I started using the frequency indication in yomichan to decide whether I want to deal with some of my leeches.
I can’t remember what the word was (that’s sort of the problem really) but there was this one vocab leech whose irregular reading I just couldn’t stick. Then I checked with yomichan and saw that it was below top 100k in word frequency. I just stopped caring immediately.
For words like 楽天主義 I think it’s less worse because while the word itself is rare (top 112k according to my plugin) it does reinforce the regular onyomi readings of the kanji and the meaning is easy to derive by breaking it apart.
So while it may not be an ideal choice it’s still not too frustrating to deal with.
Meanwhile I find a word like 賄う a lot more annoying. It’s a lot more common than 楽天主義 according to my plugin but still not ultra-common and it has a kunyomi reading I need to memorize and the meaning of the word is not obvious from the meaning of the kanji and the meaning of the word overlaps with other vocab (払う), making it harder to distinguish it.
Fully agree, I don’t understand why they don’t just teach the する version or just the noun version. Get rid of those duplicates and replace them with more useful vocab!
Also some entries read more like grammar points than proper vocab. 恥知らず for instance.
I take it you mean the exact English definition wanikani chooses? 賄う is pretty different from 払う. Especially 賄い which I see most often and is used for providing food typically.
算定 is another one of those words that doesn’t even need to be on here in the first place I feel. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually seen it and I just showed it to my girlfriend and her first response was “what does that mean?”. 算’s さん and 定’s てい reading are already reinforced by better Vocabulary (ironically one of which is the common word for calculation, 計算), so it makes little sense to have 算定 in the first place rather than some other more common word. Or at least a word that a native will know when you ask them.
I think 定 is common enough by itself to appear many times. 算 is used in different math words so even if not terribly common in general, I’d say these are useful at least. Not sure if they appear on WaniKani.
I also couldn’t recall what 算定 means and had to check. Pretty sure my teacher would react with いや、言わないで to it .
Correct, I haven’t encountered 賄う in the wild yet (I think) so I have to memorize it in a vacuum which isn’t helping. Looking at examples I see that the meaning is notably different but it’s just hard to commit that to memory the way WK does it.
There’s ‘learning words to learn kanji readings’ and ‘learning vocabulary,’ and I think many words in wanikani are falling into the second category. For me this isn’t good, because in my experience the best way to learn vocabulary is in the context of sentences and through exposure.
However I’ll say that it’s important to memorize some words to learn kanji meanings and different readings. I think it sticks in your head better than just looking at the kanji alone.
I totally agree darkvitae81, I love using Wanikani but a lot of the vocabulary (approx 40%) that I’ve learnt and then tried to use with native speakers gets the same response “Oh I’ve never heard that word before” or “Oh we don’t use that word”. I understand there is a difference between written and spoken vocab but a lot of the vocab isnt used in either and thus a waste of memory space (already very limited). Currently learning the vocab is taking way more time that the kanji which isnt the reason I started using the app. Also the recent new additions of こんにちは, これ、それ etc etc is just furthering the frustration. I’m starting to explore the idea of ignoring all the vocabulary and just concentrating on the kanji as suggested by a few users as their preferred method. But agree this could impact retention so have just continued to plod along with a lessening degree of customer satisfaction…
@Waniguchi i tried a few days ago only focus on kanji but its difficult since there is no vocabulary support, same useless in my level 25 cos its not in sync with my japanese level (preparing N3) and completely boring cos i dont need most of those kanjis for anything right now
so I GAVE UP and not using WK anymore. also not recommending it to my friends and colleagues at work and other japanese students
it was worth it for the first 10-15 levels to get used to kanjis and to learn probably the simple ones but im not wasting energies anymore. in the last 5 levels i felt really frustrated and confused and stopped liking the idea of learning kanjis. im not complaining about difficulty or learning kanjis itself cos i loved it but rather the whole WK experience past the levels 18-20. its funny the way WK classifies levels (nightmare, hell, etc…) cos the kanjis are still interesting but the WK learning process becomes more and more frustrating cos the way they classify (kanjis with same meaning in same level) and teach
in only 3 days using jpdb.io i was able to read quickly the first volume of “fumetsu no anata e” and feeling much more motivated every morning before work doing my reviews, since the words and kanjis im learning are having a purpose. also this site is very customizable so you can learn them in many useful orders (by frequency in single manga volume card deck, all decks, in whole db, etc…). thanks to whoever mentioned this site here. im also paying 5e per month to have up to WK level 25 kanjis and words marked as known and also to compensate the dev cos even if the site is still beta, she/he is doing a wonderful job.
for the JLPT words and kanjis i am using anki decks and im delightful
Maybe if you haven’t yet email them about it? Just copy paste what you said here or something. Maybe they’ll actually look at it…
Totally agree with you btw, just might as well try and get them to improve it while we’re at it
I’ve been considering doing the same once my yearly subscription expires this October, by which I should have been able to hit level 30 - whilst Wanikani has definitely been useful for teaching me Kanji I can’t say the same for the vocabularly.
I didn’t mind that too much as their primary purpose was to reinforce the Kanji being learnt, I think they’ve done their job for this. However the selection of words is fairly varied in real world usefulness, and even then they are taught as recall only - it already feels like I am already hitting diminishing returns in the sense of time spent to knowledge gained, which will likely get worse beyond level 30.
these complains have been there for years and always ignored. this thread is under feedback so they should check it
since in joined WK in 2020 i haven seen many technical changes or major improvement in the whole WK teaching method. the improvements have been happening in the WK script community
in any case a lifetime user like me giving up on WK is not important from a revenue point of view
right know the most important thing for me is having the motivation back for learning kanjis and vocabulary and jpdb.io is doing that, so i really dont care about not reaching 60 level in WK :b
I’ve also recently started using jpdb.io to learn vocabulary.
I’ve selected a few of the built-in vocabulary decks for books I want to read. I love watching the progress bars march across the page as I learn. Very motivating.
I wouldn’t recommend skipping the vocab, but my approach lately has been to ignore/deprioritize WK vocab if it’s not a common word and the reading/meaning is tricky.
So for instance a word like 泥水 (muddy water) doesn’t seem particularly common or useful word, but the meaning and reading are obvious from the kanji so it makes for decent kanji practice and I review it normally.
A word like 下手 or the newly arrived 上手い have tricky readings, but they’re super useful words so they’re well worth practicing, on WK or elsewhere.
On the other hand you have words like 飴細工 (candy sculpture) whose meaning and reading are tricky and it doesn’t appear to be a particularly common word, in this case I feel free to pass it with scripts in order to focus on more important words.
No, it doesn’t have manga currently. As I understand it this is because to create the deck they need machine readable text to feed into their analyser. For books, games and TV you can get ebooks, hook the script out of a game, or get subtitle files. But for manga you would need to do OCR, and they’re not set up to do that. Their FAQ says
Yes, this is a planned feature, although not in the near future due to the huge amount of work necessary.
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