I have my wanikani linked to my bunpro account. There’s been multiple occasions where it shows words with kanji in their example sentences that I know, but the whole word I have no clue what it is because wanikani never taught me that vocabulary. I’m wondering if wanikani is just not teaching me all vocab associated with kanji on purpose? I feel like, though, rather than doing stuff like separating 理解 and 理解する as separate vocabulary, they could be making an effort to show a wider variety of vocabulary. I feel like learning the kanji individually shouldn’t be the goal, and that actually learning vocab is the most helpful thing. So I feel like adding more vocab, even if it takes longer to level up, would benefit learning in the long run. This week alone I’ve run into like 5+ vocab on bunpro that show I should know the word, despite never being taught it on wanikani.
I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a class to teach you all the vocabulary in existence. That would be like trying to memorize the entire dictionary. The value of wanikani is it introduces kanji to you in a systematic way like building blocks and trains you to infer readings/meanings for new vocabulary when you encounter them in the wild.
Oh boy, yeah I have had that problem before too. I believe the reasoning behind this is because wanikani is a kanji learning site, with vocab added to help recognize the kanji in most situations and give you enough information to guess at new words. If wanikani took the time to teach every vocab associated with a kanji then it could overload some learners. For example, I don’t want to nor need to learn every single vocab with the kanji 日 in it because there’s so many readings already that I’ll just learn the new ones when I run into them naturally rather than learn them in isolation like how it’s taught here.
Also Bunpro has a tendency to use the kanji whenever it can to vocabulary even when the word is more commonly written in hiragana (like 鞄 かばん)
Wanikani sometimes will split words into a different level because they want you to learn a specific vocabulary word first to avoid confusion. (I learned 貯える and 貯める in different levels because transitivity and the reading is different) The vocab that you learned on bunpro might just be a few levels away from being taught (for whatever reason as there are many movements every month)
Vocab isn’t required for leveling up either way, but until recently there wasn’t a native way to avoid learning vocabulary (via the advanced lessons option) so it would delay how long until you reached the kanji for the next level on a level up. This could have an influence on how many vocab the team was willing to put in (with the する verbs there seems to be a debate between users who want them taught separately and those who want the する verb classification just put in the notes on the vocab. I personally don’t mind either way so I’ll avoid commenting on how it should be taught)
In conclusion: I think learning the vocab whether it’s on wanikani or bunpro will still help you in the long run, and wanikani is used as a starting point to be able to read much more than just what they have on this site so you will probably keep running into new words with kanji you know even outside of other learning websites
If you were to look in a dictionary or dictionary app for the more common kanji, there’s going to be dozens of if not hundreds or more vocabulary words that contain those characters. Jisho for instance returns 2115 words involving the 一番 kanji 日, or 2373 for the kanji 国 (in fact WK itself has been introducing more terms for this guy, over 10 years into its history as an offering). Certainly not all of those are particularly common but even a quick scan among the ones flagged as ‘common words’ on the very first returned page shows me several terms that aren’t in WK’s vocab.
Like @superelf94 says, WK is more of a kanji learning program than a vocab one, but what I have really liked about it is that learning common vocab and readings really strongly supplements the memory acquisition of the kanji meanings (and like you say, is really what is useful in real life)
In reading fairly basic material I have regularly come across combinations of kanji that I am all familiar with in isolation but have not seen together like that. Oftentimes I can correctly guess or mostly correctly figure out the meaning and reading but there still are many times I am a bit surprised by either or both (today’s example: 大好物). But as I have come to know more kanji and continue to expose myself to native material, things become increasingly self-reinforcing and I feel that I slowly am understanding more of the gist and meaning of things even when I don’t 100% know the meaning of every piece of a sentence or expression.