I find I sometimes have a lot of trouble remembering a kanji until I have seen it in a vocabulary word. I will often manually look up (on WaniKani) what words it is in to help me memorize it. Until then, I just keep missing and retrying a kanji as it stays critical, over and over and over. The mnemonics do not help!
Anyone know what the rationale behind “unlocking” vocabulary is? I feel like I would make faster progress if I am able to sew each kanji directly into the larger web of knowledge.
You unlock vocab when you’ve guru’d all of the kanji that make it up.
But yeah, it can often be tricky learning kanji on their own. I struggled with 覇 at level 52, for example, and even the vocab examples WaniKani provides are not really something you’d expect to come across on a day-to-day basis. If they’d mentioned that it’s used in 那覇, the capital of Okinawa, that would have helped…
WaniKani usually has well thought out reasons for its decisions. For example, it does not let you self-grade like you do with anki. And the reasoning makes sense… kind of.
I was just wondering if there was some learning related motivation behind the unlocking mechanic.
I think the motivations are a mix of gamification and workload management. Gamification in that the unlocks give people something to work towards a feeling of reward, and workload management in that it’s very easy starting off a SRS system to do a load of lessons that leads you a very heavy review workload.
Once that’s established the choice of which vocab to unlock is more so about a batch of vocab in proximity to the kanji to give some reinforcement of the different readings, which are ordered by a mix of complexity and frequency (it used to be just complexity, but over time they’ve considered frequency more often than they used to).
Sometimes you find there’s extra vocab in much higher levels. Usually that’s either because the extra vocab is teaching the other kanji in that word, or the extra vocab for reshuffled off to higher levels to make room for some more frequent vocab.
That does not explain why the initial unlock isn’t (kanji + related vocabulary) versus (kanji + other kanji). But maybe I’m overthinking it.
I think it might be to spread out the use of the kanji and reading. So that rather than doing 1 kanji plus related vocab and only having to remember that kanji for the 3 days to guru it, you have to guru the kanji (3 days) and then you can guru the related vocab (another three days) and then have a short break before the original kanji comes back for guru 2. But I also definitely understand your point- I also struggle to memorize the kanji! But then it is reinforced with the vocabulary and usually is solidified at that point.
I get you completely. I prefer to learn the vocab right away too.
So when I level up, I got to WKstats to the WKItems list and I filter it to vocabulary only.
Then I copy and paste the new level’s vocab into JPDB so I can do some no-typing flash cards for them. I have it set to frequency across the whole corpus instead of chronological so it shuffles the order a bit.
I thought that’s what the “Examples” section in the WK kanji lessons are for. So you can see how the kanji is used in a word before while learning it.
There is no “Examples” section, so I assume you mean “Found In Vocabulary.” Yes, this helps a little, and I look at it every time. But I, and it looks like several others, would like to see some of those words earlier in the reviews without having to wait until the kanji is at guru level.