Vocabulary only when you have lifetime subscription

WaniKani Feedback
21

I think the issue is that you don’t quite understand how kanji work yet. Wanikani isn’t making it intentionally confusing–it is confusing, full stop. The vocabulary is there to help you find patterns. There are some kanji that can have 8 or more readings to memorize. None of them are “wrong”, it’s just how Japanese works.

To give some simple examples:
車 - くるま - car (kunyomi, standalone vocabulary word, refers to a car specifically).

But wanikani will teach you the しゃ reading first, because that’s the reading for the kanji when it’s a component in other words.

Ex. 1. 電車 - でんしゃ - train (lit. “Electric car”)
Ex. 2. 自転車 - じてんしゃ - bicycle (lit. " Self revolving car")
Ex. 3. 自電車 - じでんしゃ - automobile.

Another example is 海

When referring to the sea itself, it’s read as うみ. This is its standalone vocabulary word.

When learning the kanji, you will be taught the reading かい. This is the reading used when the kanji is a component in other words.

Ex. 1: 海外 - かいがい - overseas, foreign, abroad
Ex. 2. 海岸 - かいがん - coast, beach
Ex. 3. 航海 - こうかい - voyage, navigation, sailing.

You may have noticed that these are all examples of nouns. It gets more complicated than that.

Example:

下
Meaning: down, under, below, beneath
Vocabulary:
下 -した - below (noun, kunyomi reading)
下さい - ください - please give me (expression, kunyomi reading)
下げる - さげる - to lower something (verb, kunyomi reading)
下手 - へた - clumsy, unskilled, awkward (noun, na adjective, onyomi)
地下 - ちか - underground
下りる - おりる - to go down (verb, kunyomi reading)
下品 - げひん - crude, vulgar (noun, na adjective)

So, this one kanji 下 can be read as した, くだ, さ, お, げ, or か depending on the word it’s used in. Which is why wanikani teaches vocabulary to reinforce readings; most of us can’t just memorize a list of readings with no context.

I hope that helps clarify!

10 Likes
22

Also しも frequently appears in place names, like 下北沢 (しもきたざわ) in Tokyo, or 下吉田 (しもよしだ) in Yamanashi, to name some examples. WaniKani doesn’t teach that reading with any of the vocab, but it is listed in the kanji’s kun’yomi.

3 Likes
23

There are several vocabularies with this reading too, like 風下(かざしも), 下半期(しもはんき), 下座(しもざ), 下(しも)ネタ.

I think this reading is worth knowing eventually.

下手 is an interesting one. It can be read 下手(へた), 下手(したて), 下手(しもて), and all have different meanings. (The first one is the most common, and the remaining are warned in WaniKani.) Vocabularies are a pronunciation with specific usage, and they may happen to have the same Kanji representation.

下手(へた) uses irregular reading.

24

Among the benefits of learning the kanji, and then a few vocab words that use it is it promotes flexibility in your understanding of how a kanji is used, which will make learning vocabulary outside of WK (WK’s vocab list is nowhere near sufficient to be fluent btw) a lot easier. This does not come naturally because there are only tenuous equivalents in most other languages (like root words, pre/suffixes, etc) but no direct parallel. When you read these long explanations about why shu and meshi are both correct, but at different times, it sounds really complex, but the way WaniKani does it, after a bit of time (I’m talking within the first 5-10 levels) it becomes very natural.

It can’t be overstressed that learning multiple readings and applications in vocabulary for each kanji, and also the base meaning of the kanji itself, is absolutely necessary and fundamental for the Japanese language. There’s no getting around it, and it isn’t a process this website made up. Kanji are like building blocks of words- you need to know each block individually, and how it changes in order to fit together with the others, if you want to be able to read. Skipping this process and going straight to vocab will make kanji a MUCH greater source of confusion than it already is.

It’s confusing at first sure, I think I actually made a post to this effect when I first joined on here, but it will make sense with a bit of practice. Your time is not being wasted, I promise.

3 Likes
25

Maybe it’s the way you’re phrasing it, but this seems a little misleading.

It is important to know how to read Kanji, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessary to learn Kanji in isolation like wanikani teaches. One of my closest friends simply memorized vocabulary as a set block of information when learning. It seems like that would leave you without knowledge of the individual Kanji or “flexibility” in theory, but in practice it actually doesn’t in the long run. You end up deducing any meanings that are helpful naturally, and get a feel for what readings are used when.

