New to this and other than the painfully slow pace, I quiet like WanKani…
But this mnemonic’s “tip” of “mullet” is beyond ridiculous and based on both Chinese and Japanese tips, should be changed to “cliff” or “house on cliff”.
“mullet” is borderline slang or at the very least, cultural specific and I see that others are also complaining that it’s a bit too “American” around here…
Other than that (and the speed issue), this so far are pretty nice…
WK chooses names based on what they think will make memorable mnemonics.
They’re overhauling them, so this may be moot already, but there’s no “should” in what they change it to, except that they will pick something they think people will be able to make memorable mnemonics from.
If they decide that cliff is better for that (of course, they’ll have to work around the existing cliff radical) then they’ll call it cliff. But they won’t base it on what people have called the dictionary radicals in English just because they called them that. Those names weren’t chosen for mnemonics.
and this will pick up. you are just on level one.
Yeah, I’m with you here. “Mullet” is daft (and sadly not his worst).
Fortunately, you’re free to add your own synonyms, but you may also need to come up with new mnemonics later on.
Good to know…thanks Okanekure, I was worried that learning here was behind a form of paywall based on speed.
Thanks for the reply and I agree with what you are saying…it’s just that most radicals use traditional “tips” but this one stood-out like a sore thumb as being totally new…
十 is another odd one as just calling it “ten” makes way more sense IMO as (a) it’s a “t” as in the first letter of “ten” (b) it’s a real character not just a radical (c) again, using another cultural reference (d) everyone else also uses “ten” so…
BUT, as you said, there is no right or wrong…just a case of “why reinvent the wheel” IMO…
Thanks again…
They felt that people would have more success creating memorable mnemonics from something like religion, rather than numerals. With a numeral mnemonic, there’s no real “reason” why the number has to be that number. It could really be any number, but it just happens to be ten with that shape.
They have received heat for their religious mnemonics (though I imagine they knew what they were doing to a certain extent, since they said that shocking mnemonics are more likely to stick than mundane ones), so I would imagine some of those are going to change.
Don’t know what they were smoking
And after 39 levels i still want to have some
I’m not a neuroscientist but I think they might be onto something since the amygdala tends to react faster than the frontal cortex, even more in the teenage brain.
That’s the point , suppose to remeber it better. Most of them are pretty ridiculous actually
Yes it was made for Americans it seems, and idk if they published the stats but I bet a majority of users are American, that is a guess though.
I heard they may redo the radicals so maybe they will detect what part of the world the user is in and base the memronics to fit their need. That would be neat but who knows what will happen
It reminded me of joe dirt which is a funny movie I suggest watching
It’s monthly or yearly and those with fast level up speeds take about 7 days a level on average.
There is a lifetime subscription which is $300, so you can think of it being $300 for the “whole program” of learning kanji which sounds like a lot but there are other language resources that charge as much or more.
You can checkout the FAQ thread for more details
Well it’s one thing to be memorable but it’s another to totally reinvent the wheel for a select few radical but stick to the accepted status quo for the vast majority shown here. Like hieroglyphs, radicals/kanji are pictures and for the most part are logically derived (more complex ones = more abstraction). My point is trying to be memorable at the cost of big picture standardization is a bit of an odd choice IMO.
Further more, Joe Dirt is a mediocre movie at best…I’d rather drive off a 厂 than ever have to watch that.
Thanks for the info Frosty…
I’m a big gamer and the idea that learning speed is throttled, forcing you to a specific speed (and payment) is not sitting very well with me…but we’ll see how levels 2 and 3 go.
Yeah I’m with you on this. Wanikani was made for new kanji learners and unfortunately for us who are familiar with kanji radicals we’ll have to learn this readings. 
Can someone please post that graphic that shows the load of reviews one should expect to have along the levels? I’m on my phone so I can’t find it easily. That’s all that OpusTheFowl needs to see 
EDIT: found it.
NB: that graph assumes perfect accuracy.
The sad(?) part too is if a new learner goes to another system, they will be a bit lost with some of the hint…there is something to be said for standardization.
Good to know that the hill gets much steeper…I’m looking forward to it!
It’s going to be interesting to see though if this beats Anki.
Like the graphic jprspereira posted implies, part of the reason WaniKani has levels is to try to help people pace themselves. I’m only level 13 at the moment and I generally have ~100 reviews every day. I can at least get this down to 0 each day. At higher levels, people have ~200-400 reviews every day, and can only knock out about 100 or so, and then new reviews get added each day, so zeroing your number of reviews becomes exceedingly difficult (see the 0/0 Streak Challenge).
WaniKani teaches you 2000 kanji and 6000 vocabulary words, and it does this in such a way that you should know every one of them fairly well by the time you’re finished (almost everything burned).
Without the level up pacing, you now:
But you know you. There are Anki decks that are all WaniKani radicals, kanji and vocabulary and then you can basically do WaniKani at your own speed via Anki. But again, if you don’t carefully pace yourself, you may burn yourself out a few months down the road. I personally think $9 a month to have that pacing, ordering and structure is worth it.
What would be nice would be to have some kind of test you could take to place you in a certain level. I know having prior Kanji knowledge and having to go through a good number of them again is what turn some people off from WaniKani.
