… can happen and on the Nintendo website of all places:
Just wanted to point that out, because there are always users who would argue, that WK Kanji are useless. They’re not.
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They are compensating for the pokemon games not having kanji
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If they actually wanted to compensate, they would have to make the whole site Classical Japanese
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They have starting with Gen5 and the Kanji aren’t even that easy. 
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Depends – there’s still a にほんご and a 日本語
I know, but who in their right mind would play in Kana. That’s not easy mode for learners, but HARD MODE.
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When in Rome…
They didn’t even use 書道. Are they even real 日本人？
I am a very serious Japanese learner.
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It’s been three years since I’ve seen it and I can still read it, so point for WK. 
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You haven’t seen 沢山 in 3 years?
People say 沢 and 山 are useless?
What is this thread
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Yeah, I haven’t seen 沢山 specifically but I’ve see the kanji themselves often. Also, I don’t remember seeing it but it’s been a while.
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なるほど
I suppose I can’t speak much for other contexts, but as far as LNs and VNs are concerned its relatively common, so if anyone around forums has been saying its useless I would like a word with them. Almost 60% of VNs on jpdb.io have 沢山, to put it in perspective…
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Next people will start telling me they have never seen 流石…
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I actually haven’t. Looks like I need to stop playing Pokemon games with kana.
I think in light novels there is furigana for “tricky” spellings, right?
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I’ve seen this one regularly, but I think I got to see a lot of “uncommon” kanji forms thanks to 五等分の花嫁. 春場ねぎ loves his kanji, and is not shy about using it, at all (often choosing to use the rarer form of a word if it has two potential kanji spellings…). The series also has furigana, so it’s not like it was a big deal, but there was definitely a number of “useless” WK vocabulary that I actually recognized in that series, so the threads about those words always made me chuckle a bit. 
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For tricky spellings for natives, yeah. I remember some people on here a while back got tripped up on the reading of 息を吐く in some cases and that doesn’t usually have furi. Visual novels are usually a lot more hesitant. In a LN sasuga will usually have furi despite being relatively common in kanji.
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Slightly off-topic but do you know any good ways to fix that? I feel like all the time I start reading a Japanese word in a way I was so sure was right up until the day I need to enter it into an IME and I’m like “shoot I was wrong all along”
Although with 息を吐く the IME is fine with いきをはく so I’d probably just never know
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In general it’s probably hard to declare most words on WK useless, you’d think
Beyond super common words, what words people come across probably vary a lot based on what they’re into and who they are. And you never know when you’re going to need words from a particular subdomain
Like recently, I needed to know a lot of words around nuclear reactors for a book I was reading. I had learned a little bit of that kinda vocab from a game I played earlier and definitely didn’t think of it as incredibly “useful” at the time
Or maybe one of your classmates/etc. will be super into In Praise of Shadows and you’ll be roped into reading the original Japanese text with all of its 瓦斯 and stuff
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I believe いきをつく (which I’m guessing is the reading that people had trouble with, but I could be wrong) and いきをはく, while sharing the same kanji, have different meanings.
I could be wrong about what the confusion is, but either way, I’m fairly sure the いきをつく reading has the meaning of “to take a breath; to take a short rest,” whereas the いきをはくreading is more literally “to breathe out; to exhale”
(Edit: and if you click the “omitted” section on ichi.moe, it actually shows the other reading/meaning combo. )
I agree with this 100%! You never know when something might come in useful for something. One can quibble about commonness all day long, but the fact remains that what’s useful to some might not be as useful for others and vice versa. 
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