Today in my lesson I learned the vocab 珠算: Calculation With Abacus. And I can’t help but feel this is the most useless vocab Wanikani has taught me. I don’t think I will ever need to know this word. At least with the baseball vocab it has relevance to actual life in Japan as baseball is incredibly popular here.
Do you agree?
I guess it depends on you?
I am nowhere near your level, but sometimes I feel the team did not have much to work with to introduce vocab that is related to the kanji they just introduced. And WK put the emphasis on kanji, not on practical use vocab, so…
IIRC, the Abacus is still used in at least tea trading wholesale auctions. It is a piece of cultural history some people interested in that sort of thing about Japan may find interesting to explore outside WK.
I guess it depends on whether you’re into Soroban competitions
The small butcher shop near my place uses one, no cash register there. Not the only shop I have seen that uses one.
Soroban is still taught as part of math classes at some schools. There are private soroban schools as well.
There are two white furry dogs recently…
To be fair, the feeling of need to learn vocab in advance, out of context, decreases after a while, but such vocab could be learned to reinforce the Kanji. It’s not like the vocab is super hard to remember in this case. Memory may be extrapolated to future experience someday, not necessarily directly.
Yeah, I think it’s neat!
But the reason I mentioned the competition is because the kanji combination mentioned in the post is used in the video description because it’s part of the name of the competition 
Almost makes you wonder, if there are no frequent words left that use the kanji, why are you bothering to reinforce it?
Children learn how to use the abacus from grade school in Japan so I suppose this may come in handy to me doen the road when the vocab potentially appears in my children’s lessons. 
Of course not everyone will have children in Japan or work with them so I can see how the vocab seems useless.
Personally I don’t watch baseball, and when people talk about it, they use the katakana versions to discuss the positions like ピッチャー anyway. So 投手 is fairly useless to me, but I could also just be saying that because I keep failing to recall it in my reviews. XD
Gonna come down to what you read I guess, but I have seen 珠 many, many times.
Outside its cultural context, it may sound weird
But soroban is a pretty huge thing in Japan
There are many regional and national soroban competitions, they’re pretty big deals
It’s like the baseball vocab; yes, to someone who doesn’t watch sports it may be indeed useless but baseball is the most popular sport in Japan
Meanwhile, someone in Japan is complaining why their English SRS app teaches the terms “quarterback”, “touchdown” and “cleats”
I put the vocab into bookwalker and….
近江成親（おうみ・なりちか/通称・ちか）は、中学時代、 強豪サッカー部のレギュラーだったが、ワケあって高校ではサッカーが続けられない。 ある日、ちかは“フラッシュ暗算”の数字を次々と当てたことから、 その動体視力と瞬間視力を買われ、なんと珠算部に勧誘される。 イヤミな大機（だいき）、変わり者の峯（みね）、覇気のない顧問・中塚というメンバーに引き気味のちかだが、 紅一点の有未（うみ）から、動体視力の向上と上がり症克服のための特訓を頼まれて……。ご破算になった夢があった──この新たな出会いがご名答、となるか!? 珠算部を舞台におくる、ハイスクール・ストーリー!!
Because of course there’s a manga about the abacus club.
TIL
should’ve figured Japan would still have something like this
My answer wasn’t regarding that particular kanji, but regarding the general statement that “WaniKani doesn’t have a lot to work with sometimes”. It wasn’t even regarding kanji frequency, but that further reinforcing a kanji when you’ve already learned all relevant words it appears in seems quite pointless.
Replying to your statement anyways:
I’m reading a book on World War II right now, and the kanji appears quite a lot because of 真珠湾. But quite frankly, the argument “It’s frequent somewhere” doesn’t cut it for a general learners platform like WaniKani. Almost every word/kanji is frequent somewhere.
In the book I’m reading right now, 零戦 is among the top 50 most frequent words according to jpdb. Am quite confident I’ll never need it again after having finished this particular book.
Learning niche words/kanji is something you should do when you come across them, not as part of some general learners course.
Signed in just so I could like this post.
Trust me, I never meant it that way; it’s just a really common kanji. I only included the “comes down to what you read” bit to be nicer and kinda soften the statement. I don’t really disagree with anything you’re saying in general but this energy that you’re knocking down 10 arguments I never put forward is exhausting; this isn’t Reddit. If I misread the intention of your statement due to the context of the thread it’s in, my mistake on that one. Best of luck to you.
I’ll just post a single picture and peace out
You can come to your own conclusions about what the picture means I guess
To be fair, I’m knocking down only one argument 
Though it seems I misunderstood the point you were trying to make.
Putting the discussion aside, I apologize if the tone of my reply didn’t sit right with you. I get a bit enthusiastic when it comes to these things, it wasn’t my intention to make you feel bad 
I wouldn’t knock down niche things as useless, just less useful to learn in advance. Well, it exists in across media forms.
Though, I feel there is no need to learn in advance that 盤 can be an abacus. It should be OK if the person know about 算盤.
It’s a recurring debate on this forum, somebody complains that word/kanji x is niche and others chime in to say “well actually I visited a Japanese laryngologist convention the other week and it was super useful there”.
That’s just the problem with front-loading vocab and kanji like this. For common stuff like 食べる, 絶対 and 少し there’s no issue because you’ll always need those regardless of what you read. Meanwhile there’s still kanji and vocab from WaniKani that I’ve yet to encounter in the wild. I don’t think I’ve seen 暫く written in kanji for instance. 肯く I do read often… with a different kanji: 頷く. A lot of food related vocab I encounter in kana only/mostly. And the 名乗り kanji that are only used in people/place names are a terrible fit for WK, they should all be removed IMO.
That’s one of the reasons I believe that WaniKani is too long or too inflexible for its own good, eventually you want to be able to handpick the stuff you learn based on your usage of the language.
