Honestly, the Goodharting WaniKani thread has provided the inspiration for this thread, but I’m not sure who if anyone over there would like to be tagged here.
With this thread though, I would like to gather proposals for replacing specific vocab and the detailed reasoning for doing so. A lot of people would like to get rid of certain words completely, which usually causes debates. However, instead of getting rid of words entirely, here I would like us to recommend replacements, hopefully ones that are well connected to the word the suggester would like to replace. A lot of people have said they would like more common or useful words added to WK as opposed to some of the more obscure ones, so let’s try to make it as easy as possible to add such words.
To get rid of 祭日 -the さい reading is still present in the vocab 文化祭 and of the vocab the 祭 kanji is in, 祭り and 文化祭 are already pretty well known to many Japanese learners, especially those interested in anime or general culture. I think it’s not too far of a stretch to suggest that most users are mainly learning the kanji itself, and not it as a new reading. Additionally, the meaning 祭日 is highly intuitive. “Festival” “day” means “festival day,” how surprising, right? The other meaning is “national holiday,” but based on the Wikipedia entry, 祭日 also covers religious holidays, like Christmas, which are not national holidays and in fact the vocab for national holidays seems to be 国民の祝日.
To add 本日 -it has the same structure as 祭日 and the same reading of 日. Although both components are common readings, I propose that it would be helpful to add on the basis that 1) it’s a common word that you often see on signs and might hear in announcements and 2) (the bigger reason in my opinion) is that the meaning is not as intuitive. Main day? Book day? Origin day? The actual meaning of “today” is not something I would have expected coming from a Western languages background. Since WK primarily caters to English speakers, this would be good to add as vocab. The usage of 本 here is different in an unexpected way from other usages of 本 but reinforces the variety of possible meanings. As a side note, I think that having it, especially in the earlier levels would help encourage users to take a closer look at the order of the kanji, which many people don’t get tripped up on until later with vocab like 光栄 and 栄光.
The problem with 光栄 and 栄光 is that they have very similar meanings (honestly I’d have a hard time explaining the difference between “honor” and “glory” in English and I’m a native speaker). 本日 and 日本 however mean completely different things, so I think it’s a much better pair of words to focus on “remembering the order of the kanji”.
