And maybe this is just me, but i just wanted to share an experience i have fairly often with WK.
I’m going through, get to 意地悪, so I type いちわる, a mistake that could make sense from the kanji itself. so I’m like boo, why am i such a screw-up as usual, and go down to the reading description, which reads as “This reading is a combination of the on’yomi readings for 意 and 地, and the kun’yomi reading for 悪. You’ve learned them all already, so this should be cake!”
Now, this is completely unhelpful to me. ち IS one of the on’yomi readings for 地! While it is true that it makes the reading easy to learn, because you can just think of the on’yomi for most of them and then kun’yomi for 悪, but it sure feels like a lot of these reading descriptions avoid mentioning the fact that there are in many cases multiple on’yomi readings, and without that important fact i end up sticking on just “oh yeah it’s the on’yomi reading” and don’t graduate to “it’s the じ reading prob because if you say いち then something”.
I don’t know, maybe this is pure frustration with japanese in general, or maybe it’s the lack of relevant feedback to this case of me getting it wrong, but it really got to me today.
Any thoughts from y’all about ways to avoid frustration? I put in about as much time as i can spare into this, i don’t know if i really have time to write my own reading notes for each one of these.
I always hated these cases where they say “you know it already” but don’t specify which of the readings you know it is. It’s possible that if you email them with specific examples (and not just a general complaint) that they’ll update those to have real mnemonics. I don’t know if they would do that, but it can’t hurt to ask.
I’ve come to the conclusion that choosing between multiple readings requires brute memorization. The only thing I’ve found that helps is repeating the correct readings aloud every time. That way I eventually get a feel for what sounds right.
So, I’m more a beginner than you, so I don’t know if this will continue to work as I hit the higher levels, but I’ve been trying to assign different, related images in my mnemonics for each reading (or at least each major one). For example, for 月, I use a month calendar for げつ and a Cheshire Cat for がつ (smiling as the moon). Then in crafting my meaning mnemonic I incorporate that into it, so it all ties together.
I also follow the WK examples of こう and ちょう and try to use the same mnemonic if I encounter the same reading again with other kanji. I have the Keisei Phonetic-Semantic Composition script installed, so I can catch the readings that are going to make future kanji easier as well. When available, I choose a mnemonic which I know will be easy to incorporate in the future kanji when I get to them.
Anyway, this seems to work for me, so far. I’ll probably have a very weird collection of images bouncing in my head going into the future, but I can live with that.
I am really starting to have the same problem as in this post. I could handle them before, but the more kanji I learn, the harder it is for me to remember the right on’yomi in master and enlighten items. I don’t have that big of a problem if the reading is an exception, but in cases like 悪where あくand わる bouth comes often, it is really easy to mix up. Do anyone have any advice?
It’s all a scam. They tell you there is On’Yomi and Kun’Yomi but then you realize there are more exceptions than you can handle. As @TimeStamp said, brute memorization is the only way to go!
My strategy has been to learn vocab individually. So in you example case with 意地悪 I would first note that the meaning is “mean” and the reading would most likely be いちわる. However, since I also know (from vocab studies) that mean would be いじわる, I just determine the word to be read like that.
This works even better with words that have unusual reading, like 河豚 (pufferfish) , which would with correct on’yomi be omething like カトン or かわぶた in kunyomi. However, it is neither… just ふぐ. So I just learned to associate the “river pig” combination with pufferfish and since I know that pufferfish is fugu is japanese… It all works out.)
For any new words encountered via WK that don’t use the most common/obvious reading, I use the same logic and try to memorize the vocab as a “sound”, since that way I’ll be also more able to use it in conversation…
My method is really backwards to what WK kinda teaches though… dunno if it is any good for people other than me.
Glad you typed this so I didn’t have to I do this, too, and think it’s the way to go. It’s mostly a problem for people if they are not engaging in other aspects of Japanese sufficiently and only using the kanji to remember it.
Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating since I kind of “didn’t know how to read it but just knew it”, but I guess that is the end goal.
I don’t disagree that the best way to learn things is by practice, but with respect to wanikani in particular, due to the SRS nature it’s basically all I have time to do. Then, when I get a vocab wrong, and the WK reading note is “this uses the on’yomi you learned with the kanji. You should already know it!” instead of “Here’s some mnemonic to learn why this one is this on’yomi vs the other on’yomi”, that was where my frustration in particular comes from.
I’ve put WK in vacation mode recently if only to give myself more time to do other stuff (like grammar and the KKLC), because I do feel like WK is not giving me enough on this front. Hopefully that will give me more context clues for some of these words that I don’t think WK gives me full context for. I will probably re-activate when i finish going through KKLC, but this SRS is just taking 1-3 hours a day and it’s basically spinning my wheels (100k reviews done so far and only level 17…).
Anyway, my main point of making this topic was talking about how it was frustrating to see “it was the on’yomi you learned!” when there are 6 on’yomi and that is not helpful at all.
Why do feel you need the KKLC if you are doing WK already? Maybe you could slow down on WK if you feel like it’s taking too much of your time. After all knowing kanji is only like 1/5 of Japanese learning or something. I would especially recommend listening to give you more context on the words.
Wow, that’s quite a lot. I have about 190k. I guess it’s a sign that you should indeed focus on other areas of Japanese for a while. Keep at it!
The main reason i’m feeling like i want to do KKLC is mostly just to get an exposure to all of the joyo kanji sooner. Any other method would probably be fine too, but at least for me when i am doing the WK reviews i get stuck in a rut on certain readings and etc while i am going through, which then the interlocking of kanji and disparate vocab readings start to affect each other. So, I figured a tighter focus on the kanji by themselves would be helpful to at least have the look down before i get into some of the things I need to output for WK.
Anyway, we’ll see how it goes and maybe i’ll un-vacation sooner rather than later haha! I feel pretty solid on the things I have learned through WK, just sucks that it takes all of my time i could be using on other aspects too.
You can click on the kanji to get to it’s mnemonic, but it could be much better. For example, every time WK uses that phrase (and it is a lot) it should be linked to the kanji reference. Even better would have it in the hover or a drop down that you could twiddle on and off. Then the information that you ‘known already’ would be at your fingertips to be refreshed when you need it rather than having to look for it on a different page altogether.
In cases with multiple on-yomi where I keep getting something wrong, I’ll make up my own mnemomics for it, or otherwise specifically try to memorize those words. It can still be pretty frustrating though! jin/nin and jitsu/nichi are particular offenders.
, which would with correct on’yomi be omething like カトン or かわぶた in kunyomi. However, it is neither… just ふぐ. So I just learned to associate the “river pig” combination with pufferfish and since I know that pufferfish is fugu is japanese… It all works out.)
I do this, too, and think it’s the way to go. It’s mostly a problem for people if they are not engaging in other aspects of Japanese sufficiently and only using the kanji to remember it.