Words that don't have kanji

yeah… does wanikani teach those, or how do we learn them?

WK is a kanji learning site, so for kana-only words you’d have to learn from other sources or through exposure

One resource I know of is Torii, it has a kana-only mode:

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Kitsun.io also has kana-only lesson decks.

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Where do you get those? :thinking: I didn’t see any in the community center at least, unless you’re talking about the katakana deck

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Hmm, I could have sworn I saw one there the last time I was there. Maybe I was confusing the Memrise kana-only deck with that Katakana one on Kitsun. Let me look again.

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by the way, is there a lot of kana-only vocabulary? i always assumed that even the kana-only words can be written as kanji, but are so frequently used that they dropped the kanji completely for easier writing

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Looking up the Memrise deck, it had just under 1000 words. The Kitsun Katakana deck has close to 4500 words.

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As to the second part of your question, yes, there are kana words that have no kanji equivalent. From what I’ve seen, a number of them are injections like よし, おい, etc, but there are also words like しんどい.

There’s a lot of vocabulary that is usually written in Kana which you probably won’t find on WK, but not much which doesn’t have a kanji equivalent (except for loanwords of course).

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In addition to the above, there’s also a very nice kana-only Anki deck made by a WK user a few years back:

https://community.wanikani.com/t/some-supplemental-material/8121

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One of the reasons for certain kanji not being on WK is also supposedly that those words, while common, are most often written in kana (羨ましい, 凄い etc).

So you won’t be learning those words from WK even in their kanji form.

EDIT: also, iknow.jp is a pretty good source for vocabulary IMO. It’s not free though.

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Second that. The Core 6k course on iKnow (that was turned into an Anki deck iirc and you could theoretically get it for free) has a lot of kana-only words in it. They’re taught by frequency as far as I know so you’ll be able to get the most commonly used words in your brain.

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