Hello, I am looking for a script that will force Wanikani to test me ONLY on the meaning of the Kanji and not the reading. In short, I only want to recognize the meaning of kanji and am not interested in how they are sounded out or written in hiragana.
Now, before you say that it is important, etc. I have my reasons. I will never need to produce the language: I am looking to improve my passive reading skills. The learning of hiragana is important, but simply not my goal.
Thank in advance
Steve
I could be wrong, but I donât believe such an ask is possible. Userscripts can alter the way the site behaves to an extent such as allowing users to undo an incorrect answer or have lessons show up in a specific order, but I think what youâre asking for goes beyond that.
A userscript could probably be created to hide the readings of the words and show you only the meanings while testing you only on those meanings, but based on how wanikani is coded, you would never be able to level up. Even if it was possible to create a userscript to do this, I feel like it would be going against the siteâs TOS, similar to a userscript that would eliminate the wait time between SRS stages.
Removing those âobstaclesâ would mean you could level up much faster than intended, which would in turn mean you would only need to use the site for a fraction of the time. Doing what youâre asking would still take just as long, but would be less work as youâd only have to answer half of the review for kanji and vocab.
That aside, Iâm not sure youâre thinking critically about what youâre asking. How are you going to understand grammar if you arenât interested in learning hiragana? How are you going to understand vocabulary words that are more than just the kanji itself? How are you going to look up a kanji if you donât know or recognize the radical if you donât know how to read it?
As already pointed out, there is no such script at the moment (or likely ever).
Also, you might have your reasons, maybe you have a really special case and already know a lot of what you need to know, but if not⊠you will never be able to âpassively readâ with only learning the most useless information for each Kanji on here; the meaning.
It simply gives you something to hang on to when seeing the Kanji, the reading gives it its âreal placeâ in the language.
Only because you know which meaning æ and 瞟 might have for each item (or rather which meaning WK gives those 2), you probably wont know what æ瞟 both means or is spelled like, hence you still canât read, neither actively, nor passively (whatever passive reading means in your case).
Iâd like to echo what others have said about thinking critically about this. At first I was of your opinion: Iâm only here to learn the kanji, I donât want to actually learn to read! I found it annoying that the site forces me to learn not only kanji pronunciations, but even vocabulary words based on them.
But the more I learn, the more I understand that this is the right approach.
First, a single kanji can mean many different things, ofren very vaguely related! And itâs only in context that you can actually understand it. And for this you need to know not just the kanji, but the words that comprise them.
Second, you will never be able to understand a single Japanese sentence without the glue between the kanji, which is the grammar, and to make sense of the meaning you need to be able to pronounce the sentence as a whole and parse it in your head, just like your brain is parsing this complex sentence that Iâve written by hearing it in your mind and dividing it into parts. This is a language understanding process, not a visual process.
And third, I keep recognising words Iâd known before and now I finally know the kanji they are composed of, and this is awesome. Just now, on level 4, I got the word è±ç«, flower + fire = fireworks. And then I got to the reading, and it was an immense âahaâ moment, because ăȘă + ăČ = ăŻăȘăł, and Hanabi is a popular card game dealing with fireworks. MIND BLOWN!
You may very well have your reasons but I also want to add that even though you may never need to âproduceâ japanese, that doesnt mean you wonât need to know the readings. Letâs say you see the character ç in a piece of text somewhere but you canât remember what it means? How do you look it up? Well you could copy and paste it if thats possible, but what if you canât. How do you type ç into a search bar? There is no kanji keyboard out there with 2,000+ keys. The only way to type it is to know one of its readings like ăă and type that into a japanese IDE.
Itâs kind of like saying you want to learn the alphabet but you only want to learn what the letters âmeanâ. You may have some crazy method but I canât imagine that being an easier way to learn to read.
I think you might be happier trying Remembering The Kanji by James W. Heisig instead of WaniKani. You could probably find an Anki deck or an app that is adapted to work with RTK which would teach you solely the kanji meanings and nothing else. Youâre looking for an experience that WK is not designed to give you, and you would have to fight the system the entire way to get it to do what you want.
Personally, I wouldnât recommend learning kanji meanings without readings, because the reading is actually the most important part! Kanji meanings often roughly correspond to vocab meanings, but not always. You will need to learn the readings in order to actually read Japanese. If youâre only choosing one, youâd be better off skipping the meanings and learning just the readings, imo.
