This is 100% off-topic but I haven’t seen you on here before and I cannot walk away from this thread without telling you that your avatar / name is adorable.
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This is very useful, thank you!
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Aww xD thanks lolol. 
Cows are my favorite. Your avatar/name is adorable too!
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I honestly strongly disagree with the assessment that the early levels are filled with uncommon kanji that has been made by certain people in this topic. They’re welcome to their opinion, but I feel it’s particularly misleading in this case. I’ve come across so many words from wanikani already, and I’m only a beginner reader. The early levels are absolutely filled with super useful kanji.
There are definitely some very useful kanji that are missing early on (the I’s (私、俺、僕, etc）are a particularly memorable case to me, but you also see them often enough when reading that you learn them very quickly. Same with the days of the week.), but even by level 10 you’ll have cut down the number of kanji you have to look up by a significant amount.
I’ve been collecting words I’ve picked up from Graded Readers and other sources and plugging them into HouHou, and most of them do appear in WaniKani eventually- most within the first half of wanikani (before level 30). There are some exceptions, but in those cases you just need to look them up as you find them, and having learned the kanji you’ll have a heads up on the meaning and reading.
So tl;dr: You learn useful kanji and vocab early on. You will continue to learn useful kanji and vocab. There will be some holes. Those holes will eventually be plugged, in most cases, but if they are not you will still be well equipped to deal with those holes by the time you are done with WaniKani.
(The most significant words wanikani is missing are those general words that are usually written in kana. This is because wanikani is a kanji site and not a vocabulary site, and you’ll need to study those through other means. Should be obvious, but I feel in this topic it probably needs to be said.)
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Thanks for the thorough reply & sharing your experience, it was very reassuring. ^^ WK helped me a ton because it made the idea of learning kanji less futile. I can only recognize 私 for now, but just like you said, I picked up on that one easily because it was so common.
I’ve downloaded HouHou but haven’t gotten around to using it yet so I don’t know much about it, but I think I will try your kanji study method. (Using HouHou to fill in the kanji WK hasn’t gotten to yet or just plug in unfamiliar kanji found in the wild.)
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Unless I missed something, the assertion isn’t that the kanji are uncommon so much as it’s the vocab chosen to illustrate their use. Which seems fair, but, for some useful kanji, there really isn’t a big pool of vocab from which to draw, and it gets smaller later on, when kanji become more specific in nature.
I recall, when I was still around level 5, seeing someone complain that a boyfriend/girlfriend was watching them study and commented that 大きさ isn’t a word anybody actually uses. But it happend to be the first word I remember encountering that illustrated how -さ works. Even though I didn’t need that vocab item to reinforce what 大 meant, or its reading, that small difference in conjugation is what clued me in to how okurigana actually interact with kanji.
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I would like to pile on because I can. WK is freaking brilliant. For my American 26 letter reptile brain that is. It is more than just packing Kanji into grey matter. It forces you to learn how to study better. Oh and by the way, I can use it until I die for money I forked over years ago. Also the level of banter inside said crabiuniverse is A level stuff.
I also like that WK has the potential to change and improve. Lets add more example sentences. Lets have somebody read the sentences aloud so all of the other words are pronounced so you can see if you really read that sentence right.
Let us add our own vocab and review that when we want. One SRS system instead of 8 that all are begging you for eyeball and finger time. Let us keep fighting but also let’s make this party better, for everyone. There are a lot of smart people lurking here and for a smaller less computer savvy invertebrate like myself, why can’t add as much as we take from all of the work that K and crew have put into this humble exercise? That is how useless all of this is.
ragequit is my new favorite word/verb I picked up this week. Thank you for that.
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More on the point, WK builds the mental infrastructure to find fill those holes yourself. Everyone has different goals in Japanese so words common for some people will be uncommon for others. Furthermore, in a day to day experience reading is a whole lot more important than speaking. (think about how many more signs there are than receptionist and information booths). And from personal experience, there is nothing better than sprinkling in a few “uncommon words” (properly used of course) in a conversation with a native speaker who isn’t expecting it.
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Yes. The way the levels are set up appears to be a trade-off between complexity of radicals and everyday usefulness, with a side of “there’s no way you’ve been reading anything without learning this through exposure” thrown in to justify not making exceptions, like 私, 俺, and 僕, as mentioned above.
You’ll generally learn the most useful kanji you can for the radicals you know and the radicals are introduced in in an order intended to get you seeing useful kanji as early as possible without being overwhelmed. It’s imperfect and occasionally frustrating because you’ll learn something like 麦 (wheat) way, WAY before 砂糖 (sugar), but it’ll work as long as you keep at it.
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You’re welcome, I hope it helps! I just wanted to correct that misconception.
I’ve found HouHou to be very useful as a secondary SRS to backup WaniKani. I’m not nearly as good about using it every day, but I also don’t fill it up with as many words. Some people use Anki, but Houhou is easier and I’m lazy 
In any case, I wish you luck. If it doesn’t work out for you, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with trying another method. I just think WaniKani isn’t bad as certain posts give the impression it is.
The person I was thinking of in particular was uh, pretty much bashing the entire system and not just vocab choices.
For example. I got the impression that he felt most of the early kanji themselves were not useful, and that’s just not true.
In the case of specific vocab, yeah, there’s going to be some that are rarer (though even 大きさ is considered a “common word” by jisho.org, which means it’s going to come up in reading materials eventually even if it’s not the type of word that makes for great spoken conversation), but a large quantity of the words really do seem useful. I can’t pull out hard data, besides that I’ve encountered a lot of them in the wild already, and I’ve looked up some of the seemingly niche words and found they are still considered common, in both jisho and houhou, for what that’s worth. If you need more than that, ask Leebo or Syphus about it XD
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Oh, yeah, that guy. Yeah, I don’t know what he was going on about. The simplest, most useful kanji happen to fit earlier in the JLPT sets, but it’s obvious that WK, at least in part, chose what goes where based on how people tend to navigate their study paths.
I’m positive that some words between levels 3 and 10 were selected specifically because they show up in resources like Genki, and some between 8 and 13 were prioritised because they’re encountered in Yotsuba.
…Or maybe I’m just being blind to confirmation bias.
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Kind of agree with the OP as I am also in Japan however I view this as a long haul or nothing kind of deal
Lots of people are in Japan but don’t agree with OP.
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Good lord, Japanese people, can they just shut up about what they think gets used or doesn’t get used? Seriously? What are they basing it on?
大きさ appears 6090 times in the BCCWJ. That’s really common.
I mean, I guess they mean that in conversation, if you’re talking about clothes or something, you say サイズ usually… but that’s just one context. Do they even realize WK is about learning written Japanese anyway?
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Most people don’t seem to realise just how different the spoken and written usages of a language are, sadly…
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Some people who are using WK are not realizing that it’s about written Japanese, how should the people watching over your shoulder know? 
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Wait, those symbol things are for Japanese? shoot…I thought this was a dating website for basic emoji training…so many hours wasted…
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* should I ask what a dating website for basic emoji training is … *
* Better not. *
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