Books in Japan tend to be cheaper on the whole. 100 yen books aren’t rare.
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Native Japanese by and large don’t understand what vocabulary or grammar you have to or should know. They are Japanese, not Japanese teachers.
WK is one of those rare tools that work really well for intermediate/advanced students. I’ve run across so many of those “we don’t use those words” in real life. It taught me a number of N1 grammar points before I even started studying for the test.
When it comes to tools of communication, it’s most all important.
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WK is a very efficient and effective way to learn all the kanji that are on WK.
It is designed for people who want to learn all 2027 of those kanji quickly and/or easily (such as people who want to approach native fluency in reading comprehension). There will still be tons of kanji and vocab to learn afterwards, but they will be significantly easier to pick up.
If you want to prioritize the 1000-2000 most common vocabulary words, you can get an Anki deck for that, build your own, or use Houhou, and do that in parallel with Wanikani. They will synergize and make each other easier. I definitely knew 友達 before I got to it on WK, but WK gave me a relationship with the kanji. That means I have the tools to read stuff like the anime title 夏目友人帳 without struggling.
An additional note: having the useful and cool vocab spread out across all levels helped keep me excited to get to the next level when I was approaching the end.
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Really interesting thread. I’ll throw in my experience too.
I started Wanikani after learning 6k words with Iknow (which is much more “usage” oriented) and 2k kanji with Heisig (forgot half of those sadly), and I have to say that I was really pleased to learn a lot of vocab I didn’t know. It’s not used everyday, sure, but it’s a great complement and if you aim for native fluency, it’s a must learn anyway.
It’s true that Wanikani is not optimal for beginners or anyone who want to be functional fast (like you it seems), but as @fyp said, for an intermediate level like me it’s a perfect fit.
PS: I started to learn the kanji I found while learning vocab with Iknow, and it didn’t work out at all for me, too many complex kanji with unknown radicals, too hard to remember properly. That’s why I turned to Heisig which uses, like WK, increasing complexity, a method I found way easier and effective.
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Gimme more examples please!
Wanna learn Persona 5 Kanjis, too.
Any idea why Personn uses Kanji for Kana words?
All the Japanese people I know use 故郷 to mean hometown, which you can also write as 古里
Seriously? There isn’t a single kanji from wanikani that I haven’t seen in real life
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Some of the ones from this topic were also from P5.
It’s a combination of keeping things from getting repetitive and some segments having a decidedly high register feeling.
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Koichi had this to say about the topic a while back
And also in that thread made this comparison with the iknow.jp Core6K/10K word lists floating around
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Also, Koichi elaborates a bit on the reasoning for not teaching kanji in the same order as Japanese school children here (under the not-so-subtle header “FAILURE #4: YOU LEARN KANJI LIKE JAPANESE SCHOOL CHILDREN (I.E. IN THE WRONG ORDER)”)
Here’s an excerpt I’ve semi-butchered to make fit in a forum thread:
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Yo dude! Don’t worry if people say they never use that word. Through the very act of them telling you this, you’ve learnt that not only is this word never used casually in spoken Japanese, but you’ve also learned the corresponding more universally used word as well. Sweeeeeeeet!!
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Reading this reminded me I still don’t understand why 匂い wasn’t included in the ten extra levels.
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Interesting thread. Being only a mere level 3 participant I obviously haven’t much experience to go on. However one thing I’d say about the ordering of the Kanji. As well as WK, I also take classes at the Japan Foundation and do a private class once a week to try and get some conversation. The private class uses みなの 日本語 for the text book which while it has Kanji seems to kana all the kanji most of the time.
I think the suggestion of selecting an ordering sequence is a good one. I appreciate that the creators of WK have a specific plan and order, that’s great and really helpful. It’s just that it would be good if I could be using WK to reinforce my JF course. Maybe letting users choose a stream that matches up to other providers order would be good for WK and those providers.
Anyway no criticism intended, I think WK is great and intend to work at it for quite some time.
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I’m only level 4, but what I understand and please correct me if I’m wrong, is that the vocab words are mostly used to reinforce what you learnt, but also teaches you the over readings of said Kanji. for the 友人 example, 友達 is one of the example vocab of 友, for instance. I will agree with you that a vocab extension would be amazing as I love the way wanikani teaches.
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Heh, yeah that’s crazy.
OP meant that he hadn’t seen 好き in Wanikani yet, not that he hadn’t seen it in Japan.
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Well, I mean, we know she didn’t like him from that.
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lets not act our shoe size and get personal with our criticism
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Alternatively lets just not say dumb things. Both you and OP could learn from that.
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I see this criticism a lot and Im glad it didn’t put me off. Even learning one kanji for common words like 友達 and 野菜 really help me read this words in other japanese learning material when it’s in context. In this case i only know 友 and 野 but that is totally good enough to read these words in context until I get to the other kanji, which will then be further reinforced.
I can see why some people are frustrated but as it is I’ve learnt way more japanese pairing wanikani with other sources than I did from 2 semesters at university
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I’m with @timothydang here; getting personal is just nasty.
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