That said, many people have achieved success with RTK, so itâs possible to start with a meanings-only approach and eventually become literate. But even RTK expects you to eventually learn the readings for all of the kanji you learn.
TBH it would probably be a lot quicker and not much worse to test yourself for meanings on kanji only BUT learn both meaning and reading for the vocab.
Being able to âmaybe guessâ the reading for a vocab with the kanji readings you already know has almost no upside.
Iâm not sure I understand your point? Even if we discount the utility of being able to understand spoken Japanese (no kanji there!), you still need to know the readings of kanji because there will be times where you will see the words written out entirely in kana. Knowing kanji meanings alone wonât save you here.
Itâs actually super helpful because itâs way easier to look up an unknown word if youâre able to guess the reading.
Other people have made this point already, but itâs the vocab that matters, not the kanji. Kanji is just one way to write the word. What matters is you understand the word, which you canât reliably do from the kanji alone.
It is pretty helpful, but my experience is that you get that ability even if you donât explicitly study kanji readings, because as you learn vocab you pick up the patterns of what the kanji is typically read as âfor freeâ, as long as youâre learning the readings of the vocab.
What Iâm saying is, you donât need to know the readings of kanji. At least not in the sense of being tested for readings for individual kanji out of context. As soon as you add context (sentences, etc.), they become vocab. You most definitely need to know both reading and meaning of the vocab.
There is no point quizzing yourself on kanji readings because most kanji have multiple readings.
The kanji readings only matter in context, and then they become vocab.
For an extreme case äž has 3 on readings (ăăăăăăăăă·ăŁăł) and 6+ kun readings (ăăăăăăăăżăăăăźăŒăăăŠăŸă€âŠ) according to Jisho. Once you encounter a word in a sentence knowing 1,2, or 5 readings doesnât really matter, if you donât know the specific vocab you are reading. The vocab is the only thing that matters.
Knowing the kanji meaning definitely helps you piece together the vocab meaning a lot of the time. Knowing the kanji reading in isolation is almost never helpful.
The only thing that matters is kanji meaning and then one step further vocab meaning + reading.
Plus, once you learn enough vocab you see the patterns between the kanji readings as well. E.g. a lot of the kanji including the çœïŒăŻăïŒradical will also have that as a reading, a lot of the kanji including ç« (ăăă) will also have that as a reading.
Ah, I think I see where I misunderstood!
I thought by this, you were arguing for WK teaching both readings and meanings, but TESTING for kanji meanings only (so, posting in agreement with OP).
Sorry!
Honestly, I think thereâs an argument for both approaches? Yours is what RTK favors, which obviously has worked for many people. And pm215âs approach (learning vocab readings as needed without explicitly studying kanji readings) also works.
Iâve personally benefited heavily from learning readings alongside kanji, but a huge part of that is because of the semantic-phonetic composition userscript. Thanks to that script, WK basically gave me a crash course in semantic-phonetic composition. Is this necessary to explicitly study? No, not at all. Youâll pick up a lot of this on your own with exposure. But I found it really interesting and helpful, personally.
What are you trying to read?
Honestly, the idea that its universally helpful in that regard is pretty outdated anyways. For essentially my entire studies, the ability to look up words was irrelevant because I used popup dictionaries for 99.9% of my input. And nowadays, living in japan and texting japanese people every day I occasionally get a word I donât know, but I never actually guess the reading when I look it up. When my girlfriend sent me ç©ç« the other day, Iâm not gonna sit there being like âHMM SEKIRITSU??? TSUMIDACHI???â like Iâm detective weaboo holmes. I just type ç©ă backspace ç«ă€ backspace and search.
Beginners might not have a pool of words to pull from like that, but regardless they will still be learning the readings just by learning vocab words as you say.
I think the idea of learning kanji separately at the start isnât a terrible one, but the âlook up benefitsâ argument supporting it has always been so weird to me. Like if an umbrella salesman came up to me and was like âBY THE WAY YOU CAN USE THIS TO WARD OFF ATTACKERSâ. Like sure if I had an umbrella and was being attacked I would probably wack the shit out of them with it, but like is that really a big enough reason to be included in your sales pitch?
Itâs a bit more helpful if a good chunk of what you want to read exclusively exists in print books or magazines⊠I wouldnât have been able to tackle é±ćăăăŹăč as a beginner at all without WK, probably. Or rather, Iâd be able to read it, but only very slowly and painstakingly, which kind of defeats the point, because itâs a magazine where the info very quickly becomes less relevant (often in a manner of days or weeks).
