We’ll change that as part of this week’s updates 
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Thank you!
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Can you either add “to damage” to WaniKani / Vocabulary / 痛める or add “to injure” to WaniKani / Vocabulary / 傷める or both? These are basically different ways to write いためる, and the meaning is almost the same.
I’m no expert, but don’t the kanji spellings indicate differences in semantics, even though their pronunciations are the same? As in 聴く and 聞く, which have slightly differing meanings which wanikani differentiates.
edit: it’s about semantics, not precedent. I’m an idiot.
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It says “usually”. There’s nothing mutually exclusive about “usually”.
I will delete that part of my comment, then. It’s not even relevant anyway; even though WaniKani as an SRS system isn’t designed to teach nuance, the semantics of the glosses that they use should reflect as accurately as practically possible the nuances encoded within the term being translated, especially when the glosses being used are generally fairly common in English.
My point still stands. Your screenshot still says “usually”.
Here’s an example sentence in English: “Playing games too much will hurt your eyes.”.
Which vocab would you use to translate that into Japanese? 痛める or 傷める? Hint: you can cheat and look it up on WK.
If there was a Japanese proficiency test where you have to translate that sentence, would the native speaker Japanese teacher mark you wrong if you use 痛める instead of 傷める? Or the other way around?
Nobody’s saying that’s a hard and fast rule. Of course it’s a gradient on how strong the difference between the semantics of the different kanji spellings are; presumably the WK team previously thought that it was strong enough to warrant differentiating them within the SRS system. But that’s their call, not mine, especially since I’m not a native speaker.
edit: I seem to have contradicted myself. Forget about precedent.
Also, I don’t think it’s productive to argue further, given that we both know of the existence of the encoded nuance; evidently you don’t think it’s strong enough to warrant different keywords. I’m inclined to abstain from giving an opinion, because I generally have no experience with the language.
There is a time when you have to be precise about which words you use, e.g. writing a scientific paper, writing an investigative newspaper article, writing laws. Learning the language as a beginner or intermediate learner is not the time to be overly rigid with definitions.
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but if you’re going to be teaching the words anyway, why not just use the glosses that most closely match the nuance of the Japanese word? It’s not like they’re going to cycle in the SRS queue for that long anyway, and it’s not that much harder to remember. It’s the same idea as with the きくs. Besides, there are only a handful of these in the program, out of thousands of vocabulary items. They’re not going to dent your progress at all.
anyway, this still comes down to respelling semantic differences. Maybe the association isn’t that strong, maybe it is. I don’t know. But pragmatically it’s not much different to the end user to put these differences into the system, like with transitivity pairs (although some would argue that they represent something different entirely.)
“To hear” and “to listen” are two different things both in English and in Japanese, and therefore each language uses different words.
“To harm” and “to hurt” are not that different. If you play video games too much, your eyes will both hurt and be harmed.
This is why I said it all boils down to how ‘different’ the meanings are. Perhaps you think ‘hear’ and ‘listen’ and very different; other than the factor of intent/focus, they are identical. I feel that the argument about whether to differentiate the latter Japanese verb pair using different glosses is best left to the natives, and the specific words used for the glosses (if they are to be distinguished) can be discussed with a translator aware of the constraints imposed by the program.
Here’s an example of mutual exclusivity: it’s marked with “only applies to”:
What? Those are different japanese verbs represented with the same kanji. They even have different pronunciations. Am I missing your point here?
The point: “only applies to” is different from “usually”.
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…I’m not disputing that, though? I’m just saying that there are different levels of “usually”, and unless you’re highly proficient in the language you won’t be able to make the call on whether they should be distinguished on an SRS platform like WK’s.
Did I say they were the same somewhere??
Here are two Yahoo! News articles about the same Mixed Martial Artist Kai Asakura. One uses 痛める and the other uses 傷める to describe the same injury:
実は海は1ラウンドに右の拳を傷めていたという。
途中右拳を痛めながらも3－0判定で勝利して大晦日に同会場で開催される準決勝、決勝へコマを進めた。
How do you explain that?
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Putting aside the fact that one news article isn’t enough to warrant any kind of conclusion regarding word usage, I’d like to reiterate that I never said anything about how specific words were being used, because I don’t know anything about that. The fact that they are used interchangeably in one article isn’t relevant to the corpus usage, which is the standard that should be used when deciding the central question, which is whether two terms should have different glosses in an SRS system.
But the fact that a native Japanese speaker does not worry too much about which kanji to use should point out that those kanji are to some degree interchangeable, and the synonyms should be added to WK.
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