i do tend to go for reading first, meaning second. but then i tend to go back and forth between the various panels quite a bit while doing lessons.
personally i much prefer having the lessons spread over several panels. i’ve tried doing lessons on tsurukame, where they have everything on a single page, and they don’t stick. i think that having to switch between panels tells my brain that it has to concentrate on all of these things…
The person below you has explained more than enough of my points.
I would like to ask why this feature was introduced in the first place.
Its an extra press of the return key for each lesson to skip over content i cant use.
I cant understand the sentences anyway. so they are useless.
Quite often they feel memey, which has no place in serious learning.
It doesnt make sense to have an entire long sentence with grammar and everything when all im trying is learning a single word.
“Grass is green” is the limit of complicated an example sentence should be.
The word thats relevant completely disappears between the rest of the Kanji.
Even if the grammar in the sentences is above your current ability to read, it’s still useful to see how these words might be applied in real situations where someone might use them. You can read the translation to get an idea of the usage of the word even if you can’t read the Japanese. WK teaches words in isolation, but that’s not how language is actually used, and if you’re only learning words in isolation, without any context or ability to string them together, you’re probably going to forget them. Why are you using WK if you don’t ultimately have a goal of learning to read Japanese?
As far as the sentences feeling “memey,” I actually really appreciate the humor, because it often makes things easier to remember. Plus, people use Japanese to say silly or ridiculous things all the time! If you want your language learning to be completely serious, you’d probably have better luck taking a business focused course. But we’re all here for different reasons, and for some of us, the silly stuff has more utility in our everyday lives than the serious stuff!
Just as an example, I’ve gotten more use from learning the word 金玉 than I have from many other “serious” words that I’ve learned here, because knowing that word has allowed me to understand no less than two different puns that otherwise would’ve been completely lost on me! My main motivation for learning Japanese is so that I can follow Japanese wrestling. Wrestling is often extremely ridiculous, “memey,” crass, and really silly. Words frequently get applied in unconventional circumstances. Even if you’re using WaniKani for “serious” learning, the same isn’t true of everyone using the program.
Thank you to everyone who took time to write out your feedback and thoughts! I can’t make any promises about when/what will change, but we are working to revamp the lessons and make them more effective for everyone. They will continue to change and improve, including how example sentences are utilized. So just hang tight! One piece of feedback I got here (that I deeply agree with) is the ability for users to turn on/off certain features. I’m all about learner autonomy! Hopefully that is something we will be able to introduce in the future.
I gave up trying to read the example sentences early on in my WK journey because I usually couldn’t understand any of them due to using kanji/vocabulary I hadn’t encountered yet. Even now that I probably could read some of them, I’ve gotten into the habit of completely ignoring them.
One thing that would be nice is if every example sentence is tagged with the WaniKani level by which you learn all the vocab and kanji needed to read the sentence (maybe excepting certain very common kana only words). Then, you could mark sentences we can read in the ui with a tag like “you should be able to read this!” or something. (And maybe you could try adding some more sentences to the platform that have a lower associated level.)
Marking sentences that the user should be able to read would motivate me to actually read those sentences.
I think the example sentences would start being useful to me if they had furigana for kanji/vocab I haven’t learned yet, as well as translations of said vocab as a tooltip on hover over. Unless that’s added I don’t see myself trying to use the example sentences until I have enough kanji-/vocab-/grammar-knowledge to understand them. Also, in response to @Vulkandrache, I personally think there is a place for memes in serious learning. If I could actually read the sentence and understand the Japanese then it would be helpful for the setnences to be memorable rather than bland, which I’m guessing is the intention.
Not going to pitch other apps here but I would like to point out there are many sentence trainers available for Japanese, and in lieu of a speaking partner or good reading habits, they really help.
I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to, but to clarify: I’m talking about what changes would help me make use of the wanikani example sentences to reinforce kanji* meanings and readings when doing lessons. Presumably your unnamed sentence training apps do not synch with wanikani in such a ways as to make them useful for that purpose?
*edit
I don’t believe targeting your vocabulary to the WK example sentences would be beneficial in the middle-term. I meant my response as a more general suggestion to aid you in your implied problem; that is, difficulty in reading longer sentences or basic vocabulary. WaniKani is not designed to help you with the introduction to Japanese part of your learning experience. It makes no effort to teach you parts of speech, conjugation, or even a core vocabulary with any real intent. That’s actually part of what makes WaniKani beautiful. Somewhat experienced Japanese learners can come here to really focus on Kanji, without distraction of other lingual aspects.
I would strongly recommend that if you haven’t already, go ahead and study the core 2000 most common Japanese vocabulary. It also helps if you can pass an N5 grammar examination, which would include most every basic particle such as “ni”, “ha”, “ga”, “he”, “de” and some basic connective words such as “kedo”, “kara”, “mo”, “shi” and so on. Imagine trying to read a sentence in English without knowing [a, the, an, to, on, so, but, and, etc…] In this way you could imagine WaniKani would be something like an English website dedicated to “Spelling”
This is clear to me. I currently study Tae Kim and Cure Dolly, while participating in the beginners book club. Come summer I will start studying vocabulary in earnest. As wanikani is only (brilliantly imo) designed to teach kanji readings and meanings, I’ve surmised that the example sentences are supposed to help with that aim and I’ve suggested improvements that I believe would make them more effective in that regard.
Anyway, thank you for your well meaning advice 
Love having the collocations for words~ Any way we can get a thread here of which words now have them, like the update list in content additions? I would love to go back to read the ones in previous levels but going through all the vocabulary words is a bit time consuming
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.