The Fugu That Broke The Camel's Back (Why I'm quitting WaniKani)

I like how this thread has derailed into an educational one, seeing those unusual kanji particles and words is pretty fun.

Let’s do this every time someone quits!

10 Likes

k t h x b a i

The neighborhood I live in is 旭ヶ丘 (あさひがおか) and for the longest time that ヶ really messed with me :joy: But a bunch of Hokkaido place names use it, so it was sink or swim in regards to recognizing that it wasn’t ケ…

5 Likes

Well, a bunch of place names, period. At the top of my head, you have 関ヶ原、霞ヶ丘、市ヶ谷…

I don’t know why 関ヶ原 was the first thing that came to mind

5 Likes

Fair enough, I haven’t had much regular exposure to assorted place names other than in Hokkaido

関ヶ原 is actually the only one I recognized

2 Likes

The other two are places in the Shinjuku district in Tokyo.

That just made me think of the character 戦場ヶ原 from 物語シリーズ.

3 Likes

It’s also a place in 日光! We can now merge this thread with the one about 日光.

(Well, err, probably not)

3 Likes

I’ve also seen it used in the name of restaurants, though none come to mind at the moment.

As for places, there’s 七ヶ岳(ななつがたけ)and 鶴ヶ城(つるがじょう), a mountain range and castle near me. That was a fun one to learn.

As well as the fact as months of time, for example, 5ヶ月間(ごかげつかん),is written the same but pronounced yet another way.

1 Like

My neighbor’s kid was graduating elementary school and I went to the informal party held after the graduation ceremony. They had a quiz (Japanese people sure love quizzes) where they showed obscure kanji of fish names and people had to know the readings. A chance to use infrequently seen things like 河豚!

In actuality fugu did not come up in the quiz. It was much harder words that only the older fisherman types knew but everyone was impressed with their knowledge. :innocent:

11 Likes

this is the content I look for :100:

1 Like

I totally agree. I was just trying to dissuade the person from quitting WaniKani altogether. :sweat_smile:

2 Likes

Ah, good point, that makes sense then.

This post by @Naphthalene is relevant here

4 Likes

This is a bit off topic, but what is a 天冥? I don’t understand the title at all and can’t find anything to it except of the book.

Usually when people make complaints about being taught too many “useless kanji”, the user usually has lived in Japan for years and in most of the posts the OP also has a Japanese wife telling them to forget the kanji taught on WaniKani. So I think WaniKani isn’t the best method for people who have been in Japan for a long time.

1 Like

I’m going to be honest…
I’m not sure if this is meant to be satire

4 Likes

Lol, that’s funny, just today I was reading an article using the phrase 職業不詳の女, and 不詳 appeared in my WK review like two days ago. I was telling that to a native speaker, how nice it felt, but their first reaction was “oh but you don’t have to remember 不詳, we don’t use it in conversation!”… :laughing:

Like, I understood what they meant, it’s a bit 書き言葉 and used only in specific context, so it’s a nice advice overall, but yeah it fitted the stereotype perfectly…

13 Likes

A stylistic choice. :wink:

冥 is darkness and is an alternate Kanii for 暗い, so 天冥 is kind of a made up word meaning something like “dark heaven”. Could be underworld. Haven’t watched the show.

For 標, it’s related to this:

1 Like

It don’t see how it could be satire. My point is that we’ve seen variations of this post before. From these posts, I have gathered that if you need to learn utilitarian kanji that you can use in your everyday life, then going through 60 levels of WaniKani may not be the most useful method. I don’t have any other suggestions, but I’m sure there are other ways to learn kanji.

1 Like