The useless example sentences are a disaster

They’ve added more context sentences that are simpler and more straightforward, and I imagine adding even more is on the (long) to-do list. If the complaint is that the “silly sentences” shouldn’t exist even if more simple sentences are added, that’s a weird position I don’t agree with. Basically, there’s no reason to think that WK is somehow against adding more of the simple sentences. They just haven’t yet.

If there was any acknowledgement that there are lots of topics praising the sentences as well, this kind of disclaimer probably wouldn’t be necessary.

Pretending they don’t exist does come across as just being nasty.

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I have to agree, I have quite a few issues with the example sentences. (All of my examples are things I have encountered up to my level, but I don’t record them, so it’s not likely that I will be able to pull up the Kanji or vocab I’m thinking of. You’ll have to take my word for it. Sorry)

  1. The kanji use within example sentences is terribly inconsistent. Take for instance when learning a vocab in level 5, it uses the kanji you’re learning. When learning a vocab in level 15, the sentences uses a vocab you learned in level 5, but in hiragana instead of the kanji you’ve learned.

  2. The kanji use within example sentences in only partially used. For example a word you haven’t learned yet, but uses some kanji you’ve learned is written in hiragana AND kanji. This confuses Rikai (and sometimes even jisho) to the point that you don’t know what the word is.

  3. 1 & 2 make it difficult to parse some sentences because you don’t know what’s a word, what’s a particle. Some words are highlighted by rikai but are incorrect, for example a word beginning with “ha” but it’s not actually a word beginning with “ha” it’s the “ha” particle followed by a different word. All kanji should be used and accompanied by furigana. I’ve had words I’ve come across that can’t be found in jisho no matter how many parts I delete, and the translation doesn’t bring up anything in jisho, so I just have to abandon that unknown word to the void.

  4. The context itself is sometimes bad. I’ve come across a couple of vocab where the vocab teaches “A meaning”. That’s the only meaning listed, and there’s no synonyms. Rikai tells me that the vocab also has “B meaning” and “C meaning”. Despite saying that Word = A meaning, all 3 context sentences then proceed to use “B meaning”.

  5. The translations are… well. Sometimes they’re just awful. Too much license has been taken, to the point where a more literal translation of the sentence is at least 50% different to what has been provided by WK.

  6. Some sentences are far more advanced than the level of the word being taught.

  7. I get it “WaniKani doesn’t teach grammar”. But that’s the problem. If it doesn’t teach grammar, then no, it shouldn’t use anything beyond beginner grammar.

  8. I get it “WaniKani is a kanji learning tool”. But it also teaches vocab. If they insist on also teaching vocab, and teaching vocab for context, then the context sentences should be useful and appropriate and something anyone should be able to read as long as they’re the appropriate level.

  9. You don’t/can’t learn a language, especially one that uses a different writing system than what you’re used to, in a vacuum. No one is here paying real money to learn kanji and vocab that they can’t actually use.

A: “I know 1000 kanji”
B: “Oh okay, can use read this for me?”
A: “No sorry, I don’t know any grammar, I can’t read/write/speak sentences, I just know what these specific kanji mean”
B: "… then literally what’s the point?

I get it. WK only teaches a part of Japanese. But they could teach it better, and could offer more.

On a different note, they need more characters. I’m sick of hearing about Viet’s Yakuza past, Fugu and Salmon’s marriage difficulties, and Koichi’s penchant for being simultaneously the world’s worst boss and biggest perv.

Despite my gripes, I appreciate and like WK for what it is, I’m just trying to provide concrit because it could be better.

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This makes it sound as though the existence of the example sentences actually makes the rest of the aspects of the learning tool worse. They might be useless to some people but I cannot see anybody reasonably believing that their existence hinders the learning process.

I ignored them throughout most of the time I was using WaniKani since I couldn’t understand them. I mostly just read the English translations to verify that my understanding of the word was correct. Even just reading the English translations is helpful to some degree to see how the word should be used.

