That’s a fair point, but I think if they have three sentences per word, having a short, medium, and long sentence makes some sense. As you said, it shouldn’t take away from the word itself, but I don’t think all long sentences cause that to happen. The main issue now is that after level 20, each word usually only has one sentence, and it’s often of the longer, more complex variety.
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And that is probably the only answer anyone can ever expect for this topic.
Of the many WK users, some will be able to take something from the sentences at one point or another, others will not, at all.
I personally would suggest OP to contact WK staff directly and engage them in a conversation. I’m certain they’ve got an open ear to this sort of thing and will explain their chain of thoughts why things are as they are.
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Yeah if it’s one long, weird sentence and two simpler better sentences, I don’t see a problem. The only problem is the level 20+ sentences where the shorter, simpler sentences haven’t been added yet.
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I’m more cynic about it. It happens because the thread can summed up as ‘‘My opinion is better than yours’’. You might be right however, hopefully it won’t end badly as the prophecy foretold.
On a lighter note, I finished my drawing to remember ‘western style’. It’s an American style sheep surfing on a tsunami (both radicals of ‘sheep’ and ‘tsunami’ are therefore included).
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Wow this thread devolved quickly
I still think a n5 → n2/n1 → natural sentence with more informality/nuance/wordplay and (normal-esque) jokes setup for the example sentences would give the best of both worlds for people who like the more complex challenge
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Count me as another person who likes the example sentences just fine. I don’t mind if I don’t understand a different word in the sentence (I usually don’t look it up, because I’m going fast and I save that kind of labor for when I’m actually doing reading practice). What I use the example sentences for are context and grammatical usage, which they work just fine for. For example, I might not be sure if a word is an な-adjective or what, and I check the example sentences and voila I know. Or I might not be sure which of a few English homonyms is meant by the listed meaning, so I check the examples. They absolutely work for this purpose. Oh and I like the complex ones, because they often give me a better sense of usage. I don’t think the translations are bad either, because they give me a sort of “feel” for how it’s used colloquially that a literal translation wouldn’t.
And I love the whimsy! I object to whoever implied upthread that whimsy is only good for non-serious learners – I’m a very serious learner but whimsy improves my life no matter what. 
I’m also totally cool with other people having different language learning styles, though. If people want more (simpler? non-whimsical?) sentences that’s fine with me; doesn’t hurt me at all. I’d hate to lose the ones we have though. And I’m going to gently ask people to reconsider some of the wide sweeping statements about how drastically the so-called “bad” sentences impact WK usage for everyone, because it certainly isn’t true for me, or for others in this thread. I think it’s fine to say something will improve your own language learning, but making sweeping statements about everyone is destined to be untrue – language learning is so individual!
p.s., I also love the mnemonics. They’re silly and of course they don’t match the pronunciation exactly, but they give me just enough of a kick to remember what the pronunciation is (and the silliness helps hugely with that). After a few cycles of that I’m remembering on my own. Again, just different learning styles.
(Btw, my context is that I only use WK for a very small niche of my Japanese learning (which I feel it does very well). I’m not actually leaning on the example sentences for reading practice, because I’m using reading for that, and I have lessons and conversation partners etc etc. It’s an approach I recommend, because I feel WK is devastatingly great for learning reading kanji and intentionally lacking for everything else – which is, afaict, exactly what it’s trying to be.)
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I dont even look at them during lessons, only when they appear on reviews because of the script I use so when I dont remember the word, I look at the sentence to see it in a context.
I wish the effort WK crew did to create those crazy sentences, they should have applied to simple lessons about grammar from N5 to N3 at least.
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Personally, I quite like the example sentences; the bilingual example sentences you find online tend to be very short and straightforward, so I feel that WK adds some valuable content to the mix.
It’s true that I spend more time translating the context sentences than I do learning the mnemonics, and I could doubtlessly move through the levels much fast if I didn’t. That being said, I do it because I want the reading practice, so I don’t regard it as a waste.
Sometimes a sentence requires a bit more time than I’m willing to invest right then and there, but in those cases it’s usually possible to isolate the bits that are relevant to the particular word being taught. For example, in the above-mentioned example sentence for 崩す:
「1ドル札を崩してもらえませんか？」「ええっと…25セント硬貨が2枚と10セント硬貨が5枚あります。これでよろしいですか？」「はい。有難うございます。」
It’s true that about 75% of the sentence isn’t really relevant to the vocabulary item, but you can just focus on the first 25%.
That’s not to say I don’t think that there are improvements to be made, though:
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I certainly wouldn’t mind having more than one sentence per word, and it would probably be for the best if one of those sentences was fairly short and simple, or relied only on already-taught vocab, so that people can get to see the word in action regardless(ish) of how far they’ve gotten with their overall reading comprehension.
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While I quite like the 崩す example, it only illustrates a single and fairly narrow interpretation of the word (albeit arguably the most useful one). Given that the glosses are a bit broader, this leaves the reader wondering: Can 崩す be used with a building, a forest, or a car?
