What are “burned” items? I don’t have any yet so I’m wondering what they are so I can do my best to avoid them.
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Burn items are when an item is in the last SRS stage of WK, and the item stops coming up for reviews.
So the only way to avoid burning items is to intentionally keep getting everything wrong when it’s far along up the SRS ladder, even if you know the item.
WK advises to start grammar at level 10 at the latest, and to start reading as much as you can from level 20 onward. Since they assume people also put into practice what they learn here, they don’t let the reviews go ad infinitum, since you’re supposed to graduate away from WK and onto reinforcement through use.
As mentioned above, the last stage of an item in this Space Repetition System (SRS)
SRS intervals gave multiple results, this one has a nice layout: SRS Time Intervals (v67.0) - #2 by rfindley
So a Burned item is a good thing? Or a bad thing? I still don’t really get it.
They are good in the sense that it’s the highest level you can get an item to in the system.
Maybe “burned” just sounds bad to your ears?
There are probably two reasons for choosing that word. One is because at that point, the items never show up for review again, so “burned” kind of represents them going away.
The other is related to the history of kanji. The first forms of kanji that we have records of, from thousands of years ago, are turtle shells with kanji burned into them. They were used by fortune tellers. So “burned” is also a reference to that important part of kanji history.
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OOoooh, thanks for the cool history lesson!
Yeah, in my head I took it as negative – burned is represented as black/grey instead of a colour, it says “turtles are safe” which kind of sounded vaguely threatening, and I guess I just thought like “crash and burn” as in failure lol. So thanks for the explanation.
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Yeah, it does seem a bit counterintuitive that you wouldn’t want the turtles to be safe, haha.
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There’s also just the old phrase of “burning something into your memory”
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That’s the way I always interpreted it.
Hi folks,
Just something that has been tickling me over the last few levels as it seems to be becoming more and more prevalent as I move up the ranks. I just received 支度 and 用意 in the same lesson, one after the other. They share identical meanings and even almost identical alternate meanings. And this is not the first time I’ve seen something like this!
Of course there are always going to be multiple words with the same meaning wherever you go, and many different ways to say the same thing, but with the breadth of an entire language’s worth of vocabulary to choose from, it seems a little more than coincidence when these pairs of vocab items with identical meanings come up in close proximity to one another.
So my question is: does anybody know if this is a deliberate thing? If so, out of curiosity, what is the reasoning behind it?
(If not, I’ll put it down to my pattern-seeking lizard brain (turtle brain?))
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My guess is that it’s pure coincidence. As for the meanings, in English they do sound identical, but actually they are used differently, there’s nuance.
支度 is when you make preparations for some kind of event, like a trip, or a meal. 旅行の支度ができた。 (I made preparations for the trip). The nuance is there are things you need to do in order to prepare for the thing to happen, and doing those is a 支度.
用意 is a bit more generic. This is when you prepare something, or you make arrangements for something. Like if you want someone to sign a paper you can tell them そこにペンが用意してありまそので、どうぞお使いください. Or if you’re picking someone up at the station you can tell them 車を用意しました to signal you’ve prepared a car for the trip. Or 布団を用意しました to let them know the futon is ready and they can go to sleep. If the meal is ready you can say 食事を用意しました.
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It’s not a coincidence. I’m not sure if there is a practical teaching method to the madness but you will get chunks of kanji and vocab with the same or similar meaning/readings as you go through WK levels. I keep a dictionary and Rikaichamp enabled during lessons to get a feel for nuances. If the WK primary definition does not seem close enough, I will use a synonym (usually already listed).
Someone even started a nuance thread in the forums.
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To add to what @jneapan said, you can also check a Japanese thesaurus (類語辞典) once your proficiency level is high enough for it to be useful. Dictionaries aim to be concise, so often they don’t help as much with nuances. For instance, one of the definitions of 支度 is 用意, so you’re not getting far there.
That entry compares 支度, 用意, and another “preparation” word, 準備. It gives examples, has written disclaimers about usage, lists even more words that are similar, and then has a nifty table showing which words can be used in which phrases, where a circle indicates the word is natural to use, a triangle indicates you might hear it, but some speakers might consider it unnatural, and a dash means it’s unnatural. They usually try to pick particularly common phrases as well, so you can learn some collocations at the same time. Collocations are a great way to understand nuances, since they bundle things up nicely.
In the chart, 準備 actually appears to be the most flexible, while 支度 is the least.
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I’m new to WaniKani, but have been self-studying kanji for about a year now. I’m wondering if there’s a way to have WaniKani force you to remember the multiple readings for kanji that have them. Since the app only requires you to enter one correct reading, and it can be the same one every time, I’m wondering if there’s a setting or something that adds an extra review question for the other readings.
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Not directly, but the vocabulary that uses that kanji will usually be related to the various meanings so you will pick up the meanings over time. (most are synonyms anyways) And the meanings listed with the kanji aren’t going to be all the possible meanings that kanji might have. You’ll learn the multiple meanings over time, and if you come across a new meaning in the wild you can always add it as a user synonym or even suggest it as a synonym to WaniKani.
If you’d like more practice with the meanings themselves, I found KaniWani actually forced you to learn them all since multiple kanji might have the same meaning and the only way you could differentiate which one it was asking about was to look at all the meanings (probably not a great way to do it though)
I generally write one of the readings, and say the other one in my head at the same time.
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Alright, I can’t find the standard reply button (on mobile) but here we go:
I was going to download an Anki deck of the example sentences in WaniKani, but one of the reviews said it would hurt more than help, as the sentences are made by students. Is this true, that studying those sentences would do more harm than good?
No, the WaniKani sentences were written by native speakers, though some of them have been tweaked to display kana in place of kanji for the earlier levels.
The usefulness of some of them, however, is… questionable.
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If you’re just looking to work with practice sentences to help with speaking, etc. I’d actually encourage bunpro for this. Their audio recordings are of full sentences and they have a “Copy japanese!” button so you can mine the sentences for sentence practice. It’s another SRS program so you wouldn’t need to throw it into Anki.
Tofugu’s 4500 sentences is another option if you’re just looking to mine sentences.