I am now heading towards the end of lvl 48, therefore I can say I saw a good amount of Kanji and vocabulary.
I have found very often that the vocabulary choice is not useful, and when I checked with my Japanese wife and Japanese friends (I live in Japan), they confirmed that such vocabulary is not useful/not used in Japan, on the other hand I found that often vocabulary for a specific Kanji which is useful is missing.
I do not know the criteria that you are using to select the vocabulary for each Kanji, but I wanted to share that often your choices could be better.
An option could be to allow users to remove unwanted vocabulary so that we do not waste time on vocabulary that we will never use.
The option to remove vocab has been wanted for as long as this site exists, I fearâŠ
But yes, WK should never be someones choice for learning vocab, it is clearly focused towards giving you a few items for every reading of the kanji, itâs no âmost frequentâ deck of words. So if you already know most readings, the whole batch of vocab regarding that kanji is just filling your queue and stealing you time.
The criteria is that it reinforces the kanji. Thatâs it. Literally, WaniKani is a kanji-learning app, its selling point that users can learn most of the jouyou kanji with minimal effort through mnemonics and SRS, and learn to recognize and differentiate them via components (not always radicals, even if thatâs what theyâre all called on WK) and gain the skills to learn any other kanji they need to on their own. Itâs not a vocab-drilling app, so the vocab they choose doesnât necessarily need to be âuseful.â It was always the intention that WK would help users get over the hurdle of kanji and then pick up vocab elsewhere (textbooks, anki decks, immersing, etc.), not be a one-stop shop.
Sure, some of the choices can be questionableâthereâve definitely been times where Iâve looked at the WK vocab for a given kanji and gone, âBut this other one is literally right thereâ âbut from the beginning, the priority has been kanji. With the recent addition of kana-only vocab, though, the focus might be shifting to âkanji + vocabâ rather than âkanji (with supplemental vocab),â but though words have been removed before, I doubt all the âuselessâ words will be even if WK fully becomes more generalized. Whatâs useless to one person is useful to another, after all.
Iâm not sure how high my hopes for anything like a skip button or auto-burn ever getting added are, but in the meantime, there are other sites/apps that allow users full control over what they learn, including ones with an interface inspired by WKâs. (Aside from KameSame though, I donât remember any of their namesâŠ)
I understand that.
There is way more useful vocabulary that can be used to learn the kanji, and I feel itâs a pity as about 10-15% of the vocabulary at very least is not really useful nor used by Japanese people in Japan in the daily life.
Youâre not wrong. I have been saying that for a long time now, but people just typically parrot the same âits for reinforcing the kanjiâ line without any critical thinking about what that really means.
Tofugu the company is actually a lot more aware of it than the community it seems if you look at their trends of vocabulary changes and item shifts, but the wheels of change turn very slow.
Can you tell me what these sites are? I am a WK lifetime subscriber anyway. But I feel like Iâve wasted my time with the vocabulary here. My wife is also Japanese and she is quite often at a loss when I try to use my newest vocab on her. I feel like the vocab Iâve learned through WK makes me sound like a weirdo.
Honestly I donât have the time to go to check them all one by one, and yes I totally agree with you.
Yes, âhow about reinforce the kanji with vocabulary that is actually usefulâ? That is all I am saying.
You can reinforce the kanji, and at the same time learn vocabulary that you will actually use.
I run into the same thing. Usually it starts with me using a vocab word I learned, her not understanding it and thus presuming I am making a mistake, me showing it to her in written form, her now knowing what it is and telling me that it is an old word or a very uncommon word that no one uses. I have not kept any stats on this, but in the grand scheme of things I expect it is quite a small percentage. To be honest, I do not mind learning the words, but I would like to be made aware of when they are of this sort. There are a couple cases I recall where it was pointed out in the lesson,
When talking about how âusefulâ a vocabulary is, itâs important to consider the context. Is the context tourism? Is the context living in Japan? Is it consuming manga or light novels? Some vocabularies are useful for one, but not the other.
One might come across outdated vocabulary if they want to watch period dramas, for example.
Of course there are still vocabulary words that are very rarely useful compared to ones that can be used in a variety of scenarios, but I wanted to bring more attention to what actually defines how âusefulâ a vocab is.
The closest option for ignoring vocabulary you donât need is using the lesson picker theyâve soft launched a few weeks ago. Itâs going to be a permanent feature when they finish working on it.
This is your best choice for communicating with WaniKani staff directly about your issues with specific content you want to add/change/remove.
There are indeed several, this is used only in official document, or that you donât use it for speaking it exist only in writing. So it would probably help if you point out such vocabs specifically , so theyâll add that caveat.
(All links are to the respective threads here on the forums.)
