There is also a bit of “not following the normal process” going on here, @Jyakarr. If you followed Wanikani’s method, the reading is in the mnemonic, always. So when recalling the kanji reading, it should be enough to recall the mnemonic. I do realize many people don’t use the mnemonics, but they can be very useful.
What Wanikani does when they don’t specify which reading they want in the reviews, is force you to recall the one that you learned with the mnemonic. That might be a stupid way of doing things, but the reasoning probably is to not give you hints that can help you “cheat” on your reviews.
It’s a problem that’s easily solved with a userscript though. And most user-created mobile apps should have the option as well.
I have 3 gripes about WaniKani, and this is one (+ insistence of ‘to’ for verbs, and using a ko sound for ka mnemonics, grrr, 平常心、平常心,)
Now, the actual readings used will be picked up by the vocab, so I’m not sure there’s much point to learning them separately other than to be aware of them, but anyway, remembering which set of readings will be accepted is an extra (and useless) piece of information I have to learn and there are already a lot of things to learn.
Nowadays, I default to 音読み, unless I happen to remember that it wants the 訓読み, and if it wanted the kun, I’ll just redo it.
I just checked, and the mnemonic used for か is “car”. Is there some country / dialect where “car” is pronounced with a こ sound? In American English at least, “car” definitely matches the か sound pretty well. (And while I’m not super familiar, I think it matches British and Australian English fine as well.)
I never bothered remembering which one is kunyomi and onyomi.
WK only teaches one kanji reading; other readings are learned via vocab.
You’ll need to recognize correct reading based on the combination of kanji. Take, for example, 生. There are many readings for that kanji. Just learn one reading せい and ignore the rest. You’ll soon know the multiple readings in vocab.
However, it gets confusing when kanji has different readings as vocab.
kanji 生 せい vocab 生 なま
In that case, there is no other way to know the difference except by reading outside of WK via context.
“Kanji reading” is usually on’yomi, but isn’t always. If there’s not enough vocabulary that the on’yomi reading will be used for, then it’ll just be the kun’yomi reading.
“Vocabulary” is obviously not always going to be kun’yomi? Since there’s a ton of jukugo words in the vocabulary too.
Hard to break or not, I think these are valid observations .
I also had a problem with the entire cock business, but eventually just gave up on phonetic mnemonics entirely, because only a minute subset of them made sense to me.
I think the originally query was answered, though, so I don’t want to derail any further
I would agree with you if each kanji only had one onyomi and on kunyomi. Unfortunately it’s often more complicated than that. You’ll get used to the abuse over time.
I like to keep track of which readings are onyomi and which are kunyomi, but I’m not sure how useful that actually is in practice - just for keeping things organized in my mind.
The background color is an indicator as well - the fuschia means it’s usually looking for the on-yomi that you originally learned. Purple is usually kun-yomi or a jukugo word.
Ah, you didn’t mean just か. But I think “cock” still sounds quite close to かく (again, in American English). But I get that not everyone pronounces things the same, which can make some of these mnemonics unhelpful.
One thing I think worth mentioning is that when reading it is definitely useful to have a prominent reading in mind to guess first when coming across a given kanji when you see it in a new compound, and the best candidate for that might be onyomi or kunyomi.
Keeping WK along rigid on/kun lines would improve it from a categorization standpoint, but from a practicality standpoint… Like - for example:
When you see 神 in a new word, you should think of the onyomi シン or the kunyomi かみ depending on the word.
When you see 姫 in a new word, you should think of the kunyomi ひめ - I’ve never ever seen the onyomi キ
When you see 特 in a new word, you should think of the onyomi トク - a kunyomi doesn’t seem to even exist
There’s no categorical consistency to practicality, and by drilling a kanji into you with SRS Wanikani is going to associate a particular reading for you, and the most useful one for that is going to be the onyomi mostly but not always, and sometimes one or the other isn’t even worth thinking about at all.
If it helps – I would also reassure anyone that you will be able to tell what’s an onyomi and what’s a kunyomi without ever studying them if you keep reading. I never bothered to keep them straight, and now just from patterns of having to guess kanji a lot, and what Japanese words are like vs. Chinese ones, it’s obvious which readings are which, so I don’t regret at all not learning them in a more systematic way. They just come up in different situations, so once you’re familiar with those situations it’s easy to spot.
(there are cases where I would prefer Wanikani to not defer to the kunyomi so quickly though… like さむい is an awfully common word, yeah, but 寒 isn’t uncommon in compounds as かん either, etc.)
Also, some kanji, like 込 and 匂 don’t have onyomi because they’re 国字
Sometimes WK also defaults to the kunyomi because they’re not planning on giving you any onyomi words until much later, which I think is the case with 寒
It is occasionally useful to know whether the readings are kun or on because kun-kun and on-on are more common than mixes. So it’s easier to remember words like 東口 and 東側, where if you remember that the second kanji uses the kun reading, you can infer that the first one does too. So 東側 is ひがしがわ and not とうがわ.
In fact, the explanation for 東口 says
This word uses kun’yomi readings, possibly because of 口, which is a body part (body parts do that quite a bit in words and kanji). You should hopefully have seen both the kun’yomi readings from previous levels meaning you can read this word as well.
So WK is expecting you to know which reading of 東 is the on reading and which is the kun reading when it’s teaching you the vocab.
That’s true for some, like 狼 - but 寒 only has one vocabulary associated with it in WK currently, さむい.
Those are honestly the words I’d probably prioritize adding, more support for readings like that (where they are common in compounds even though the standalone kunyomi word is way more common than all of them). When it’s just the kunyomi first, then maybe one onyomi compound later on, like for 雨, I think I end up not remembering I did learn う in WK with 雷雨 and just internalized it as some kind of exception then had to learn う again from compounds post-WK.
Sometimes in retrospect with those I’d prefer if they’d have stuck to the most familiar pattern (of onyomi for compounds first as the kanji reading, then kunyomi as the vocab), but it’s hard to balance where the line is, and certainly for beginners the word あめ or さむい is vastly more common and useful than compounds. So it’s not a huge deal. By the time you’re encountering enough compounds where the onyomi reading would be useful for these I think you should be plenty able to absorb it without being like, shocked and appalled a kanji might have another reading after all.
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