This short thread might clear up some confusion:
1 Like
Those are all examples of great sample sentences. They are fairly short, do not include complicated grammar, and most importantly they make sense. Those sentences are good examples of context for a word.
I’m only at lvl 4, so I don’t have many example sentences for more complicated words yet, but here is some of the nonsense I encountered. Guess which words they are for:
かれの二つめのあくぎょうは、カエルのあんさつだった。
His second evil deed was the frog’s assassination.
あさ八じに、はだかではげ山にしゅうごうしましょう。
At 8am, let’s meet naked on bald mountain.
きみは玉ねぎをいくつわきにはさめるかい？
How many onions can you hold under your armpits?
Sentences like this distract from the word that you are learning because of the nonsense. But more importantly, they fail at providing a common context for the word.
4 Likes
I agree. I think random sentences are good for truly testing your vocabulary and comprehension but some of them are just too long and complicated. I assume this will change later on but I am personally not a fan of the mix of kanji and hiragana in the example sentences too; I have found reading sentences with only kanji (but furigana also) to be more helpful. Now I rarely look at the example sentences because it is just frustrating and discouraging to me.
6 Likes
As I level up, I keep encountering more and more of those simple sentences like “The sun is shining bright” and I think THESE sentences are truly a disaster. I want my example sentences to be weird and complicated. I used to read them all and I always tried to translate them without looking at clues, and yes, I kept failing, but the more I tried, the easier it became to read even the most convoluted and twisted ones. After year of reading example sentences, reading NHK News Easy became a joke. I don’t want “Tokyo is the capital of Japan” kind of example sentences, I want “Today I farted so hard that metropolis government started evacuating people but then I realized it was just a dream about the earthquake disaster I was having while sleeping at work” kind of sentences which also provides a great context for 震災 (no, there’s no such example sentences, I’ve made it out). It’s like learning to walk on thin ice. if you manage that, you’ll be confidently walking on every surface.
5 Likes
Did you seriously just say that you need a sentence to put “onion” in the correct context?
5 Likes
Me too, but I really think that’s down to the WaniKani style. On the other system I mentioned they don’t use silly stories, they focus on a very strong singular visual image (this is the focus of their research, not language).
Sometimes the image is so bizarre that you end up seeing your own backstory happen. And it only happens occasionally, but this way it is always relevant to you.
With WankKani you always have to go along with every one of their backstories, and that becomes too fuzzy for many people, including me most of the time.
Personally I feel like the difference is between placing your memories on rock (Linkword) or sand (WaniKani).
If anyone thinks I’m shilling for Linkword let me say it is faaaar from perfect, it has loads of room for improvement too, it’s just that their mnemonics are the best I’ve had. And of course, they don’t have the problem of needing to teach Kanji and their multiple readings, they just focus on vocabulary and grammar, so it would not be fair to compare (and linkword does have a little japanese course, but it is almost entirely useless to anyone other than a complete beginner)
I think this cuts to the heart of the issue.
The sentences appear at the wrong stage of learning. The first stage of learning is introduction to the material, the last stage is testing.
Good for testing is not the same as good for introduction, and these sentences appear at the wrong stage of learning for most of the WK users. They are undeniable good for a minority who already have lots of Japanese under their belts, so I agree they shouldn’t be deleted, just add some more appropriate ones for beginners.
4 Likes
(I thought we could send PM here but turns out we can’t. You can contact me in my blog to discuss this further although I don’t see why not. If you want to talk in private you can shoot me your discord.)
Okay, complaints like this are where you’re losing me.
- The grammar in this sentence is incredibly simple. The sentence is somewhat lengthy, but I don’t think that’s a problem in itself, as lengthy sentences happen in the real world. So I’d say that having longer sentences like this sometimes are very useful for learning.
- So if this sentence replaced コウイチ with メアリー it would be different somehow?
- What do you mean by “real life application”? This sentence contains grammatical structures and words that are very useful for real life.
(I think some of your other complaints are also nitpicky while other complaints are legitimate. I just don’t have time to respond to every single example you put up.)
