Japanese language has no official status in Japan, but it tends to be the one language Japanese people eventually pick up. As a tradeoff, one can see that Shohei Ohtani, perhaps the best baseball player to ever take the field, still needs his English interpreter even after spending a decade in the MLB.
When it comes kanji characters in Japanese, the number of official kanjis in use has remained largely unchanged for some time now. Which brings us to the actual subject of this message, which combines topical baseball with longevity in the form of kanji characters.
In short: when new words are added into WaniKani curriculum, it would in my opinion be fair if the same exact amount of words would at the same time be taken out of it. For example, the word 接戦(接 = “contact” level 26, 戦 = “battle” level 11) is currently a hot topic in the sports news, as it is used to describe “close victory” both in the World Series and Nippon Series baseball games.
WaniKani curriculum currently has only the word 辛勝(level 58) to describe more or less the same thing. However, if 接戦 is good enough for the Japanese, it’s good enough for me.
To add this word to the curriculum would undoubtedly help people reading Japanese sports news, but inflating the WaniKani curriculum to infinity won’t help anyone. Therefore, as a ground rule, to put something new in, something old should at the same time be taken out. After all, Shohei Ohtani does not probably have all the bats he’s ever used in home runs with him in the World Series games. Some of the recent relevant ones will do just fine. And this seems indeed to be the ultimate 優勝 recipe.
best,
Jari
from Finland
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