This is just “cognitive chunking” — you learn 除 as “Building + Surplus”, when you learned 余 as “Hat + Jackhammer”, and Jackhammer as “Ground + Barb + Handles”, and it lets you learn progressively more complex kanji, since remembering “Ground + Barb + Handles + Hat + Building” would be ridiculous.
Most levels I’ve been doing lately (I’m at 32) have one or two truly new radicals, with the rest being these “chunked” radicals. So there are “fewer radicals” to learn later, even though there are roughly the same number of “new radicals” — because you’ll have already learned most of them.
The baseball thing is a good example to illustrate cultural differences. Americans have football, Europeans have soccer, Japanese have baseball. It’s their most popular sport and even if you do not care about sports at all, Japanese media often mentions baseball at some time or another. Multiple books I’ve read like “Kafka on the Beach” and “I am a Cat” are not about baseball in the slightest sense, yet they still reference baseball and baseball teams. Japanese cartoons often have references to baseball too, or even feature baseball as a major plot element. I personally do not read Japanese news that much but I am sure they feature the latest trends in baseball expansively. Wanikani does not even come close to all the baseball terms I had to look up because it’s significance in Japan caused a lot of its terminology to leak out into other areas.
The word for “bureau” might seem weird but it’s a character used in the expression “結局” which means “after all”. This expression is extremely common. It’s also used in a bunch of fairly common words like 郵便局、放送局、薬局. I am sure you use the words post office, broadcasting studio, and pharmacy in English right? These are just some examples but this character is used in a lot of words similar to the aforementioned.
For “Reconciliation” you meant “仲直り” right? In English “to reconcile” is fairly common in my opinion though, even if easier to spell versions like “to make up” are more commonly used. Fixing relationships be it between people or entities is a common concept. This is a word you will encounter every other day. Diplomacy is also a word that I do not find to be that rare. It’s probably a word that is in every other news article. Horse power “馬力” is a word I never encounter myself in the things I read in Japanese. It is a common way of describing the power output of machines so it’s good to know though, especially since it uses the slightly less common reading of りき for 力.
Well, yes and no. Sure, you get some of this stuff coming up in popular culture. But also some terms really are just technical jargon specific to the sport, that you would want to learn if you’re a fan but which are a lot lower priority if you aren’t. I think it’s mostly better to learn these words as and when they come up in your reading/watching/whatever – that way you see them in context, and you tend to learn the stuff that’s a common analogy first and the obscure stuff later if ever. And there’s clearer motivation for learning it because you did really run into it.
仲直り is definitely one where WK’s choice of English word is a bit misleading about the register of the word. “Reconciliation” is way more formal and abstract in tone than 仲直り, which is a common everyday conversational kind of thing, more like English “to make up with s.o.”.
I tried to mention the more common “to make up” in my post to refer to this. The reason why Wanikani probably chose “to reconcile” instead of “to make up” as a primary meaning might be due to “to make up” also having a second meaning which doesn’t match 仲直り at all, i.e. to make up stories. To reconcile is simply the closest match in the English vocabulary. Luckily they do mention the lower register and more common ways of saying it on the vocabulary page.
Regarding the baseball thing, my main point was to illustrate how baseball is an important sport in Japan which, like you said, shows up in popular culture. I was mainly trying to illustrate that words you never see in English can actually be more common in Japanese due to the different cultural environment. I agree that some of these things are best learned in their context. Wanikani is not perfect, but I mainly wanted to help the OP see that it’s not saturated with excessively obscure terminology and characters, there are reasons for them being included, and that he will actually encounter a good bit of them when he starts the aforementioned reading/watching/whatever.
Above level 50 you have a bunch of kanji taught mainly (if not entirely) for use in proper nouns and it’s really annoying IMO. It just doesn’t suit the system very well because you’re given a kanji to memorize with a specific meaning, but then the vocab is all proper nouns that don’t make use of that meaning.
I feel like this stuff would be much better served by a dedicated deck for popular proper nouns, like popular places and Japanese celebrities.
Absolutely! The misalignment between what the Japanese words and kanji mean vs English glosses ended up being too much. I’m also not a fan of mnemonics which rely on weird English pronunciations of Japanese kana. Lastly, intermediate learners profit more from learning resources explicitly in their target language.
Baseball and basketball is pretty big in America as well. Both are major and big sports, just not as big as football. Or Hockey if you live in Minnesota or Detroit (Hockeytown).
I also did not find any of the words cited as rare for me in English. Had a very nice bureau I worked at every day in my home office.
I agree that it would be better to change the system up for these specific characters and go straight to the compound words rather than focusing on the individual kanji characters. This is probably why Wanikani only had 50 levels in the past.
These characters are tricky though, they’re both extremely common due to them being used in common proper nouns or personal names, but they tend to be used for their pronunciation rather than original meaning which can be archaic (if the individual kanji had one to begin with in Japanese and wasn’t just plagiarized from Heisig’s kanji book which used fictitious meanings to differentiate individual characters). There aren’t too many of these if I recall correctly and the characters which are only used for one proper noun or their reading tend to be super common at least. It’s not like Americans don’t know what “Minnesota” is or can’t read names like “Mary”.
