Oh btw the kanji doesn’t mean machine, it is only used as a counting word for machines. It mainly means platform, and the shape doesn’t mean anything, it is a phonetic simplification of a more complicated ancient form.
I actually don’t dislike WK, and I’ll probably buy a sub. I just think the way it handles radicals and mnemonics is not very good.
As for your 1970s example, the understanding of learning and the way the brain works has changed A LOT since then. Going off my basic psych courses in college, the current understanding seems to be that specific people remember things better when using specific senses. Some touch. Some listening. Some visual. Etc.
WK seems to kind of half-assed this by tacking on the “really try to think of this using all of your senses” at the end of a lot of the mnemonics. If they really wanted to have a robust system, they would include some basic audio, maybe just saying the name and a basic version of the mnemonic story, as well as logical explanations for things.
Currently, the don’t do those things.
I myself am more hands on, auditory, and logical when it comes to learning. WK fits the “hands on” part by allowing me to just do the lessons and fail until I get them right, but it absolutely does nothing for the auditory or logical parts. I completely have to make those up on my own.
They’ve been told a few times to add platform as a meaning, but I think synonyms are a low priority since we have the ability to add them ourselves.
You pretty much just expanded on all of the points of my post just before this. I also get pissed off at the bad mnemonics, and bad pronunciations for those mnemonics. The thing is, with a bit more time, I’m sure they could come up with better ones.
Or they could at least have more than one mnemonic, and come up with ones that make sense in different contexts. In their own words, making more connections makes you more likely to remember, so more mnemonics couldn’t hurt.
But to me, relating “machine” to “platform” makes a ton of sense, as I just earlier said that the bottom part is a base (platform) the “machine press” presses onto. Even if it isn’t the actual origin of the term, it visually makes way more sense.
Like others have said, you don’t have to use mnemonics. Sometimes they just don’t gel with me, and sometimes I don’t bother at all. But you might be interested in a snippet from the FAQ:
What do Guru, Master, Enlightened, and Burned mean?
Guru: you know an item fairly well. Any available, associated items will unlock and appear in your Lessons pile.
Master: generally, you should be able to recall these items without using the mnemonics.
Enlightened: you should be able to recall these items without the mnemonic fairly quickly. The answer should appear without much effort.
Burned: this item is “fluent” in your brain. The answer comes with little to no effort. You will remember this item for a long, long time. Even if you don’t use it and “forget” it sometime in the future, it should come back to you quickly after recalling it. Items that are “burned” no longer show up in reviews. You can unburn an item on an item’s individual page, if you feel like you don’t know it as thoroughly as you should.
This is pretty explicit that even if you do use the mnemonics, you’re not expected to remember/associate them in the end since the kanji/vocab should become second nature.
However! If you want to completely ignore them, WaniKani can still be useful. Having a massive learning framework already laid out for you can save a lot of time. I’m a self-learner, so even if I didn’t use the mnemonics at all I’d pay just for the structure.
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The whole thing means platform, and it’s not meant to be a visual representation of a platform in the first place.
It’s quite common for one kanji to have loads of unrelated meanings, and there’s really no reason anyone should expect the components of the kanji, and thus the radicals used for mnemonics, to apply to all of them. Or even make perfect sense. Because as was pointed out, they often were used merely for their phonetic relationships.
But we’re still talking about the simplest of kanji.
You ask why do they make you learn radicals and then kanji. It’s not a foolproof system but for the most part they want you to learn the radicals as a complete separate system. You learn 10 radicals and then 20 kanji you can make with them, then another 10 radicals and then another 40 kanji that you can now make with the new and old radicals. And so on.
You are still young in WK levels, but by level 6 it doesn’t feel like WK is slow or trying to get money out of you for nothing. First day of new level I learn 30 Radicals, 20 Kanji, and 100 Vocab. Day 3 of a level I unlock 20 new kanji and another 100 vocab. I’m Estimating. Every six or seven days I am learning basically the most my brain can fit and then old kanji and vocab are coming back again in the middle of all of this.
One thing I can tell you is that if you want to learn then WK gives you bang for your buck.
But do you think those radicals are actually adding anything of value? Do you really think it wouldn’t be better to just start with those 20 kanji and 100 vocab, then unlock the other 20 kanji and 100 vocab?
Is it really better to have the radicals? Not just equally as good. Not some gray area of possible effectiveness. Is it better to learn the radicals first?
If most people can’t, without a doubt, say “Yes. It’s better to start with the radicals, and not the kanji.”, then they shouldn’t be in the system.
Even if the pacing was kept the same, would removing the radicals really remove any value from the system?
Absolutely yes. It would be impossible to do this without the radicals. when you get to the later kanji. Most Kanji are just smashed up pieces (radicals) with no rhyme or reason, and the pieces have no meaning either.
The whole point of learning by radicals is so you aren’t learning a new random hodgepodge every time but can look at a kanji and say okay… I see samurai and forehead and legs radicals… that makes me think of this and now I have the answer. What do these things have to do with “sell”… absolutely nothing. But they mean more then the samurai kanji over a line and two more lines.
It’d be nice if Japanese made total sense and every kanji (and piece of a kanji) and their meanings and readings made sense together but they don’t.
Sometimes a kanji just fits in your brain and that’s great but the radicals and mnemonics are 100% indispensable when you have no idea what you are looking at.
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It is a systematic approach, the “radicals” are reusable building blocks for more complicated kanji later. In the beginning the reason for this is not so clear because the kanji themselves are chosen to be simple, but later the three steps radicals → meaning → reading are a good repetitive framework where you know exactly what to expect, instead of “we make an exception now because this particular kanji will be used as a radical later as well blabla”.
