WK is an awesome tool. It helps me a lot to improve my Japanese reading ability. Although it’s sometimes hard to pass all reviews because of a time consuming job I enjoy it a lot.
But there is one real difficulty for me as a non native speaker: sometimes it’s much more difficult to remember the English meaning of a Kanji than learning the Japanese one!
Over the last months I think I learned more new English words than ever expected. Even those special ones like “mullet”, “creeper” or “hick”. On one hand it’s a really good thing - it’s never bad to learn something in life. But on the other it makes it harder for non native speakers at times. Anybody out there experiencing the same?
There’s only been a couple of English words I straight-up didn’t know (looking at you “cleats”), but from time to time I fail a review because I enter a less natural sounding expression for the same thing (and the Crabigator can be really particular about wording).
That’s a good idea. I often use examples of my own language to remember the readings because the English version is not natural or clear enough to keep in my mind.
I have this problem too! I’m a native Finnish speaker and Japanese pronounciation is similar to ours so sometimes I just make my own examples to remember the reading. The hardest English word for me so far was triceratops
God, yes, and not even because I can’t understand the English, because I do.
It’s because I straight out translate the vocab/kanji/radical to my native language, and then in reviews I retranslate it to English … using the wrong word.
I’ve been thinking of adding my own synonyms, but that would require checking if WK supports non-European alphabets
Right! Lol. I already forgot! I’m a German native speaker and sometimes the pronunciation is indeed closer to Japanese. So I switch all the time creating a kind of “Denglish” stories to remember meanings and readings
I am German but by now also a C2 English speaker. I usually do not know words like “mullet” as well, but I usually still have a feeling what it means. And to fair those new words are welcome. I have Grammarly installed and thus can easily just look at the definition of the word. Normally it is also enough to look it up once, and I will remember from then on.
Because I have no problem with any of the other words it never happened to me that I type a word in German because I do not remember it in English. However, if I forget the spelling of any of the new words german usually also does not help me as I have only seen the English definition and not the German translation
you could always try!