Why do we learn 決 but not 決断?

Maybe you can look at it it this way: WK teaches both 決 and 断 and their readings. And when you know those two it’s easy to learn 決断 on your own.
Also, there’s a deck on Memrise that teaches vocab made only from kanji you learn on WK. Maybe you’d find it useful?

2 Likes

Language skill and literacy are completely separate skills. People can and do live their lives without ever learning to read. That’s far less common today than historically, but it demonstrates how divorced those two skillsets are. WaniKani is not designed to teach you Japanese, it’s designed to make you literate in Japanese so that actually learning it will be far more accessible.

Think of Kanji like an alphabet of ~2500 core characters. WaniKani teaches you most of those characters, and you’re given a few example words to reinforce it. When I was taught literacy in kindergarten they started with “A is for apple, B is for big booty bitches, C is for crayon…” etc. The WaniKani curriculum is just like that… with 2000 logographs to spend years learning. :smiley:

It’s strange to me that so many people seem to have a desire to use words they’ve only seen in one arbitrary study context anyway. That’s how you end up misusing words constantly. Memorization apps and textbooks omit the vast majority of colloquial expressions which are kind of the backbone of conversation. The way I see it is that WaniKani supercharges the ease of all other study, other study enables input immersion, and vast quantities of immersion are prerequisite to actually speaking without sounding like a textbook or a Mad Libs book.

20 Likes

There are a list of vocab words on Wanikani containing 決
… and there are also a list of vocab words containing 断.

So it really makes little sense not to include 決断 anyways. We are learning thousands of words as it is so why leave the common ones up to us to learn? Why not include them too? I feel like I want to practice all of the practical uses of the kanji via Wanikani, as well as the uncommon words. I want to do it all…

1 Like

If you read the Intro to WaniKani I believe it sufficiently answers this question.
Anyway I strongly recommend that you also learn a core 6k vocab list especially if you want to learn common words first. You will find that it’s much easier to learn them now that you have a better understanding of Kanji and how they are constructed, which may have significantly slowed your progress before. Once you’ve finished a core 2k you can jump right into reading teenage manga with a satisfying result.

4 Likes

It makes a lot of sense not to include it. Wanikani isn’t meant to do it all. It’s a kanji learning tool. Not a vocabulary learning tool. If you want vocab go to torii, kitsun, or anki. Wanikani is only using vocabulary to support kanji learning. If you’re looking for vocabulary as the goal it’s beyond the scope of wanikani’s purpose.
It’s important that you keep this in mind because many words wanikani “teaches” are only to give you more practice with kanji. So it’s all balanced because it has many kanji to teach. It can’t just bog you down with every possible word that 決 is used with or even care if the word it chose to teach you is common or not. Instead, it tends to show you a word where the kanji is alone, at the beginning of a word, end of a word, rendaku’d, and it’s kunyomi/verb usage. The word selection is about capturing how pronunciations work in different contexts.

1 Like

決断 isn’t exactly a beginner word either. It wouldn’t be strange to me to not have either 決 or 決断 as vocab.

Because Wanikani is a stepping stone to reading. You’re meant to leave the nest sooner or later, as cozy as it may be.

But if you’re dead set on that particular item being in there, you can email them at hello@wanikani.com with the suggestion.

1 Like

I’ve read the replies, but something still doesn’t add up. Why don’t they just add another 10 levels to include more common vocab? There really isn’t that many of them… it would help us to reinforce the kanji, because after all… that’s the objective, right?

I’m very happy that there are not even MORE vocab items included :smiley:

Too many easy to read compounds go against the idea of Wanikani in my opinion. And 決断 is really easy to understand and read.

5 Likes

There are charts floating around on the forums that show the amount of people that reach each level - the sad truth is that the customers of Wanikani don’t want more vocabulary and levels. Most people are eager to get the basic knowledge of kanji and then move on to other study methods.

Chart in question, from My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 ) - #2 by jprspereira graf1

5 Likes

This comes up quite often and it’s really hard to answer. Not because the answer itself is difficult but because it’s hard to answer truthfully without sounding condescending or coming off as cliched as “you’ll understand when you’re older.”

