was having a conversation with a student and tried using 一文字, but they also didn’t know what I was talking about. Honestly, it would be helpful if there was some kind of social note on the word’s frequency so you know it’s something you’re more likely to run into the word in reading rather than speech or don’t run into faux pas like with 男優.
Another thing to keep in mind though is that they are a business too. They have to gate you at least a little bit with the content to keep subscribers longer and make the selling point that they are teaching you X number of words through all their cards.
I would just add to the (long) conversation that native speakers often confuse the concept of “rare words” with words they don’t use. The fact they don’t use it, doesn’t mean you won’t find the word quite frequently in articles or books. In fact “一文字” is used 425 times just on NHK.or.jp
Good opportunity for you both to snuggle up and play some Sekiro together.
I’m not sure how you did your search exactly, but are you aware that the very common word ひともじ “one character” is written with the exact same kanji? It’s how you count characters in words. ひともじ, ふたもじ, さんもじ, etc.
The example above someone had where it was spoken in a music video is easier to confirm that it’s いちもんじ
This would probably be the best argument someone could make against teaching いちもんじ, not that it’s unworthy of knowing.
Satogokoro or GTFO
But wouldn’t you leave if you had 里心? 
I feel it’s 里心(がつく) THEN gtfo.
Honestly a lot of native speakers are not the best guides for assessing study materials for language learners. Of course speaking and having conversations is a great study method but keep in mind their background, education level, attitude and so forth.
For instance my husband is a born and raised in japan native speaker and some of the things he says is wrong or he doesnt know. However I would encounter it later down the road or be corrected.
Anyways totally practice with your wife, but take her comments with a grain of salt.
Strongly agree. Part of the purpose of learning new words is so that you can start to build a relationship with them. That relationship may be “I hear this all the time and people understand me when I use it”, or it may be “People laugh when I use this word”, or it may be “I sometimes see this word in writing, but never hear it used in speech”.
That sort of pattern recognition requires input and feedback, but you’ll probably have difficulty noticing a pattern in a word’s usage if you can’t even remember the word itself.
Indubitably.
Well, when I started Wanikani, I saw some similar posts, claiming that some words WK uses to teach the reading etc are obsolete and nobody uses them. Someone in a post claimed that 友人 is a very rare word and not used in everyday japanese. In my ventures in reading native material and basically literature, it appears 友人 is much more common than 友達 in written language。The thing is, people use different words when speaking and different words when writing. And the WK choice of vocabulary will help you a lot when reading AND with the kanji readings themselves. Just a simple example of how not not-useful the WK vocabulary is.
For what it’s worth I see 一文字 all the time while playing Ni-Oh 2, maybe your wife needs to study the blade like me.
Usefulness depends on the context as well. Might be useless now, and then later on you do find use for it in unexpected places so it wasn’t that useless after all.
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