I empathized you. I once thought that WaniKani would’ve taught us both kanjis and conversational Japanese vocabularies as well. That made me bad at speaking Japanese with friends sometimes because actually Wanikani teaches us a lot of written language vocabs. So I got the moral of the story: WK only works best for Kanji recognition.
When I started they had a vocab entry for イギリス.
They don’t anymore,
I guess they nipped it in the bud before it got out of hand. IIRC the blurb was something like “This has no kanji in it but it’s useful to know”. The reading portion of the review was super easy obviously, just type what you see! 
So… as someone else said, that this is a dated term is in the description.
But beyond that? It should be obvious. From a linguistic sense. “Sato” is described as home village, and that alone should tip you off that it’s coming from a time when most people would connect homesickness to having left their home village, aka a time when most people lived in rural areas, and HAD a home village to originate from, pre-urbanization, yadda yadda.
Anyway, both of those kanji are useful to know. Knowing that vocab word helps me remember “sato.” Which is the point, as everyone above has said ad nauseam (sorry to latch on 
)
Interesting either way because I had english (person) in a lesson in class today. I under it’s a kanji learning program, but at least that would have been better in my opinion then satogokoro.
Agreed. : D
イギリス人 - Level 20 vocab
Wanikani is a kanji learning site and, as well as what people have said about the vocab being chosen to give plenty of examples of the kanji usage, for the most part formal Japanese uses kanji a lot more than casual Japanese, as most slang is written in katakana. As such it makes sense that Wanikani mainly teaches formal Japanese while making you rely on other sources for learning to speak casually.
Hinata from Haikyuu also calls it 便所 and he’s like 16.
I’ll preface this by saying we’ve had some pretty useless words in WK in the past, and maybe still do, but:
- I think it’s funny that people latch onto a single word like this. I mean, there’s like 999 other really great useful words that you learn for every one of these (ok, exaggerating a little), but WK gets thrown out as “only useful for kanji, don’t use it for vocabulary” because of a single word.
- We have two native speakers on staff. One of them has gone through all the words. The second one is going through them. Maybe this one will get removed, maybe not, but we’re doing at least a little due diligence (after the initial two or three rounds of due diligence).
- What is common/useful to a native speaker depends on a lot of things: Dialect, region, education, age, work experience, life experience, what article you just read the other day, and whether or not they are thinking about reading (or just speaking, as is often the case with native speakers). When I originally chose all the words, I might have had a series of experiences where I ran into a certain word (like 便所, for example) a lot due to who I talked with, where I lived, etc., but for another person maybe 便所 isn’t so important.
- And, finally, yeah - sometimes kanji don’t have a lot of good words. So, we put in words that aren’t super common so you can learn the readings of the kanji. But, just because a word isn’t super common doesn’t mean that it isn’t useful. You’ll be surprised at the things you run into if you’re reading a lot.
All that being said, sometimes we ask you to learn stupid words. So if you think a word is stupid be sure to email us and we’ll pass it around and discuss if we agree or not.
As someone who has said things that could be paraphrased as “only useful for kanji, don’t use it for vocabulary”, I don’t think it’s just the inclusion of something like 里心 that makes me feel that way. WK just isn’t set up to give the kind of detail you need to be able to parse some of the trickier nuances. I’d say for beginner vocab, it’s solid, but as I prepare for N1, I can’t consult WK to parse the distinction of various closely related words. But I didn’t sign up expecting to be able to.
Maybe a better option could be not to remove “less common” words, but put a note with smth like you said ‘regional’ or ‘you probably won’t see it often, but it’s a nice word to know if you’re going to read some serious books one day’.
I am sure there are people who would request the same, others can always skip them.
My Japanese teachers rotate every month or so, and I’ve found this statement to be absolutely true.
For example, when I used 脳みそ for the first time in class today, I got different responses/reactions from my kanji teacher vs my grammar teacher. 
Isn’t the reason people say this more because so many words don’t have any real explanation of what they mean? Like Leebo, I didn’t come here necessarily expecting them to - I came here to learn kanji - but there are a lot of similar words with no differentiation given in the item description or even words whose English translation has multiple meanings but there’s no indication of which one the Japanese word refers to.
I love WK, but I generally don’t try and remember the words I come across here for use in speaking.
This is true. I’ve seen words a few times on here and scoffed, going: when am I ever going to use that. Then two days later it pops up in a book or news story.
Koichi is a Satogokoro. True wisdom cannot be argued with. I agree, any word that you learn is still a word, whether it is common or not. Praise 
.
Jiisho says 里心 is taught in second grade so i want to learn that kind of words too. It’s cute word and i love it, so stop messing with it…
So Shakespearean language then is taught to 2nd graders in English schools? That makes no sense.
What?
Anyway, Jisho doesn’t have any information about when vocab words are taught in Japanese schools, only the individual kanji, which indeed are both taught in 2nd grade… but it doesn’t necessarily mean 里心 is taught. At the same time, it’s pretty easy to guess the meaning.
Jisho is a lie. >.< Can’t trust anyone on this planet.