Oh no I dug in and made one of the best investments of my life! Now I know 6000 words I had no idea existed before. I’m so mad!
Let’s keep feeding the troll to find out what happens.
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The focus of the vocab is to teach and reinforce the kunyomi readings, dismissing it as useless is a little harsh
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Haven’t come to understand and love the ways of the Crabigator yet? Some just aren’t chosen, I suppose.
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Personally, I had already finished the Heisig method before moving on to WaniKani, mainly in order to learn readings and a few bonus vocab.
And honestly, although I already know the most part of the meaning parts of my lessons, I find the WaniKani method really efficient, especially because you don’t have to waste any time managing your review settings and wondering whether they are optimal or not. You just have to wait for your review to be available and do them. This way, the learning is almost automatic for me : I didn’t think I would be able to learn readings that efficiently.
And I don’t find the vocab useless. It can be pretty archaic sometimes, and some of the words are definitely not the ones a beginner should focus on to quickly manage to speak, but it is really instructive etymologically speaking.
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Literally everything you described can be done using HouHou. Go do that.
You can have the specific radicals you want use uploaded to the app and it has all of the vocab imaginable. You have to make up the mnemonics, but its free so…
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I disagree completely. I don’t retain the vocab if I don’t learn it in kanji form, and I think this is something that many other people probably feel as well, AND it’s missing from a lot of ‘Learn Japanese’ materials. WaniKani does a great job of connecting together the kanji with vocab so you get a solid base that is usable. Even if you don’t always remember the mnenomic you start to figure out ways to read it like a cryptic crossword or you can put in your own notes that help you remember it. If you already know a bunch of Kanji it just makes it easier to get to the vocab and frankly you need to know the kanji to learn the vocab. There are scripts you can use to help you skip through things a little faster. I guess you wouldn’t realise this because you’ve made a judgement before doing your research.
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This gave me a really good smirk.
I’m so glad you’re around.
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I get where you’re coming from but you’ve only just got here, stick this thing out it’s totally worth it. It’s difficult for me to explain succinctly but I’ll try…
When I do my core 2000 flashcards sometimes I come across a word made of 3 or 4 different kanji. One or two of the kanji I already learned here and there are one or two new ones.
For example 横断歩道 (おうだんほどう) When I first saw this I had already learned 横 (おうside, 歩（ほ）walk and 道 (どう) road. I didn’t know 断 (だん) What could it mean? Well I’ve already learned the right side of it 斤 (きん) which means axe. I later learned that the new kanji means disconnect. Axes are used to disconnect branches from trees right?? Handy mnemonic there…who knows it might be the official one they’ve used on wanikani. To sum up: side disconnect walk road = pedestrian crossing.
I feel like spending these last four months here have programmed all of the basics in so well that I’m always in the position where any Japanese content I look at I’m always in the position to infer. Instead of looking at an advanced text and feeling stupid, now I always at least have a crack at picking apart unknown kanji and trying to decode it if possible. I’m not always right but it makes looking at advanced stuff less disheartening. I can’t remember now for a while the last time I saw a kanji that didn’t at least have one component that I recognize. I reckon this is just going to increase exponentially as I go up through the levels and give me the ability to understand Japanese through Japanese instead of constantly relying on translations.
As an analogy It seems to me that the first 20 levels or so of wanikani are similar to looking for all the pieces with edges first when you’re doing a jigsaw. Once you’ve done that all of the pieces start to fall into place easy peasy.
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… oh. Damn, I would have done that if I hadn’t just bought a lifetime subscription.
Well, I love WK (and the community) anyway, so I’m happy with contributing.
I’ll probably try HouHou on the side then. 
Considering this guy didn’t make a single reply after this I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say it’s just a troll.
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OR we got him super fuckin’ good haha yeah highfives
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Wanikani is not for learning vocab, it is for learning kanji. The vocab are only there to help you learn the kanji. On it’s own, to a beginner, wanikani is not much use because you learn obscure words rather than common ones. The only goal of wanikani is to teach you kanji, from scratch.
It’s no good on it’s own for vocab for a beginner, but that’s not what it’s for, it’s designed to teach you 2000 KANJI, from scratch. The vocab are only there to help you learn the kanji.
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They didn’t even wanted an answer, they just came here to rant and then left forever
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We got some funny replies out of it though so it’s all good.
Hey nice Sakamoto picture! I don’t know how long you’ve had it, but I literally just noticed
It’s my picture since I’m Sakamoto-san.
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It’s the Wanikani version of Betteridge’s law of headlines: if a post contains the word useless the answer to it is no.
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He most likely gave up on even trying to argue after realizing how inquisitous a large part of the WK community is.
IMO his post may be uninformed and offensive but your way to deal with it was equally idiotic
Woah there calm down, my friend 
Nobody expects the Wanikani inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise… Our two weapons are fear and surprise…and ruthless efficiency… Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope… Our four…no… Amongst our weapons… Amongst our weaponry…are such elements as fear, surprise… I’ll come in again.
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