Also, when it comes to personal names specifically, there’s a cultural element to use the kanji for their meaning even if that meaning isn’t used in modern vocabulary. Something we don’t have a direct analogue for in the west. I feel like Japanese place far more value on this which is why the name しおり can be written as 栞 (book marker) or 詩織 (weaver of history) or 志桜里 (Loyal sakura tree village) for example and not 死檻 (prison of death). If you’re level 50+ you should be far enough in your language learning journey to start understanding the cultural aspect of the Japanese language as well in my opinion.
to the OP, please note that this is only a thing in the last 10~ levels. Don’t worry about this (yet) ;).
Yeah I absolutely agree on all of these points, I definitely want to learn these characters (in fact I want to learn many more than exist on WaniKani and I’m currently considering starting an Anki deck dedicated to proper nouns to practice this aspect more intensively), they just really feel out of place on WaniKani IMO.
To take an example from my current batch of reviews you have 早乙女 which is introduced with the 乙 kanji but doesn’t really use the meaning or reading introduced with the kanji. Now at least 乙 on its own is also kind of useful (I’ve already encountered it in legalese) so it’s not a complete waste, but it’s still weird.
Also strange that the fairly common 乙女 is not taught on its own, but that’s a different discussion.
I think for sure you can see in word choices that WaniKani tends towards knowing its primary audience—people who want to consume popular entertainment. That’s why words that much more frequently appear in fiction — like Yakuza terminology or pirate or sci-fi terms — as you noted with baseball terms, appear a lot.
The special vocabulary for Tokyo-related things is a bit annoying — but, since culturally and in government structure, Tokyo isn’t considered a “city” like any other city, but a singular “metropolis”, it’s annoying because it’s annoying in learning the language, not because WaniKani strangely highlights it (it doesn’t). And again, most popular entertainment set in a somewhat-modern somewhat-real world tends to involve Tokyo.
Still, if you’re planning to do a JET Programme stint, or want to go to university in Japan, the word choices are probably a bit less useful — but you’d better not be relying on any single tool in that case.
That said, I almost always check out new words in the dictionary as I go through lessons, and it is extremely rare (at least through level 30) that they aren’t marked as a “common word” (which I believe means in the 30th percentile in a general-published-corpus). The exceptions tend to be one of:
An 当て字 or historical spelling for a common word that’s “always” written in kana — but that’s okay because a) it helps with vocab in general, b) reliance on that “always” can bite you since the kanji often come back when the words are used in compounds or complex expressions, and c) you look smart if you use kanji for ある and いる (j/k—but not kidding for some other examples).
A less-common form of a common thing; most often, I think, in that it can seem almost random whether WaniKani’s lessons introduce “verbal nouns” with する, without する, or both as separate entries. (You’d think it would be based on how often the word is used without する, but that doesn’t seem to be the only calculus going on, if there is a calculus — it can be a little scattershot. It might involve whether or not をする is used as a variant or not—the ones they give you with Nする tend to be ones you don’t often see written Nをする even in keigo, I think?)
A simple “building block” that isn’t that useful in itself but can be useful in other circumstances. These are too numerous and varied to even name, but I’m sure you already know what I’m talking about. But for instance, learning 崎 and 島 alone aren’t useful or memorable till you see them in Kawasaki or Hiroshima—and now you can read a lot of -saki and -shima/-jima places.
I drive my husband batty whenever we watch Japanese shows (with English subs, since he doesn’t know the language at all) because I’m constantly pausing and switching to Japanese captioning to check “wait, is that word [I previously didn’t know] just these kanji?” and usually finding out the answer is yes.
(I might have a bone to pick with WK on how often they teach you just one of two two-kanji jukugos where they mean basically the same but one is in one order read kun’yomi and the other is flipped and read on’yomi — they seem to pick which one to teach on the basis of the need to learn readings rather than the commonness of the jukugo compared to its pair. And often it’s a case where “kun is informal, on is formal”, so you have to learn both anyway. But you gotta make pedagogical compromises or you have to just teach all the things, I guess. And I’m actually starting to automatically consider — when I hear a new two-kanji word — if it’s just flipped and the other reading of the one I know, which is probably like rendaku or pitch — one of those things you can’t easily practice but just kind of get through osmosis.)
The thing is that, unless you actually want to learn about baseball specifically, you won’t normally struggle too much to pick up the common vocab and metaphorical expressions in context.
I’m not a native English speaker and I know absolutely nothing about baseball or American football for instance, yet that’s almost never an issue. When people talk metaphorically about “home-runs”, “bases” and “touchdowns” I still know roughly what it means even though I have absolutely no idea how these things actually play out in the real games.
That’s just part of the “cultural background” of the language you pick up in context. Like knowing who Martha Stuart is and how she went to jail at some point or that Jimmy Carter is a former president who had a peanut farm.
I mean I’ve been playing Fashion Dreamer in Japanese (the only game I feel comfortable playing Japanese and doing lookups for it). Quite a few level 14 WK words in there.
You could check out other resources while doing WaniKani such as…
Crystal Hunters a manga that teaches Japanese
Game Gengo a youtuber that teaches Japanese through video games
If you like video games go on steam to wishlist Nihongo Quest N5, Shujinkou, Koe, and Wagotabi.
Have you tried NativShark? You can archive vocab, grammar, kanji, etc that you are already confident in. It can link to Wanikani so it knows what kanji you know.