To a point. There’s no need for dozens of words with the same reading. 決 and 断 already have plenty of reinforcement for those particular readings.

Yeah, honestly, you could stop after the mid-40s and start reading fairly easily.

The last 15 levels or so have fairly diminishing returns although I do wish they covered the full 常用漢字 set.

4 Likes

I’m not sure that’s a fair statement; there’s a ton of vocabulary outside of WK.

On one hand I get it, and I remember going to Japan and seeing 列車 for the first time and wondering why that hadn’t been a vocabulary word since both of those kanji were covered.

But at some point you have to establish some bounds, right? At some point there’s an image of what the overall workload should be and I’m sure it’s a selling point that you can cover it all in just over a year. “Just add a few more here” and “just add a few more there” can quickly add up.

I will say as I’m grinding through the last few levels here I am very glad that there’s a limit and some finality in sight, because it’s been a long road! :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Aye. There’s only a few hundred or so of the really really common stuff but after that you have to start deciding what corpus to base your definition of “common” on.

WK uses mostly news articles so there’s vocab for baseball and military terms even though those won’t show up at all in other material.

I think the biggest disconnect for new learners is the mistaken assumption that once you finish Wanikani you’ll be able to read everything from a promotional pamphlet to a business prospectus.

I’ve been at this for two years and it’s still a struggle to read. I mean, it’s about a hundred times easier than when I started but still not where I want it to be or where people assume it should be after that length of time.

Once you grind out the last 10 levels, you feel like you’ve learned so much and know so little. :wink:

There isn’t much common vocab on WK or there aren’t many words left in terms of being common to be added to WK? If it’s the latter, then I’d disagree because people could easily need at least 5000 more words besides those 6000 and so words that Wanikani already teaches.

2 Likes

The thing about a focused tool meant to get you reading 2000 Kanji in the shortest time possible, is that it’s just that: a focused tool. It’s intentionally tuned to include the smallest possible amount of vocabulary possible while remaining effective for retention. Each extra item added beyond that minimum would slow down the Kanji learning process without assisting it significantly. Why do most airplanes require the pilot to retract the landing gear when it would be more convenient to just leave it down? It’s because that gear isn’t always needed, and it creates wholly unnecessary drag.

I’m glad that instead of WaniKani wasting my time by teaching me the words that it thinks I might need to know, in the order it guesses that I might want to know them. WaniKani stays in it’s lane and let’s me add vocabulary to my own SRS as I encounter them in Japanese materials. This method is vastly more efficient. Instead of learning 1000s of words in artificial study scenarios for years and just hoping that I can remember them when/if I see them one day. I learn exactly the words I need to get myself reading and listening to the specific Japanese media I’ve selected, and get right into the real language acquisition process ASAP.

If you want the convenience of vocabulary that’s already been curated, that’s available via prebuilt Anki decks or KameSame’s top 10,000 words list. But for those of us who want the efficiency of self-curation, WaniKani is willing to teach us Kanji without imposing on that efficiency.

4 Likes

That’s honestly one of the best ways I’ve seen it put. Bravo. :smiley:

3 Likes

what WK does is, it teaches us kanji. with kanji, we can read anything. with reading, we get exposure, and vocabulary.

in english, we only have to learn 26 signs to be able to start reading. we can get immersion in text right from the get-go. and we end up with vocabularies of 10’000, 20’000, 40’000 words (or even more).

in japanese, kanji pose a huge obstacle to reading. but as there is actually quite a lot of sense to how kanji work to form words, you can very often read words which you don’t know, if you know the kanji. the 6000 or so vocabulary words we get in WK are only a small part of the vocabulary we will learn over time. but because we know kanji, we can read books and manga and newspapers etc.; and thus we can build our own vocabulary.

the reading thing really works. start reading as soon as you can, that’s my recommendation! ^^

4 Likes

And here I always thought we got the baseball level because @Koichi loves baseball (the Mariners specifically)! :joy: :baseball: :durtle:

1 Like

Could be both. :wink:

I used to live in Seattle and those Mariners fans are pretty hardcore. lol

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.