I’m just retelling what I’ve seen for people who have done it this way from the start, but I can also tell you in my own personal experience this has been the case after I moved off WK. Just from learning words I’ve come across while reading I’ve got well over 1000 Kanji I’m familiar with in those words that didn’t appear on WK. Likewise if you include words I’ve grinded outside of reading the number of Kanji I could read in at least 1 word was probably a little over 4000 at my peak. Probably for only a couple dozen of those did I ever bother to look up the Kanjis meaning or individual readings. And for a whopping 0 of those I memorized standalone meanings/readings or added a kanji to my srs. Honestly you’d be surprised how sufficient basic inference is for learning how to read.

Is WKs way more efficient? Maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was at the start especially. But I do feel the need to point out that it’s not actually necessary. Not saying you’re saying it was necessarily, maybe Im just misinterpreting. But ye

8 Likes
26

Huh interesting, yeah that makes a lot of sense. I still think that the way WK does it makes it pretty easy to learn how to apply kanji to lots of different situations, but it’s true that there are lots of ways to achieve that. Thanks!

4 Likes
27

Yeah, I’d agree with you there. It’s a very friendly introduction to Kanji and how they appear within words.

2 Likes
28

Minor correction, but I suspect you meant 自動車 - じどうしゃ in that last line…

4 Likes
29

It’s actually kind of funny seeing this brought up in this thread because there are some Japanese discords I’m in where people are very adamant that learning kanji in isolation is actually the less efficient method.

And to some extent they’re kind of right but that’s because there are different ways to approach learning by isolation. I like to tell those people that I study in “semi isolation”.

By that I mean that those people will refer to older “level 60” posts where a person admitted they still couldn’t read very well, but I noticed a pattern between the people that seemed to have low vs high proficiencies and that was whether they were reading a lot, especially earlier. So “semi isolation” means actually trying to read, like people who participate in beginner and intermediate book clubs. Whereas there are some people in full isolation who prefer to wait until they like 50+ or to completely finish and they seem to struggle with retention.

So it certainly seems like retention would be even worse if someone was also choosing to skip the vocabulary cards too.

5 Likes
30

If I may add my humble opinion to the whole subject, I think a lot use WaniKani to learn Japanese as in… yes, I study Japanese! I study kanji! But at the end it is only that: to learn kanji, which are letters. Kanjis are hard to learn, and I know Japanese people, who struggle with certain readings. But that is because… well, it’s kanji! They have so many readings and meanings, WaniKani tries to cover a lot, but can’t even cover all. And at the end of the day this is what Japanese people grow up with and what us students have to accept. Kanji is hard, they have multiple readings and you need them for vocabulary and names. And most likely you will forever have to look up some, because even Japanese people have to.

Nothing that WaniKani teaches is wrong. It shows how complicated the whole approach is. And I do hope that most know that reaching WaniKani level 60 does by no way mean you are fluent in Japanese. If you don’t study grammar, vocabulary and immerse yourself into the language, then WaniKani level 60 means nothing. I do also think a lot fail to understand that they should start with reading or listening right away and not wait until you have reached a certain level. The burnt items do not come back because your brain will magically know them forever, but because you most certainly see them on a daily base because it is expected you constantly read, see or are surrounded by those kanji.

4 Likes
31

I thought it didn’t look right! My fault for not double checking. Thanks!

1 Like
32

Oh interesting! I haven’t encountered that reading in the wild yet. Hopefully I’ll remember your explanation when I do. :sweat_smile:

33

I dont think there is anyone who believes that studying kanji in isolation is better than studying kanji and reading japanese text. Of course there are people who study kanji in isolation but I dont think they are doing that because they think its better but because they have reasons to not start reading (for example missing time or motivation).

In regards to the main topic of the thread:
All the readings Wanikani teaches you are correct, as many before me already mentioned. Of course you could learn Kanji readings purely through vocabulary but thats not Wanikanis approach and it would take much longer that way I think. Wanikani teaches you a way to recognize Kanji as a building block and intuition to pick the correct reading of those that you learned.
My recommendation would be to just trust the process and get used to learning the radicals, kanji and vocabulary as they come.

1 Like
34

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.