I'd add that WaniKani does go into compound words, whilst it teaches ~2000 kanji it teaches ~8000 words of vocabulary (which can be either a single kanji, a compound word, etc.). However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご.
As for my own case, I'm self studiying with a grammar book + the minna no nihong + wanikani + a weekly tutor in immersion, playing Animal Crossing every now and then in Japanese and trying to read Komi san, as well as preparing for a 6 week trip, which will be my third trip to Japan. It's hard to imagine doing anything more – my wife already thinks I'm doing too much.
FYI, while this word is most often written in kana it's also often written in kanji.
Source: I run a website with such stats. See "Alt. forms" here: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ
Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...")
All of the stats are calculated by me analyzing texts from my corpus. If you follow the link that I've pasted and click on "Used in" then you can see where exactly this form of the word is used.
リンゴ is used in: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ/used-in
林檎 is used in: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/林檎/used-in
So you can see that the kanji form is used relatively often in novels (which makes sense, as those often use higher level/more flower-y language).
(I also use modern news articles in my corpus and that's also included in the stats, although this isn't shown on the "used in" pages.)
林檎 for sure is common.
You can either select specific text and ask to "decorate" (kanjis with furigana). Or you can click the extension icon (top right in your browser) and it will decorate the entire page. Mouse over kanjis will show furigana. It was a game changer for me.
> its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop
First, let me say that you may be responding to a strawman. There's few-to-zero people who will recommend memorizing kanji to the exclusion of learning grammar and other aspects.
Realistically, people who promote rote-memorization of kanji are also suggesting to learn grammar, attempt to think in the language (not translate in their head), and suggesting immersing/talking/etc as much as possible too.
So, let me ask you, what do you suggest people do instead of rote-memorization of the readings of kanji? How do you suggest someone become able to read a sentence in japanese, guess the pronunciation of an unfamiliar name, if they have not memorized how to pronounce the relevant kanji?
Do japanese school children not learn kanji by rote memorization themselves?
They do indeed, but in a context of everyday immersion, so it’s not rote learning to the exclusion of all else.
Is it just the mention of WaniKani? Personally I don't like WK either, but the author barely mentioned it in passing, and says nothing at all about the stuff you're criticizing.
Rote learning of English spelling is a much more daunting task than rote learning of kanji. To unfairly cherry-pick from the paragraph above, the English word "person" is about 10 strokes; "people" is also 10 strokes. But there is no obvious connection between the two words and the different spellings have to be memorized individually. 人 is two strokes; 人人 is four strokes; 人々 is six? All are easier to memorize, easier to write, and easier to read. Of course, I might have cherry-picked the most extreme comparison. But even that little four letter word "myth" is 9 strokes and must be rote memorized. It is a small word in English. Somebody else can correct my belief that 9 strokes is not short in kanji.
Ok, I'll correct myself. 神話 is a 9? stroke character and a 13? stroke character. So 22 strokes total? It's funny what we convince ourselves to believe when we cherry-pick. "God talk" is a 5 stroke word + an 8 stroke word. "God speek" is 5+10. So even if I go out of my way to justify my belief in Japanese brevity I have to start rethinking. Maybe if I can think of a word like "deity" or something with even more strokes I could eventually avoid having to adopt a new position on which language is easier.
Another observation is the number of times each day a Japanese person whips up their hand as a chalkboard and asks, "This or this?" while air drawing out two different kanji. The fact that the observer can recognize the characters written in air has always seemed instructive to me, though.
Learned Polish recently. It's the same. But people do try the supposedly easy way of learning it "without studying the grammar".
It's perhaps a slower way (unless you go to live for half a year+ in the country and don't use too much the crutch of help available in your languages), but not a harder one (ditto).
Maybe for the very beginning, when you first learn phonetics and alphabet/ideograms, where the "floor" is infamously higher in Japanese for non-~Asians ?
Rote learning and gamified approaches like duolingo have a low barrier to entry; buying a textbook, enrolling in a class or living in the country for a year are much higher and the latter two are prohibitively expensive and time-consuming for casual learners.
The article uses code to illustrate how this might be different thinking in Japanese with a URL request:
> request.setURL("serverurl").send()"
I think there is formality/ceremony here like "I have a request, it is for this URL, and I want to send" vs. the other style in the article: send().request.setURL("serverurl") is more forceful as in "I'm sending you a request for this URL" there is no politeness of the exchange.
I almost had a business trip to Japan some years back and people were discussing the formal and polite ceremonial business card exchange process with certain sequences of presenting, bowing, etc. I think learning about the cultural norms might be a key here with learning the language and the reasons why things are structured differently.
If you just want to get by for your holidays, sure just learn to translate with Duolingo. But if want to speak the language, you will just lose time.
Not only do most Kanji rote-learning resources not take into account aspects such as compound words, but also its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop.
No language learning works well if you are continuously translating it back into your native tongue. You need to learn to think in the language you are learning, that is the only way you are going to gain any sort of fluency. Just knowing that X translates to Y is not going to help you, even if you memorise the whole dictionary.
You might get away with translating back into your native tongue with a Western language, but you won't with Japanese.
With Japanese there's no escaping learning the grammar and other aspects. It's just your choice if your want to do it the hard way (textbook theory) or the harder way (immersion via graded readers, conversations with patient natives, or anything else similar).
All the time and effort people put into rote-learning Japanese Kanji should really be expended learning Japanese in a more holistic way.
Otherwise you might as well just buy one of those books with set-phrases such as "where's the toilet".