Hi all, first time post. I wish it was less gripey, but I digress…
I just started WaniKani a few days ago and I’m on lesson 1. At first I was having a great time with it, and I was feeling really good about the pace and what I’ve been memorizing. The mnemonics were awesome and I could tell they really helped with retention of stuff. But then vocabulary happened…
To put it bluntly, it feels really bad to be told “hey, you only need to memorize this one reading, the others aren’t important right now” and have that not be true at all. I’m now either getting the vocabulary readings wrong, or having to stop the lesson and go back to review the Kanji reading, edit the mnemonic I already memorized/brain dump the old one, and then re-enter the lesson. Its super frustrating.
Is this how the rest of the lessons are going to be? I’d rather know ahead of time that I should edit or ignore the WaniKani mnemonics and create my own that include every possible reading. Maybe that’s not how most people’s brains work, but it’s how mine does. This bouncing back and forth just leads to a frustrating study session for me. Does anyone have any tips or advice on handling this?
The majority of kanji will have multiple readings. The ‘main’ reading is the one the WK team felt is the most common one, but it is fairly rare for a kanji to only have one reading.
For most (but not all!!) kanji, the main reading will be common in compound words, when combined directly with another kanji and no hiragana in between. This will typically be an “on’yomi” reading. If the main reading is “kun’yomi”, it might still be used in compound words but it’s more likely that it’ll have kana after.
Dealing with the multiple readings of kanji is part of the Japanese language difficulty. This is why the vocab are there - to help teach you the other readings. So yes, do expect this to happen a lot.
Personally I don’t use mnemonics very much, but if you want to use them, don’t be shy about making your own.
I appreciate your response. My gripe isn’t with kanji having multiple readings, it’s with the fact that WaniKani said “don’t worry about learning these readings right now” and then as soon as I got vocabulary, it asks you to memorize the aforementioned “unnecessary right now” readings.
I’d much rather take the time to learn a kanji plus all of it’s possible readings up front and then learn the vocabulary.
Right now it’s Kanji → 1-2 readings → vocabulary + 3 more readings.
My brain just absorbs → kanji → 6 readings → vocabulary better.
Well, I guess they mean right now when you get introduced to the kanji the first time. When you get a vocab with a different reading, that’s a bit later. If you don’t like it that way and rather learn everything at once, feel free to ignore the message about not needing it right now and adjust the notes from the start, so they’ll fit your needs.
I think it’s there, cause a lot of people would feel overwhelmed lesrning everything at once.
Many people think its not very useful to learn kanji alone and memorize all meanings / readings. Like the kanji 生. It has many different readings / meanings depending on the word. So to try to learn them all in solitude might seem pretty hopeless. I think that might be one of the reasons they give you one primary reading and then you learn the rest of it in context with the actual words
It will keep happening throughout the course but I think (without taking the time to check the data) that it will become less and less common.
The super common kanji you learn early on are extremely overloaded with readings and meanings but as you progress towards more niche kanji used in less vocab you generally find that only one or two readings are really important. Eventually it gets to a point where the kanji are only really used in one specific word and you can learn that instead.
I think you underestimate the work that represent and also a lot of readings are pretty rare. That said I think cross referencing the WK lesson with https://jpdb.io/ and https://jisho.org would be helpful to find the learning style that suit you.
If you want to learn several reading at once I think prelearning a level by adding the level vocab to a jpdb deck is a more efficient approach.
WK is not the most flexible system if you want to customize it deeply.
The problem with this, is that Wanikani operates on a 1 question 1 answer system.
So if you learn kanji → 6 readings, Wanikani has no way of checking that.
That’s why it’s always 1 kanji → 1 reading (rarely 2 and you are expected to just know 1)
If you instead learned 1 kanji → 6 readings and answered any 1 of those, chances are that the one you answer is not a very useful one, so instead WK forces you to answer 1 it believes is relevant.
If you want to rather learn all 6 readings from the start, then maybe this question - answer concept is not optimal for you, as for you WK would need you to expect to answer all 6 readings, which is just not as it is designed.
As you already realized in the later answers, the “don’t worry right now” is just about that instant. There is an expectation that with any new item you learn you need to learn 1 or 2 new things about it (reading + meaning), which can be efficiently quizzed.
The one in the kanji is the one they feel is most likely to be a good guess when you are reading native content without furigana if you get stuck. (though for some of them there are definitely some points of contention for whether they picked the right reading).
If you were to learn all of them, it might take longer to get a feel for which one is a better one to guess with.
Based on your WK level and the nature of the question, I am guessing that you are quite new to studying Japanese, or at least kanji. I would suggest that you give it some time and after you have gone through a few levels and had more exposure (both to kanji, vocab and WK) circle back and see if you feel the same way. You are not the first to ask about this (I know i was one).
Along with the other explanations provided, I second @mgrice. I think you’ve outlined a fairly universal struggle for those just starting out- but a little time to get accustomed to the mechanics and flow will make it click before you know it. It took me several weeks of practice thinking it was pointless and obtuse- and then almost overnight at one point it clicked with me. So long as you don’t give up I’m confident the pieces will fall into place before you know it
it will seem like you aren’t learning much at first but as you build up a base of readings; it will become apparent that you can easily go overboard and overwhelm yourself if you try to do too much at once. baby steps and no not the new game where you fall down a lot…well ok maybe sort of that…..
!