I don’t think it’s a case of treating users as children so much as two different features (bans and user synonyms) interacting in ways which may or may not have been intended/anticipated.
I’ve personally never used them, I’m happy to go with the flow. It would be interesting to see the metrics on percentage of users who do. They’re probably of more use to non-US-based and/or non-English native speakers (e.g. the candy vs sweets example).
If it affects a relatively small amount of users, it makes less sense to prioritize this change over other fixes/enhancements.
Wait, English isn’t either? If you notice my screenshot in the OP, I set that as a synonym, too. Though, that was not what I used.
For that, I can understand why it might be blacklisted: English people are all over the world. However, when adding it as a synonym, I was thinking of people specifically from England but you’ve got South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and most of NA too, so… …
But then what do you call somebody who’s from England, if not イギリス人, in Japanese?
But what I’m hoping for the WaniKani dev team to do, is to change that. We shouldn’t be able to input a synonym that is going to be blacklisted. Some kind of warning should pop up. “We disagree with your synonym, here’s the reason why” (possibly followed by the reason) or “We disagree, and there’s a reason why.”
I’ve always thought about the idea of making a script that adds “a” as a synonym to every single item, and doing a 100% speedrun of WK in record time, but then you can’t add alternative Japanese so it wouldn’t really work.
Actually thinking about it, you could just make a script to look at whatever the current item is and get the answer and input it. Then all you’d need to do is start the lesson/review sessions… which could also be automated, and at that point your record would truly mean nothing
You know what that script would/could prove, however? The absolute fastest someone who is totally perfect in every way could get through the entire 60 levels of WK. Because in real life, even the fastest, most accurate person wouldn’t be that fast, because life does happen, and they are still likely to fail at least a little.
… A comparison between that extreme outside “FASTEST CASE IN A VACUUM” or whatever and the actual fastest recorded person to do all 60 levels (and burn the level 60 items too) on WK would be interesting, perhaps. To those who gotta go fast anyway…
You might even want to run it twice - once where the script (aka the fake “person”) only does lessons/reviews between certain hours of the day, another where time is meaningless (NO SLEEP option).
Yeah, very probably. I mean, I’ve seen all the old charts. But… if someone was going to make such a script… *shrugs* Might as well put it to use doing something useful, right?
There are so many items in later levels that have such a poor overlap with any English word that the built-in synonyms are woefully inadequate. Plus the inconsistency re. transitive/intransitive or some items being translated as singular and others as plural, etc. I would say most people use synonyms.
We have some upcoming changes which should fix the issue where user synonyms clash with meanings we have put on a blocklist or warning list.
I’d recommend using the mods tag rather than tagging us individually as we have different shifts throughout the week and you will likely get a faster response that way.
