Yes, it seems to be hitting those of us in the 7 - 15 range the hardest, and I don’t think it’s because we have the “most” to relearn, but rather our mindset is about “winning” WaniKani still. It seems like the sempais around here got over that a long time ago.
The word that got me at level 10 was: 投手. I had never seen the on’yomi for 投, and had no mnemonic, so I got it wrong like three times in a row.
On the positive side, I am a baseball fan, and love me some Japanese pitchers, so it’s awesome to get to learn a word that I’m likely to run across in the wild.
Oh, there’s a handful of baseball words that you’ll see on WaniKani eventually.
How about tennis words? I’ve been going to tennis365.net to test just how much Kanji I can recognize. Would be great to have some of the basics down before, say, Wimbledon in July?
If you take a look at, for example, 唇 - Jisho.org (WK teaches kun’yomi) or 輔 - Jisho.org (WK teaches nanori!) it becomes more evident why WK opted to teach a reading with very substantially greater likelyhood of being encountered in practical text, compared the obscurity of where the on’yomi actually shows up.
Yeah, there is some trouble with that too, but you at least get to see what the reading of a word is when you are learning it, so it’s not as bad as kanji you were in the middle of learning, where it’s asking you for a reading you’ve never even seen before. And really it’s not much different than before when they’d teach a word with a different reading than the one taught with the kanji, only you gotta make up your own mnemonic. I make up my own half the time anyway though, so maybe that’s why it’s not bothering me as much.
For 投手 I remember the とう because it sounds a bit like “toss”, and you’re tossing a ball with your hand.
I understand your frustration. For my part, as soon as the change happened, I went and looked at every kanji I learned to see if they changed it and the only 3 I found that I’ve never seen their on’yomi were 石(せき), 考(こう) and 池(ち). I hope it’ll help you.
Thanks so much for this list! I got trapped by a wrong answer on 石 the other day so I wanted to see what else I needed to brush up on.
I would love if they would make a Kanji relearning tool and put the new Kunyomi ones back to apprentice for me so I could re-learn them instead of coming across them in review as a surprise.
Apologies in advance for the following “inside baseball” discussion:
Indeed 球威 is mysterious especially when translated into English as “pitcher’s stuff”. I’m a (very) casual baseball fan and hadn’t heard that term. Wikipedia says:
A pitcher’s “stuff” is an overall evaluation of how effective his pitches are; it is “good stuff” when the pitches are difficult to hit, and usually just “stuff” or sometimes even “lousy stuff” when the pitches are poor.
So.
But I was thinking about all the baseball-related terms here on WK including two for “sacrifice fly” (犠飛 and 犠打). I looked up the word on Wikipedia and found it listed there as 犠牲フライ, although 犠飛 was listed as an alternate term. 犠打 is better translated as “sacrifice bunt” apparently. I’ll send that in as a suggested revision.
I discussed all this baseball vocabulary with my (admittedly-non-baseball-fan but very Japanese wife) who mentioned that before World War Two, baseball in Japan used a lot of words that came from English (e.g. ダブルプレイ). During the war, with anti-American sentiment running high, Japanese baseball switched to using native Japanese words (e.g. 併殺). But postwar, it’s mainly loanwords that are used. I am in no position to judge how true that is because I don’t follow Japanese baseball or listen to the commentary, but it’s quite possible that some of the terms we’re learning here aren’t particularly useful even if you did follow Japanese baseball. Not that it hurts to learn them. I mean it probably hurts a bit if you don’t care at all about baseball…
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