WaniKani Switching the "Kanji Reading" on a bunch of Kanji?

I learned from WaniKani a while back that the “kanji reading” for the “compete” kanji 競 was きそ (kiso). To remember that, I used a mnemonic of imaging two brothers competing to win a kiss (kiso).

Today I’m doing my reviews and now it says the “kanji reading” for 競 is きょう (kyou).

I’ve noticed this with about 5-10 other kanji in the past month or two where they are changing the “kanji reading” to one of the other readings than they originally taught.

I thought what they choose as the “kanji reading” was based on whichever reading has the highest percentage of how frequently it is used in the vocab readings. So what is going on here? It’s not like the vocab readings can change, so why is the “most frequent” kanji reading changing on a bunch of these? It’s getting a little annoying that I have to keep altering my mnemonics.

Do you know when you had learned the きそ reading for 競? I only joined WK in 2019, so I’m not sure if this was always the system, but the WK team posts content updates to the forums when they make changes to kanji reading or meanings. Doing a search for “競 content”, I see a couple threads going back to 2020, but none making the change you mention. Usually if I feel like something is different than what I’d originally learned, I’ll search through the forums. WK is pretty good at giving you a notification during reviews if you made a mistake on something that recently changed though, so it tends to be me misremembering things haha.

きそ is the kun’yomi, and as of right now, you only learn it when you learn the 競う vocab. The on’yomi, or “kanji reading” is きょう or けい. Since きそ is the kun’yomi, I don’t think it ever would’ve been taught as the “kanji reading” regardless of frequency.

WK does actually reference kissing in the reading mnemonic for きそ. Is it possible you may have switched up the two?

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I get the impression that the kanji readings were not selected with a 100% objective rule like that. There’s some “use the common one” and some “make the kanji reading the on-yomi, because you’ll learn the kun-yomi as a vocab item”, and sometimes those two ideas conflict, and sometimes a choice somebody made a decade ago looks worth revisiting because the reading that got picked wasn’t actually a very common one. Plus new vocab gets added so even if they were using a “whichever is most common in the vocab in WK” rule it might change occasionally.

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You’re right, I probably forgot on this one that the verb “to compete” used one reading and the kanji itself used the other reading.
But I feel like there have been a few others where I was certain they just switched the “kanji reading” of the kanji itself.

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Thanks, I thought I had read somewhere they said they choose the most common reading as the “kanji reading” so just wondered if that wasn’t entirely true or if I somehow made that up.

They changed the reading of 床 from しょう to ゆか when they moved it down in June because the compound words with しょう aren’t as common as just talking about the floor in general.

I think there’s at least one other kanji in that list that changed reading (they have explanations in there too), but I didn’t bother going through the whole list to check.

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Mmm, there’s “common in the word set WK has”, “common in words with this kanji in general”, and there’s “if you see this kanji in the wild what’s the reading most likely to be?”, which are all different metrics…

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Wouldn’t “what you see in the wild” correlate to “common words used in general”?

I took “common in words with this kanji in general” to refer to the frequency of dictionary entries with that reading and kanji, while “what you see in the wild” is just that.

So like, you could have a kanji/reading pair that appears in 6 out 10 times the kanji shows up in dictionary entries, but the most common word in the wild is one of the other 4.

That’s how I interpreted it anyway.

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Yep, that’s the distinction I had in mind.

There is a couple like 床下 and 床板 which use the kun’yomi reading. Of actually common ones using the on’yomi reading I can think of 起床 and 病床. In that sense it would still make sense to keep しょう for the kanji, since ゆか is covered by the vocab item, but YMMV.