so i’m still a lowly peasant, lvl 29, egg shell pieces sticking behind my ears and all, but why on earth does the wk vocab have such a bad rep?
my last session had 凍る、冷凍庫、不潔、精神 - all excellent, high-frequency words.
who cares about the 5% rares/obscure?
people collect friggin pokemon, i collect oldschool-cool japanese vocab, like 里心
seriously, the vocab here rocks.
I guess it’s at least partly because a lot of people using the site are beginners, and at that stage it’s like every word counts, so finding out that some of the words you’re learning are a bit obscure and maybe not that helpful can be a bit of a blow.
In particular, there’s nothing to tell you which words are the super useful high-frequency words and which are… less so. You also have less experience to be able to tell yourself.
Then the icing on the cake is confirmation bias mixed in with a tendency to pay attention to the noticeable things rather than the thousands of actually useful words.
But yeah. It does!
where is number 8
なんだ、喧嘩売ってんのかこらー！ヽ(･Д(･Д(･Д(･Д･´)Д･´)Д･´)Д･´)ﾉ
i omitted number 8, sorry.
23 “And he that doubteth the vocab selection by the Holy Crabigator shall burn in apprentice hell, and his review pile shall be copious.”
Crabigator 14:23
no, no, THATS why it will shock you
Because it was omitted
本日の件につきましては、誠に申し訳ない事でございます m(_ _)m
That clickbait got me hard.
Does wk vocab have a bad rep?
Going along with your analogy, I’m not even hatched, BUT, I could tell from the beginning that the vocab selection from WaniKani is awesome.
I could hardly remember my kanji until I started paying more attention to the vocabulary.
They complement each other so well, it makes me wanna smile. 
Isn’t it the whole purpose to learn kanji?
seriously, the vocab here rocks.
When you don’t know Japanese, all the words are obscure 
#8 is pretty shocking though
I’ve seen the occasional complaint about vocab lessons piling up all at once, hindering level up progress and cluttering up reviews of the kanji, which is what they’re here for.
But I think everyone who really cares about that just installs the reorder script eventually.
You’re one level away from being halfway through all of WK. Hardly a lowly peasant, I’d think.
You don’t get knighted until 42.
I think some see WK as a kanji and vocab source. While it definitely teaches you loads of useful vocab, there are the stories of people using things like 里心 and being told by natives that they should just use ホームシック instead.
Two random anecdotes that spring to mind, though I can’t attribute them to the proper members for the life of me.
One person had to write out the kanji of the words they were using at times for their speaking partners to understand what they meant.
And I believe someone else was called a poet by a native because they used such obscure words for things. (So not all bad!)
That might contribute to the criticism? shrugs
I’m here to learn kanji - I’ll take the mass of useful vocab as a great extra. ^-^
Also:
missing number 8 rage
After all, you will be given some leeway about your language by natives, and I’d rather err on the obscure word side than on the stutter and not know how to say it side 
how many words does wk have, 6k?
i’d say 4k are high-frequency, 1.5k a bit rare, but still good to know, 450 a bit outdated (as in, people use a katakana equivalent) and only 50ish sound odd to j native, but some people might still use them, even if only in writing.
even if you disregard the fact wk teaches them mainly to help learning kanji readings, that’s an awful lot of good stuff to learn. guess it will cover half of the core 6000 (which is based on newspapers, slanting towards written language.
Since my goal in Japanese is to be able to read The Tale of Genji in its original written form, WaniKani vocabs are useless for me.
All of those complaints/bad rep rumors reflect on the lack of understanding of the fundamental difference between written language and spoken language.
Not just Japanese but in general.
When it comes to reading scriptures, classic literature, old documents and art there’s no such thing as redundant/obsolete.
Just about a week ago I’ve been in an exhibition that had Japanese art with writing from the late 19 hundreds and such. I’m pretty sure it was written the way old people say old people used to talk… (was I able to read it? Nope. Wish I could though)
Totally shocked by number 8 - who knew!
i believe by principle that language has no quality. there’s no good or bad words, every expression exists for a reason and has it’s place. the stuff we learn here has so few words that even fit the “obscure” description, it’s nothing compared to all the words that give you a good place to start your overall studies with.
It has happened to me more than a few times that I see some word I never saw before that screams “obscure”, only to see it again the next day in another book/game/whatever.