I don’t think in any other language (culture) people have such incredibly fixed ideas on how what and when a “foreigner category xyz” should be expected to do AB or C. There is an unique Japanese set of problems here and they touch a large field including exams for the sake of it, meaning of Life going to Toudai to have children looking at Toudaiseis in TV to be inspired to learn away their life to become a Toudaisei themselves to be able to become an expert in English without being able to say “Good Morning” but making up a test like JLPT for “foreigners” and…Atsugiri Jason… I said DON’T TRIGGER!
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Lol
My heart is with you
You are stronger than your triggers
Keep sending me data points 
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I met many Japanese people and for a while I tried to ask them questions. But the response was ALWAYS - this is strange, we don’t talk like that. Ever. Try it for yourself it is not only mariner929s wife. It is my husband, all of my colleagues I ever talked to and also even Japanese teachers think a “foreigner” cannot learn Japanese.
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Sounds like a challenge
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Do you remember the sentence? It would be educational to discuss it and get her feedback.
people conveniently forget that even in english, one area may have phrasings and sayings that elsewhere make absolutely no sense whatsoever to others. Just because one person’s wife didn’t understand something really doesn’t say much.
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Like the geordie dialect - utterly unlike English anywhere else
I never found them useless, maybe a bit hard to follow, but that’s okay. Those sentences can either be rewritten or replaced, or I can just skip them.
I typically don’t put too much stock into it as we need many more examples in all kinds of different contexts to really learn Japanese or any language for that matter.
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I guess that there is a fundamental different conception of “question” in Japan and “overseas” (haha).
What “we” think is a neutral question with the intention to hear the other persons true opinion, while (this is just my impression trying to make sense of it) a Japanese hearing a “question” automatically thinks there is a problem or conflict coming up and becoming defensive. And in order to avoid conflict they answer in a way they think you want to hear if this does make any sense.
Like if you ask your wife “What do you think about this sentence” she might receive a message like “Hey goddammit, look at this annoying sample sentence I start to hate learning Japanese and I expect you to tell me my sense of this being wrong is correct” or something like that. And of course for her the sample sentence is not really important and for her the question comes unexpected while she is eg cooking dinner but it is important for her to keep the harmony and so she starts feeling uncomfortable and tell you this is strange and to be honest any sample sentence is strange by nature because it is something made up and if you start thinking about it too much you realize that it is strange.
Sure, but they are not Japanese themselves, so I don’t see how that is really relevant.
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The reply got flagged but I can’t believe people still use r-ard/fuse it with other words to insult people. What’s this, 2012?
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The relevance is in how do you learn a language of a culture that sees questions as some kind of aggression. How do you get feedback? How can you ever be sure you are not making mistakes if people are too polite to not correct you or think you are a lost case anyway from the beginning even if you pay them as a teacher?
Ahh, sorry! Now I understood your point as I reread your comment. I was trying to think in the context of me asking the question and mariner getting defensive, when you were talking about the situation between mariner and his wife. I agree that’s possible, but now were just hypothesizing even more 
.
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Ha! The email I’ve been meaning to write…add a 4th sentence in the first position that is the most basic use of the word.
(and add more than 500 character spaces for “Notes” while at it.)
I’ll get right on that.
Same. I rarely read them anymore.
They’re full of kanji/words that haven’t even been taught yet so you end up with several lessons when you’re just wanting one.
I understand that’s going to happen, but they could at least do some furigana (and perhaps a link to the word in WK) over the unlearned kanji/words.
I’m sure there are people who are more diligent students than I am, or have more exposure to actual Japanese who can make good use of them, so I hesitate to say they’re a “disaster”, but I don’t get much use out of them.
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To speak for myself – I like the example sentences. I’m very new to Japanese and I’ve been following Tofugu and WaniKani up to the point I’m at now (just level 3).
The silliness makes me enjoy learning. Per the Tofugu suggestion, I haven’t done hardly any grammar yet, so when the example sentences come up I just practice reading them aloud with the best pronunciation I can muster. Like someone else said, this program isn’t supposed to get your grammar straight – it’s for vocab. When I want to build proficiency speaking these words naturally in sentences and recognizing them in the wild, I’ll move on to a different program or buy some manga or find a Japanese speaker to practice with me, and I feel I’ll be much faster and better prepared to swim through that. Nothing can replace actual spoken practice with another Japanese speaker anyway. In the meantime, my mouth is just getting used to making those shapes and saying those silly sentences.
Also, honestly, they make me smile, which is not something I ever got in high school language classes. I sympathize with those of you who are frustrated… but maybe consider… this part of the process that you’re frustrated about isn’t really WaniKani’s purpose, and they never claimed that it WAS their purpose. Now maybe it COULD be in the future if they choose to expand and make a comprehensive all-aspects-of-Japanese course. I’d sign up in a heartbeat if they did. But, anyway, for what it is, I am very content with it.
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Personally I use example sentences as to practice the reading of kanjis and laugh the sentences they made. Wanikani clearly meant for learning kanji and nothing else. If there are kanjis I don’t know I look up and read again. As for other uses for me I use to practice my reading. As ridiculous some sentence are, sometimes a meaning could stick or sometimes helps to distinguish to similar meaning of vocabulary. For grammar I use different sources.
Finally I learn Japanese for fun and Wanikani certainly make my days better with funny mmemonics and sentences.
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I don’t have any problem with the sentences – I think it is good that they are frequently ridiculous (‘I farted several thousand feet in the air’, etc) – makes you remember 'em! I view the sentences more as bonus entertainment actually, especially the BL/bromance storyline of Koichi and Viet, the marriage troubles of Salmon and Fugu, the sinister plans of Aya for her corpse collection, and of course the ongoing mystery of who ate Koichi’s bacon.
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Thanks for the feedback everyone! We’ll be closing this because we’ve received a few flags here and we want to make sure things stay civil.
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