KameSame is a website that was originally created to reinforce stuff youâve learned on WK by testing EN>JP, but itâs since expanded beyond that. Theyâve got various lists you can do vocab lessons from, as well as a field where you can enter text and itâll search for the vocab in the database and you can add those to lessons. It doesnât test on JP>EN meaning like WK, but the reading and meaning cards are completely separate, so you donât have to do them both. Youâre also able to ignore any card, even after youâve added it to your review queue. You get a limited number of undos, but if you donate, you unlock an option to toggle in settings that allows unlimited undos.
And then there were two that were applications you download onto your computer rather than websites. Houhou also functions as a dictionary, and it allows you to edit cards and even make your own if a word or phrase isnât in its dictionary. Reviews look a lot like WK, but thereâs no lessons, so no quiz before an item goes into the queue, which for me meant my retention was awful. I think the other one I gave a shot was Torii? I donât remember anything about it though.
If you donât care about it looking like WK, the big one of course is Anki, but I donât remember any others Iâve heard people mention. But then thereâs also BunPro. I donât know if their vocab is still in beta (though any user can opt in in settings), but they have multiple input methods, including meaning and fill-in-the-blank (I think you can only have one per card, but I also think you can change it per card? unless itâs only per deck), and you can freely add and remove cards from lessons and also auto-burn them from the item page at any time. By connecting your WK account, you can also choose to auto-burn all vocab youâve already encountered on WK. I think the only vocab they have though is JLPT and/or textbook vocab, though they do still have a ton of it. I havenât exactly looked at vocab in a while, though.
Thereâs also jpdb.io â its big strength imho is that it has a bunch of pre built decks for light novels etc, so you can work on vocab thatâs going to come up in what youâre about to read. Anki style ârate yourselfâ rather than âtype the answerâ style interface.
If wanikani is a kanji-learning app, then why is it adding kana-only words to the vocabulary? It seems to me that wanikani is trying to kill two birds with one stone, but these two approaches are at odds with each other.
Because while it was originally created to teach kanji, with the main goal of the vocabulary to reinforce those kanji (which is why a lot of the vocab is considered âuselessâ by a lot of users because it wasnât necessarily intended to be immediately useful the way a top-frequency word deck is, even if they do have quite a bit already thatâs in there specifically because itâs common), theyâve apparently decided they want to expand into a more general âhelp you learn to readâ rather than merely âhelp you learn to read kanji.â
I mean, I get why. You need kanji to read Japanese, but not everything is kanjiâand not everything has even a rarely used kanji form. So while youâre here, why not learn those other words too? They likely think becoming more of a one-stop shop would appeal more widely and grow their userbaseâif you get everything in one place, thatâs fewer things you have to worry about. Iâm just not so sure the execution is the best. You canât skip words, you have very limited choice over what you learn when, and itâs needlessly unforgiving. Theyâre not exactly the best about semantics and nuance, either, which they should get better at if theyâre not just gonna be like âWe gave you the tools to get started, now go out and read and pick up the rest on your ownâ anymore. Plus, you also need grammar to read, and itâs not like WK ever intended to teach that either beyond part of speech and some (and not always well-done, at that) transitive vs. intransitiveâŠ
If they are going to continue down this route, they should probably rethink the system. Which they may already be doing, I know they released a lesson reordering thing recently, but, hm. Weâll see. I feel like it may come to a point where theyâll have to give up either the strict leveling or the âyou can technically complete this in a yearâ selling point.
Have you used yomichan before? There are a bunch of different frequency dictionaries, including one based on jpdbâs corpus. With that you can just hold shift and hover over any of your vocabulary items to see a frequency rating. No frequency list is gonna be perfect, jpdb is based on manga and fiction so the vocab choice is gonna be skewed in that direction, but it should give you a pretty much immediate ballpark of how useful the word is.
Should mention yomichan isnât maintained anymore but I was able to install it just the other day with no issues. And there are similar programs for mobile too.
Too bad Tofugu gave up on its grammar resources- textfugu and etoeto. Almost like they might have decent companions. Or maybe not. I never got to try either.
I agree. Whatâs appealing to me about WaniKani is having a barebones kanji-learning system and these ingenious mnemonics. It makes zero sense to me to rely on wanikani for all my learning needs, because of course I do other things in parallel, like practicing grammar and reading.
Does it help that once in a while a super basic word like ăăă«ăĄăŻ or ăă pops up in WaniKani and I canât even skip it? No, it doesnât! At my current (still very basic) level Iâm learning to read words like æ„ăŸăă and é«ăăŁă, combining learning to read with studying grammar, because these two are interconnected. And a system like WaniKani canât help with that. So why keep showing me ăă again and again for the next 6 months?! I see no use in this.