But I recognize that my specific use case might not be very common 
.
This is exactly how I do it. Recognize the kanji, type a word that includes that kanji into imiwa, repeat and piece the new vocab together that way.
Donât get me wrong, I donât think WK is bad. I just think the approach isnât perfect and if there was an option to skip the kanji reading quiz portion I would take it to save time.
I guess to me, the reading quiz is either kind of a freebie (because the phonetic component is super straightforward or you have the reading reinforced enough through vocab that itâs not a problem to remember), or it trips me up because Iâm either getting the kanji confused with something else, or Iâm forgetting that itâs a kanji with a reading that doesnât come from its phonetic component. The latter two cases are both cases where I think itâs worth reviewing the kanji a little more because thatâll affect my ability to read it if I see it in the wild.
But overall, Iâd rather look at a kanji in an unknown word and have a reading immediately jump into my brain than look at a kanji and have a meaning immediately jump into my brain. If you know at least one reading for the kanji, you can type, say, ç©ă backspace ç«ă€ backspace and search for ç©ç«. If you know just the meanings, youâll get stuck trying to piece together the concepts of âaccumulateâ + âstandâ, which isnât super helpful.
thank you for all the responses. In short: 1) not recommended; 2) technically not possible; 3) other methods â Remembering The Kanji by James W. Heisig.
I am already working with Heisigâs book.
While I appreciate the many good points made about the importance of learning both â and for the most part agree with much of what was said â i am not entirely convinced that everyone learns languages in the same wayâŠ
But in the end, it seems it is not technically possible â so I will treat the reading as I did gender of the noun in French and German â simply make it part of the word â I found a script that allows me too link meaning to reading so the associations will be just part of the word ⊠it will take longer, but it is what it isâŠ
thanks for your timeâŠ
Steve
I mean you could just use an anki script and press correct on the readings but if youâre going to that level just use anki in the first, would have saved you a few quid
Thereâs no such script as far as I know (although it wouldnât be hard to make a script that auto-passes the readings). Using the Smouldering Durtles Android app you can set the readings to âanki modeâ which will just require you to press a button to pass them while still getting the usual prompt for meanings. I donât know if the web anki scripts allow this.
Also I understand where youâre coming from because I too am mostly interested in being able to read Japanese over everything else, but keep in mind that in the wild youâll very often encounter words spelled in full kana for all sorts of reasons, especially in less formal settings.
One of the big issues I had when I started playing games and reading manga was dealing with this. I would very often encounter words that I actually knew with kanji that I couldnât recognize because the game decided to spell it in kana for one reason or an other. One common thing for instance is to spell a word normally using kanji with katakana to denote a strong emphasis or weird articulation. Iâve encountered instances where an alien or demonic entity would speak fully in katakana for instance, probably to convey an otherworldly speech pattern.
Another thing I often encounter is a kanji word spelled in hiragana with syllable stretching to convey a teasing tone, like âç§ćŻă ïŒâ (itâs a secret) spelled like ăČăăżăă€ă ïŒ or something like that.
In other words I think that even if you only ever want to be able to read Japanese, not knowing the reading of most words will prove frustrating, unless maybe you only read formal/literary Japanese thatâs very kanji-heavy.
At my current level (which is much lower than yours) I actually do the opposite at this point: I donât really pay a lot of attention to the meaning of kanji or even vocab on WK because it is often of dubious value as we know, but being able to know/guess the reading of kanji is extremely useful to me.
Admittedly my situation may be a bit unusual in that my main hobby is playing âretroâ games, and the Super Nintendo doesnât support popup dictionaries so if I have to look something up I either have to guess the reading of the word or, if Iâm unable to, search the kanji by components or use OCR which is always rather cumbersome and sometimes error-prone.
Yeah I do that too, but of course that assumes that you know how to input ç©ă and ç«ă€. Thatâs why I also donât worry too much about remembering all the weird rendaku and other phonetic quirks and reading exceptions, but I absolutely want to memorize that ç©ă is ă€ă for instance, and ç© is ă»ă.
Basically I want to be in a position where, given any Japanese word using familiar kanji, Iâm able to guess the reading in one or two tries with reasonable accuracy, or failing that be able to rebuild the word piecemeal to look it up on jisho.