6 Likes
8 Likes
2 Likes
The thread has now run its natural course:
- Initial message.
- Message of support.
- Light pushback from opposition.
- Light counter from OP supporters.
- Stronger pushback.
(6. Normally, ad hominem begin here, with insults starting politely then getting more and more abrasive). - Lock or go to 8.
- Memes shitposting until thread is derailed and/or abandoned.
It’s the cycle of feedback life.
13 Likes
Personally, I don’t really mind outrageous sample sentences. Like someone mentioned above, I feel like they’re more of an afterthought or a supplement. I can guarantee, though, that if you were to seek out native Japanese materials like manga and novels, you’ll come across plenty of decent sample sentences that you could learn from. Plus, they come with a context, which is something WK example sentences occasionally lack 
1 Like
Wh… what’s 8? I’m afraid now.
5 Likes
Parentheses 6 is 6, 6 is 7, and 7 is 8?
2 Likes
Yeah, this happens because the quality of WK example sentences is very divergent. So for every poster who posts weird sentences, there’s another poster who posts good sentences.
The way I see it is that the quality of the sentences has improved over time. But there are also 6414 vocab items, so writing 6414*3 = 19,242 good Japanese sentences that observe all the nuances of a certain vocab in a very context-dependent Japanese language while satisfying WK members’ taste ranging from the weird to the boring is just going to take some time.
14 Likes
Respectfully, unless you have the power to change anything about WaniKani, I don’t really care if you agree or not.
I disagree. Just because it doesn’t use N1 grammar doesn’t mean it’s simple.
コウイチのオフィスのつくえの引き出しには、高校の時に書いた自作の詩の下書きが大切にしまってあるって知ってる？
->コウイチのつくえには、詩の下書きがあるって知ってる？
Context is achieved without superfluous junk bogging it down. Some sentences benefit from extra information. This is not one of them.
And there are plenty of long sentences.
No. Because Mary is overused to the point that I’d off her if I could. Overusing the same characters is just lazy and irritating, which typically leads to you ignoring the sentence altogether.
I can think of no scenario in which I would ever need to ask or answer a question like this. Therefore, it has no real world application. It’s not something I can turn around and use without heavily editing it, so it serves no purpose other than to bog you down.
5 Likes
Let’s play a game of f**k/marry/kill:
- メアリー
- コウイチ
- Nic Cage
5 Likes
I love when people say “respectfully” before saying something disrespectful. Good thing it doesn’t matter if you want my opinion or not. This is a public forum and I have a voice, same as you. If the WaniKani staff does in fact read this topic, I want them to see various views rather than hearing an echo chamber of your opinion.
The names are all arbitrary, so this seems like a silly thing to get hung up on to me, but 
In exactly this form? Maybe not. But if you remove the って知ってる at the end, this sentence is absolutely something you could see when reading a book, during narration. Example sentences like this should help you get used to seeing structures that are common in novels, so for anyone that plans to read novels in Japanese it’s valuable. If you don’t read novels and don’t plan to read novels, then maybe they’re less valuable to you personally. But WaniKani is used by people with a variety of existing experience and a variety of goals, so obviously not every sentence will be relevant to every user.
14 Likes
Weirdly enough, all of the phonetic mnemonics you’ve shared so far work just fine for me. So evidently the solution is just for everyone to read them in a Scottish accent and then you’re sorted 
(obviously I’m not actually being serious but it is a good example of just how much accent matters for these phonetic mnemonics. I’ve definitely come across a few that dont work for me - they probably work better for others. It’s just generally something that’s not going to ever 100% work for everyone I think.)
6 Likes
UltraViolet is being a dick about it but I agree that long sentences like that are not good for WaniKani. The point of the example sentences is to put the vocabulary word in context, if the sentence is too long the focus no longer becomes the word in question but trying to break down and parse the long, complex sentence. Yes, that is an important skill but it’s not the point of WaniKani and it detracts from the thing that WaniKani is for. Understanding long, complex sentences is something that should happen during grammar study and in immersion material.
8 Likes