Having additional context sentences to illustrate this would certainly be appreciated. -
On a related note, the practice in the early lessons of writing kanji one hasn’t learned yet in hiragana, as in 大とうりょう, is a bit of an abomination. I’d like to be able to look to these sentences as examples of good kanji usage, and I’m pretty sure this isn’t it, whether it’s a legal document or a tweet.
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Less grievously, but still worth noting, is that I suspect that sometimes the sentences use kanji spellings of words that are normally written using kana, just to help the user review their kanji, even when using them like that “in the real world” would be rather unnatural. The use of 有難う rather than ありがとう in the sentence above strikes me as one example.
I get that this is often a matter of taste and it isn’t always easy to know where to draw the line, particularly as electronic input methods have made complicated kanji less difficult to use (and character limits have made them a practical alternative), but I’m fairly certain that ありがとう would be more natural when transcribing this conversation.
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We do monitor the feedback channel, but a lot of time, because we prioritize immediate support via chat and email, it’s something that we don’t always address right away. This feedback is something that has been brought up before and we are hoping to revamp the example sentences in the future. They were first added for the purpose of providing a fun and quirky way to see how the word may be used in a sentence. For now, we are changing sentences individually to something easier if we realize that they’re too hard to follow. Feel free to reach out to us (by chat or email) if you come across a sentence that you think is unnecessarily difficult. Thanks!
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This should be pinned above the feedback section, along with some notes to avoid the fugu
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Man, this is my new favorite phrase. I’ll take this to my life. It’ll be on my 圣.
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Or the new one that seems to be going around, “X is absolutely terrible. I mean that as constructive criticism.”
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So you’re suggesting that majority of people who encounter these for the first time have already learned everything they need in order to fully understand them and get something out of them?
As much as you only focus on how easy ones are a waste of time for advanced learners, as others have pointed out, the unnecessarily cluttered ones are a bother and a missed chance for beginners.
The point is that they should add value for people who haven’t yet learned everything. Imabi has that kind of attitude and you know that it can only teach you anything if have a certain level of thorough understanding. WK shouldn’t really go imabi on these sentences.
If you want bragging rights, or more fun with ridiculous sentences, sure, go ahead and retain them, but at least add value for beginners who can’t decipher phrases meant for higher levels.
Well, at least it’s good to know that this is something WK staff is aware of and are willing to tune down. Will certainly let them know if I find some of these “gems”.
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If you feel overwhelmed by the sample sentences it would be good to reconsider if Japanese really is something you want to have in your life. It just gets worse the deeper you go.
Quite a weird thing to say on a platform that is meant to teach its users part of a language from absolute novice to advanced user imo.
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I relate hard to this one, as I had zero grammar at level 1
He didn’t say anything like that. He did not say easy sentences should be removed or that they’re a waste of time, he only said that there’s no issue in keeping the hard ones.
If a user has trouble with a hard sentence they can focus on the easy ones and use the hard ones for practice later when they have learned more.
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Please could you keep them and add an easier one?
Sounds horrible, I know. To clarify:
I absolutely understand that you will have difficulties reading the Japanese sentences and understand them right away.
So do I. After learning Japanese for 15 years, having the N1 for 12 years, living in Japan for 10 years etc.
It is natural that if you see a single sentence you don’t know the context, some Kanjis, some grammar. Casual communication (or Keigo, young people’s speech, old people’s speech, doctors speech, teachers speech, politicians speech, SAHM speech…) is not told in language school or Jlpt you have to learn it by yourself. You will never be able to read the names except they are kindly written in katakana like コウイチ. You have to always guess and read the translation and switch between them gradually making a sense out of it, this is called learning.
You don’t read it once, you work on it.
In real Japanese life you will stay forever in this mist of ambiguity. I could write you a book about one day of living in Japan and the language troubles arising in this one single day but to keep things short: Any text you will ever read is filled with words (and images and scary typefaces) you have never seen before even if you pass the Kanken 1kyuu. Because there are names, English loan words with completely made up meanings (eg my number, sunshine, goforit) there are strange names for events (eg in school like hakage, nanohana) and suddenly you end up “voluntaring” for the PTA for an event you don’t understand what it is (obscure name) chatting hours on Line with people whose real names you don’t know (having line names and flower profile pictures you can not assign to the faces they belong) with a language (casual to an extent that you have no idea who is talking about what) that is something more like a machine gun exchange of stickers and emoticons mixed with sudden difficult kanjis, and names of kids (Kanji, hiragana, nicknames), but you don’t know who they are and they ask your opinion on what to do on the event (you still don’t understand what it is) - you know something like that.
And some of them will be from Kansai.
So in my opinion rather than changing the sentences it would be better for any of you to change your attitude towards the unknown and getting accustomed to guess.
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If this is a good space to rant about example sentences, I just need to yell about one for 性病 because it literally made me yell in real life. I use a script to include the Japanese example sentences in my reviews, because I’d miss a lot more vocab items without some context. So imagine I haven’t seen this word in months and this sentence comes up:
性病を移してくれてどうも有難う。とても嬉しいです。
Who uses sarcasm in a language learning setting??? The funny thing is though, the sentence is so bad in this context it made me memorize 性病 because my mind linked the word with the sentence.