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One could argue that the sentences make the product worse if people waste their time trying to use them to learn since they are there, but just end up frustrated or discouraged as a result (in addition to the time wasted).

I mean, I wouldn’t make that argument, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable argument to make. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, but I don’t personally think they make the product worse for existing.

Also, for what it’s worth, I used them the same way you did: to make sure I understood the English translation of the word correctly.

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agreed. they should make the example sentence as short as possible, while giving you a sense of what the word means. also they should try to only use vocabulary that we have already learned on wanikani if possible. by the time you reach level 60 there should be none or hardly any words in the example sentences that you don’t know. I have been importing my wanikani vocab into Anki after burning them. I would like to switch the vocab to wanikani example sentences to review. but they are way to long and contain a lot of words that they don’t even teach. I believe that the sentences are a extreme lacking point that makes things more complicated and stressful then they need to be.I don’t understand how anyone could think these sentences are useful. once you know the vocab words in isolation, make it so wanikani users, can then easily transition to sentence cards. you do this by only putting learned words that wanikni teaches in the sentences. I have invested a lot of time and money in Wankani and I find the lack of thought in the example sentences very frustrating and negatively interferes with my language progression.

Also when I am reviewing the wanikani vocab in Anki, if I get the transivity of the verb wrong I mark it as failed. if I was doing sentence cards I would see what particles are actually used with the verbs. and I would have a strnger understanding of how the vocab is used. you can know if a verb is intransitive but that dosn’t mean your gonna know what particle that verb is most commonly used with.

What would b really good is if wanikani had an option that lets you flip your vocab reviews to sentences reviews. if wanikani has already taught you all the words in that sentence. some reviews would be vocab, but as you get higher up in Wanikani levels, you would slowly transition to more vocab cards and when you reach level 60, you would only have sentence cards to review, if you have that setting turned on.

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I like the sentences. They’re fun when I decide to read them sometimes, and I can parse through most of them if I try. Hell, I even learn new things by accident sometimes.

Honestly it’d be a bit of a bummer to have them dumbed down or taken out entirely. I certainly wouldn’t read them nearly as much they weren’t as whimsical and fun

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Once you have over 6000 wanikani sentance cards in your Aki collection, your gonna want to make sure you know each word in the sentences. other wise instead of doing a 5 - 10 minute reviews a day your going to be doing hours of reviews, because your going to keep failing your reviews, which will increase the amount of views you have each day. this will eventually lead to not learning any new words because your trying to make sure you don’t forget your reviews. because of this lack of oversight, your only option is to use wanikani vocab cards to review. sentance cards give context and greater understanding of words. this will lead to much faster learning. for people who have put hundreds of hours into wanikani this is very frustrating.

I like them. Same reason as Mecha_Ivan and seanblue.

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These 3 reasons essentially made me stop reading example sentences. Probably combined with the below:

Jisho provides example sentences for certain words and I find these useful, because the word is used in a fairly real context.

A general overhaul approach for the example sentences might be the following:

  1. Use kanji wherever possible and provide furigana so that people of all levels are able to read them, and with time they will notice how their kanji reading abilities improve.
  2. A bit of a stretch, but: Provide more realistic contexts for taught words so they’re more readily applicable in real-life scenario.

I think the problem with example sentences also highlights a general approach drawback to making things peculiar and funny - the nuanced meaning of kanji and words gets lost :frowning: .

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Biggest problem I see is that they are too complex and frequently use vocabulary and even kanji that you haven’t been taught at that level. Additionally, sometimes the meaning you’re being taught and the meaning in the example sentences differ. See 崩す, for example. I frequently refer to the example sentences to see how to use vocab I’m learning, but more often than not it turns into a frustrating session of trying to jisho.org my way into understanding the sentence.

Of course, that’s what learning Japanese is like, but I think the sentences could be easier for pedagogical purposes. The words I have to look up just to understand the example sentences are not going to stick in my memory

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I think your message was more descriptive in providing elements to improve for the sentences.

