Does anyone else thing that, at least in the first levels, the “context sentences” are sometimes complex and not useful? For instance:
五十人の白人のアメリカ人女子が、五つのおまんじゅうをてにいれようときそいあっています。
Fifty white female Americans are competing against each other to obtain five manju.
ちちの五十五才のたんじょう日に、ホグワーツへしょうたいされた。
On my dad’s fifty-fifth birthday, I was invited to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
王女があやしいアメリカ人と、王しつのかね一千まん円をもってよにげしてしまった。
The princess took 10 million yen from the Royal Family and flitted away with a fishy American into the moonlight.
And so on. I think that this fact increase the burden of the study (for those who are already struggling to memorize the radicals/kanji/vocabulary), and some people could ignore them completely, instead to use this opportunity to really put the word in a “real world” sentence and enhance the learning process.
If they are supposed to be funny, not all cultures/countries have the same codes for humor, but I appreciate the effort.
Would they be more useful if they were in more simple and meaningful contexts? What do you think?
As far as I can tell you can enter almost any word into jisho.org’s sentence searcher and it gives you several results. Many of those sentences are much simpler than WaniKani’s and less… out there.
I really agree with you though. I used to ignore WK’s example sentences for the longest time, because they were way too difficult grammatically and had some really weird vocabulary. I didn’t know about jisho.org’s sentence searcher at that time. (There is also tatoeba.org. Jisho seems to link there very often.)
Eh, I don’t know that I would recommend Jisho and Tatoeba for that, anyone can contribute those sentences. A paper E-J dictionary or just a monolingual dictionary is what I had in mind.
Tbh I think you might just ignore those, as sentences YOU find while watching shows, reading, etc will put those new learnt words into your attention.
I use this routine to pick up sentences from my shows as I become aware of any new vocab. In any case try make use of new vocab ASAP, as that will make it memorable much better than any provided sample sentence
I think it would make sense if the sentences only included Kanji that were already taught. It’s not such a problem in the higher levels, but it still sometimes happens that they put Kanji in there that I won’t learn for another few levels. They should stay weird and funny though, I enjoy that. Also, regarding grammar, Wanikani doesn’t really know what grammar level its users are when they start WK so I don’t really have a problem with them using more complicated stuff.
They already did this for the first twenty levels (levels 11-20 were added several months ago). As you can see in the ones in the OP, there’s stuff like たんじょう日 there to avoid putting 誕生日 in the early level sentences. Presumably they’re working on 21-30.
The old ones that were written without any concern for kanji level are still there as well though too.
I can see how that might be a problem in principle, but so far I haven’t met incorrect sentences (of course I might not be good enough to recognize them ). Have you?
But yeah, an actual dictionary will be full of high quality sentences.
most lowbie vocab has 3 example sentences, with the first one being rather simple, the second one a little more complex and the third one more natural. don’t worry about it, you’ll get more out of that when you work on your grammar.
The main point of the context sentences I think is to give a little more information of the usage of the word. As such it is usually enough to be able to recognize it’s place/role in the Japanese sentence, and read the English to get a better feel of the meaning, since so many seem to be synonyms, from just the meaning page. You can kind of infer from the English whether a word is a formal word, or spoken/written language word. Don’t worry about being able to translate the sentences yourself yet, if you are still early in your studies.
Also, since WaniKani doesn’t teach grammar I don’t think they have to make judgements on which grammar a Kanji student knows or not. There are plenty here who already have a quite firm grasp on grammar before starting WK.
(Also I don’t like the half kanji/kana compounds at all. Maybe an option to toggle furigana on a sentence would be better?)
nothing wrong with the example sentences. they’re correct japanese, that’s all that matters for me. i don’t even read them when it’s words i already know or don’t wonder how they’re being used, but when i do, i find they’re nice and helpful.
(There is also 
). Have you?