But in the end WK actually exists while your pie-in-the-sky “I could do it so much better if people would just let me unleash my genius” version would probably collide with reality quite quickly when you actually have to come up with 2000 mnemonics instead of doing the armchair complaining about a selected few.
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(And I know I’m being really negative in the thread, but I do appreciate all of the replies, even if I kind of hijacked everything away from it’s original purpose. Maybe I’m just being self-righteous, but I think there’s even value in me being negative, as it gives you motivation to say something positive you might not have said otherwise.)
But I’m going to get more off topic, but still somewhat related. One of the mnemonics that has always rubbed me the wrong way is all of the “kou” mnemonics being related to “kouichi”. I lived in Japan for two years, and never once saw that name. I literally had to google it to make sure it was a proper name in Japanese, and not something completely unrelated. And the fact that they use it for almost everything “kou” related really doesn’t make sense to me. Yes, developing an evolving narrative and making more connections should help you remember things. But “kouichi” has a ton of concurrent narratives that aren’t related to each other, so even if you remember “kou” is “kouichi”, and he does bad things, that doesn’t help you remember which of the 10 bad things that he does to get the correct answer for the current kanji.
I’ll admit. Some of the mnemonics make sense, and I use them. Some of them almost make sense, but I’ve been able to modify/simplify them into something that makes sense to me. “kouichi” has been completely useless. I completely ignore it every time I see it. There are too many instances that use the same mnemonic without being at all related. Same goes for “Charlie Sheen” and anything “shi” related.
And completely off topic, the spell check is FUBAR. I’ve completely mangled some words, and it’s been like, “Eh. Close enough. You probably meant the right thing.” As an example, on more than one occasion, I’ve been zoned out and typed “katakana” instead of “katana”, and it gave it to me. On the other side, I’ve gotten 少 wrong several times, because I typed “little” or “a few”, when the acceptable answers are “few” or “a little”. I mean, really? Katakana is close enough to katana, but “a few” isn’t close enough to “few”? FFS.
And on the Japanese side, it seems to allow NO errors. I’ve had many slips of fingers resulting in my answer being off by one keystroke, but it counts it wrong. Get a few of these typos in a set, and it will drastically set back your rate for getting guru, even though you knew the words and just messed up. And sometimes it will warn you that you typed the kun’yomi, instead of on’yomi, and give you a second chance, but if you do the opposite, it’s just wrong.
So, yeah. All of those contradictions get really aggravating. Sorry for going off topic. It just popped in to my head and I had to say it.
Fair enough. If things really do start making sense at higher levels, then I guess I’ll eat my words. But right now, removing repetitious and nonsensical radicals, and adding in one or two other mnemonics doesn’t really seem like a “pie in the sky” goal. It would obviously take more manpower, but it seems very doable, and IMO, I think the service would be a lot better for doing it.
I mean, even lengthening the time to guru kanjis and removing their associated radicals seems like a win to me. It would cut down on all of the perceived repetition at the beginning, and would do a lot to quell a lot of the complaints that newbies have. This could lead to more subs, which is a good thing for WK.
Even just adding in a “Trust us, this will make sense later. Believe it!” to the early mnemonics would probably quell a lot of the newbie complaints about them.
If you check out the userscripts forum, you can find a script that lets you override a wrong entry. I know the Android app also has it, but I don’t know about iOS. Basically, if you typo something you can say “I knew that” and it’ll let you try again. (Which is amazing when doing phone reviews, since it’s so easy to be a victim of autocorrect.) But it’s easy to abuse and say you know something when you really don’t, so handle with care.
If you really don’t want to learn the radicals at all, you could A) get it wrong, which shows you the ‘meaning,’ and B) override it with that script to give it the correct meaning that you just saw. That would let you guru/burn the radicals ASAP to get them out of the way for the learning you want.
I’m not sure if you know this or not, but Japanese has 214 ‘official’ radicals. They don’t all match the radical names WaniKani gives, but some do. I find some of the traditional meanings more useful than the WK radicals for mnemonics/interpretation. There’s a bit of scholarly reading here on imabi if you’re interested in learning more on the subject. Depending on how linguistically inclined you are, you may just want to skip to the table in there.
You do realize that Kouichi is the name of one of the founders, right…
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Koichi is both a common name, and the name of the founder of Tofugu/WaniKani/EtoEto/Textfugu, and he’s a very public face in the company’s products.
He will often respond if you tag him with the @ symbol, but it’s not necessary now.
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Tofugu YouTube channel:
Try to familiarize with Koichi’s face and persona.
Trying to absorb something like 鬱 without having learned little parts to first work with seems like a task that most people are not going to be up for. If you want to give it a go, be our guest. But that’s what the radicals/mnemonics are there for.
TLDR: install the override script
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This is nowhere mentioned in the course of reading about Wanikani, or signing up for it. You have to specifically search for that information.
So, while it might be humorous to use the founder as the bad guy in all the mnemonics, it isn’t really helpful if they never point out that he’s the founder.
In all my time looking for ways to learn Japanese, I never once came across Wanikani in any search. I only learned about it from other JETs.
I still say it’s a bad mnemonic.
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Remember Kanji’s reading may be one thing, but…
Kanji’s meaning and writing correctly needs another drill. I find components/parts/radicals to very helpful when using along with mnemonics… That’s the way not only WaniKani, but also Heisig’s RTK, KanjiDamage works.
BTW, I extend my radical knowledge to comply with Kangxi’s radicals and Heisig RTK’s parts.
It complements very well with exercising hand muscles.
If you got Kanji meaning wrong, feel free to “Ignore Script” and make it comply with www.kanjipedia.jp