Providing the sentences which are considered bad is likely the only way changes are ver getting to be made however. I wouldn’t expect all of the sample sentences to be looked through unless specific feedback is provided about which sentences are bad.

If this does happen, it’ll be a stalemate as some people will say they like the sentences while others will say they don’t so I don’t see changes happening either way.

Still, I’m surprised people aren’t at each other throats yet. There is hope.

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agree. Thus I almost ignore them. The main reason- they are complicated, use tons of unknown vocabs, and the worst part- unknown kanjis are written in hiragana which makes it even worse trying to decipher the whole sentence while using tools like rikaikun or yomichan.

It’s not really an issue for me- wanikani is a kanji learning tool in the first place and it’s doing its job well. But I need another srs tool just for vocabulary. In conjunction, they supplement each other very well. In wanikani context sentences are just good in showing you the usage of the words. But if you really want to learn vocabulary, you should supplement your wanikani studies.

There are plenty of tools like kamesame/kitsun/torii.srs- their context sentences are much better and usually they use the words from 1 level- like if you are learning n4 words most likely all context sentences will have words from an n5-n4 list

I view there are being two categories of sentences with two difference functions:

  1. Sentences that aid in the immediate recognition and understanding of the vocabulary using whatever limited knowledge one is expected to have at that level.
  2. Sentences that further anchor the vocabulary in a broader context when going back in later review.

I wouldn’t say that the example sentences are bad. I would say that there are too many of the second type and not enough of the first type. Once I finish Wanikani (and get a bit further ahead with grammar), I plan on going back and going through all the example sentences that didn’t make sense the first time.

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100% agree.
It does seem that the majority of feelings about the sentences are somewhere between dislike and neutral. The only people who actually like them are people with several years Japanese under their belts and just looking to revise their Kanji. But on the whole, it seems the vast majority of feeling about the sample sentences is on the negative end of the scale.

And that makes me so sad. I can clearly see how much time and effort someone has put into them. And I feel guilty when I too ignore them, or only read the english for some clue about context.

I can see them being useful if I got to Level 60 and restarted, but for every other situation I can understanding why they elicit negative reactions, and can accept they might be an overall negative reflection on WaniKani itself. I just try not to think about it too much.

The suggestion that fixing the sentences would make WK amazing, I find quite bizarre though. There are many, many other things that need to be done first. Better mnenomics for starters.

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I agree! Away with the sentences!
If I need more context I go to jisho or weblio for an example

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My main issue with context sentences is that they use kanji we haven’t learned yet. I could tolerate jokes in the sentences but what’s the point if most of the time we also see kanji we haven’t learned?

Many of us don’t have the extra time to look up the words since reading alone already takes time.

That’s my only complain really. If they had at least limited the sentences to kanji learned up to that point it would have been so good. I skip all of them but I’m still doing immersion through YouTube videos, Japanese tv shows, podcasts, etc so it’s fine!

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If that happens in any of the 1st or 2nd sentences on a word in the first 20 levels, then it’s a mistake and they’ll fix it if you email them about it.

If it’s in the 3rd sentence then that’s supposed to be a high level sentence, and if it’s after level 20, well… still waiting on them adding more of the “simple” sentences. They’ll probably still fix it for the ones after level 20.

People do email them about this stuff right? Not just complain about it?

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Well, it would help if the WaniKani staff actually monitored the Feedback category… I think many people assume this feedback is read and they don’t need to email them.

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Well, it’s also not the only place that people complain about stuff, but sure.

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Agree! When I learn a new word or expression, I expect to see them in a useful context, not in jokes with Fugu, Koichi, Viet and whatever. I wish the sentences could be more useful, something that I could see in real life contexts, such as news, books, videos.

Sometimes the sentences are too long, with kanji that I haven’t seen yet. And I’ve seen sentences in which I can see words I’ve learned, but the kanji is written in hiragana.

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