Reading mnemonic for 認める is misleading?

The reason I was able to recognize you is because your face was covered in meat (みと). Your face was always covered in meat all those years ago too!

The predominant meaning of the word is recognition as in acknowledgement, and its variations stem from that. However, this implies its meaning is similar to 気づく or 見分ける. Could/should it be changed? This is an issue with its kanji, too.

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Just dropping in to say that I would support a change there as well.
The Kanji page and vocab page with the whole recognizing places and people havily implies it has to do with knowing something which you made a valid point is misleading.

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What’s the difference? I’m looking at both words in jisho and they both mean to recognize something, to notice.

What is the issue?

After looking it up in a J-J dictionary it actually can have the same meaning as 気づく according to the dictionary. I just haven’t seen it used like that before. I feel like the aknowledge nuance is the one you will see most often.
So arguably one could make a case to adjust the primary meaning in wanikani which would imply a change of text as well.

If you go to the kanji and look at the compounds you will see that this also reflects more of the nuance that the Kanji typically has.
Now english is tricky since “recognize” can have the aknowledge nuance in and of itself. But I (as a non native) associate “knowing something” much more closely with recognize compared to “aknowledge”.

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As noted above, the first definition you’ll find for 認める is 気づく.

目にとめる。存在を知覚する。気づく。

So at the very least “implying they’re similar” is not an issue.

I could be fine with changing the text, but yeah, they have the same meaning in some contexts.

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If you look up the word “recognise” on Google, the top synonyms are acknowledge, accept, admit and concede. Obviously none of those words are exactly synonymous with “recognise” and have different nuance. When I use J-J dictionaries myself and see them offer a synonym like 気づく for an entry, I’m careful to treat them to be as similar in meaning as I would say that recognise and concede had the same meaning.

That isn’t to discount your point since I agree with it. Obviously I’m not a native and there’s every chance in the world that its meaning can be synonymous with 気づく most of the time. I just value context and nuance more, and a quick look up on Jisho with the #sentences tag or a squizz at over at immersionkit tells me that 90% of the time it doesn’t mean to recognise (from memory).

That wasn’t the point I was intending to make. The original post seemed to suggest that 認める and 気づく do not overlap, and that this is why the mnemonic should be changed. The fact that one can be defined by the other suggests to me that that isn’t enough of a reason alone to change the mnemonic.

WK mnemonics frequently play fast and loose with meanings, sounds, and imagery because their primary purpose is jogging your memory.

As I said, I’m not married to keeping the mnemonic the way it is, but it’s also not a huge oversight in my mind to use a meaning that technically does exist to jog your memory.

I think I disagree pretty strongly with that. The mnemonics of the kanji/vocabulary being taught should accurately reflect the true meaning, not the meaning of a homonym for the sake of jogging your memory.

I’m also arguing that their meanings don’t overlap, just as recognise and concede don’t overlap despite concede being offered as a synonym for recognise. Like I said, though, I could be wrong about that. The first results [1] [2] on HiNative suggest I’m not, though.

Well, I can’t help with getting you in contact with the dictionaries, but that would seem to be the next step.

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Thanks for bringing this up, I’ll forward this over to the content team and we’ll let you know what they say.

Update: We have now added a note in the meaning explanation of 認める to avoid any confusion regarding the English meaning of ‘recognise’.

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