Do any of y’all know what is the source of WaniKani kanji list? and what’s the criteria of how they are ordering it? Like they are not using any of the JLPT, Joyo, or Frequency lists.
The ordering is custom to WaniKani. The goal is to learn kanji in a way such that they build on each other. So the kanji you learn first will be useful in learning the vocabulary for kanji you’ll learn later. So to reinforce the kanji 出 in level 2, WK has you learn 出口 (exit)., but to understand that word you need 口 from level 1.
Ordering kanji like this is really tricky, and the exact order changes all the time. Like JLPT and the standard grade school order though, the priority is on the most commonly used kanji. So you will see most of the kanji at about the same time.
As for sources, pretty sure all of WK’s kanji are off the Joyo kanji list, so straight from the japanese government. If you’re talking about the translations, I’m not sure where they came from originally. Probably adapted from something like JDict, which is what Jisho uses. But it’s pretty heavily edited by the WK team, and they often correct inaccuracies based on things the community finds.
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It’s their own order based generally on complexity of the characters and which radicals they’ve already introduced. But they do take frequency into account from what I’ve seen in changelogs when they move kanji from one level to another.
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No I meant the Kanji itself and there’s some Kanjis in Joyo isn’t in WaniKani
Ay yes, this gets asked a lot. The most important thing that most people don’t really realize when they start learning is that the majority of kanji see very little use. The joyo list has about 2000 kanji on it but even with only the first 1000 kanji, you’d be able to read about 80% of all the kanji you’ll encounter.
Even by the back half of WK you’ll run into kanji that are so rare, it’s unlikely you’ll ever run into it in the wild. This is actually a common complaint from people who make it that far. So WK doesnt have a complete list simply because those kanji arent useful to you, I know that’s hard to swallow at the start but it comes to make more sense over time.
If it helps there’s this cool little principle called Zipf’s law. It says that, for any writing system, if you order words or letters by usage, the frequency of use drops off exponentially. Here’s a demonstration of how this applies to kanji. As you can see, about half of the kanji you’ll see will be from a list of only 250 kanji.
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Most are but not all. And some jouyou are missing (around a hundred).
I don’t think there’s a specific list they’re using, otherwise the kanji in the late levels wouldn’t be so weird sometimes.
That’s a bit excessive, the kanji are not that niche, but it is true that some of them are not super common.
But the main issue that when you have covered all the basic stuff you start getting into the more specialized kanji/vocab that may or may not be immediately useful depending on what you read.
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