Why does wanikani not teach all the kanji?

this is probably a dumb question, but i can’t help but wonder, why doesnt wanikani teach all the kanji?
I know some answers are probably going to be “you don’t need that many kanji”, but if i make the effort of learning 2000+ kanji why not take another step and also learn the remaining kanji for JLPT1? It feels like a missed opportunity for this site to not include the remaining kanji, it would only need to add a few levels.
My level is still way too low for now but, what if i want to learn the extra kanji i’m talking about? what’s a good resource for doing that?

EDIT: typos

EDIT2: thanks for all these answers, now i understand that wanikani teaches enough kanji and i dont actually need to know more. thank you!

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By “all” do you mean all of the jouyou kanji? There’s no official list for the JLPT levels, but jouyou is often given as a standard for N1.

A bunch of kanji that are jouyou kanji are unlikely to actually appear on the JLPT, simply because they want to test you on difficult, but useful stuff, and things like 璽 or 畝 aren’t that important to know, even for someone at N1 level. There’s not unlimited space on the N1 for testing kanji. The test usually only has 6 or 7 dedicated kanji questions.

Just to be clear though, there are many thousands more kanji than what’s on the jouyou list.

At the end of the day, if you aim that high, you probably won’t need WK mnemonics anymore.

EDIT: It’s also worth keeping in mind that only a small percentage of all users make it to level 60, and producing more content is work for the staff that smaller and smaller amounts of people will consume.

EDIT 2: As far as other resources, something that is focused on the Kanji Kentei level 2 would be a good resource for making sure you are a jouyou master. That’s the level of the test that covers the entire jouyou set.

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I think the aim of WaniKani is not to master all Kanji but to give you a good basis to start learning on your own from reading material.

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Also, the kanji you learn through WK will probably be enough to read something like 99% of all words. The problem is that that last percent might seem insignificant, but in actuality consists of thousands of kanji that are only used in a few words each…

And which of those will be useful to you may also depend largely on what you’re reading.

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I know my anecdotal evidence doesn’t count for much in the grand scheme of things, but I passed N1 when I was only level 47(?ish) on WaniKani, with very limited non-WaniKani kanji knowledge, so I’d agree that WaniKani should be enough for that goal (well, not counting grammar and listening ability, which you’ll need to study separately. As for vocabulary, I only had the Core 2k under my belt at the time). But take that with a grain of salt.

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This. I wasn’t on Wanikani yet, but I got my N1 knowing about 1200 kanji. Actually I remember that I didn’t know the answer of any of the kanji questions on the exam except for the last one. Lol

Japanese are well aware one does not need to know all joyo kanji (or more) to be fluent in Japanese, and JLPT reflects that.

WK teaches way more kanji than you need. And in case you get to finish it and learn all the current 2000+ kanji, I’m pretty sure you won’t need help to learn the maybe 10 extra ones you might need for your major/work in case you come to Japan.

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Also, not everybody has the goal of passing JLPT N1 or any JLPT at all.

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The stats site https://www.wkstats.com:10001 has different lists of kanji grouped according to WK, JLPT, Joyo and Frequency. Here you can see some of the kanji not on WK.

My other half is Japanese, born and bred in Japan. In fact, he has only spoken English for around 5 years… anyway, I showed him the list of kanji that are shown as not taught on WK and he said he couldn’t read a lot of them and they are rare and likely used for specialist words that most Japanese people will be unlikely to read.

That said, I spotted the first kanji for his surname among those rare ones and asked him about it. He said that that is true, it’s a very unusual Japanese surname and at school most people couldn’t read his surname, even the teachers!

So I guess, what I am anecdotally saying is that if you get to level 60, N1, or are a native speaker of the language, there will always be more to learn. Don’t be discouraged by that, as I honestly think that level 60 of WK would provide an excellent level of fluency, that would allow you to communicate well with natives. To add to that, I’m a native English speaker and I am still learning English words that I have never heard of in my WK studies. Lol.

Learning never stops.

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