So at no point in the past had WaniKani ever taught the vocabulary reading of 他所 as よそ. Regardless of whether or not it is in the dictionary is beside the point. The point is that for 3 years, the only valid reading accepted was たしょ and now my grade for understanding 他所 has returned to “Apprentice” level. I know this is new behavior and a recent change, because I got the unique and distinctive message that I never saw before, which was, “That reading is possible, but old-fashioned. What is the more modern way of saying this?” I finally punted and entered an intentionally invalid answer to get it to tell me what it wanted and that’s when I saw the totally brand never, never-before-taught reading of よそ.
It would probably be good to be much more careful with changes like this going forward. Whether or not it is correct; if this is an actual departure from how it was literally taught previously, the system should accept the answer for a given user and then explain, “going forward, we’re looking for the answer よそ as it is the more commonly accepted reading as of now.”
Changes like these (and the still-missing) summary page are becoming quite the aggravation.
The list of fails is growing… It’s really sad… I used to like this place. But all recently updates are really unnecessary. It was working fine before.
Yes they said “technical debt” … But you can still fix the technical debt without removing or adding features that nobody wants.
The summary page is gone
Kana vocab
Suddenly changing readings
Changing the UI ( to worse - I am looking at you synonym box )
The vocab sound is not slower for certain users
And for sure I forgot something …
I forgot about the UI issues but at one point, while I was in Japan, my personal laptop failed and tried to switch to using the site on my phone via Chrome browser for Android. 100% unusable. Was shocked. By the time I was able to start using the site again, I had piled up nearly 500 words to review. That was Very bad. If I were using the site for free, I wouldn’t complain but I’m not. And granted, it’s not a lot but I would gladly pay double if it meant that the issues you described would get resolved.
Looking at Jisho, there’s two entries when looking up “他所”. One is 余所, and uses the “よそ” reading (with it providing 他所 as alternate kanji usage). The second is 他所 itself, providing “たしょ” as the reading.
The first entry labels it as a common word, the second does not. Considering 余 is already on WK, they should probably add an extra vocab word for 余所, and keep the original 他所 reading (either on the hidden allow list, or as a warning, as it’s technically not incorrect).
Interesting. I haven’t come up with this kanji in my reviews yet. They might be in the Enlightened pile. Anyway, searching the web I found this: 他所「よそ」「たしょ」 if anyone is interested
I think it means it gives a warning shake, and considering the change was 4 months ago, I’d assume they removed the “we recently changed this” message.
In my case, having the burn review in 9 days, I could just burn it and immediately send it back to apprentice to essentially relearn it, so it’s not a big impact for me, but I can see how it would affect others.
No, It means you can still answer with たしょ though they want you to memorize よそ, since it’s more common.
They’ve done similar things with items before, which ensures that even if you’ve started the item learning it differently, you can complete it the way you learnt it.
I didn¨t notice the change and have been answering たしょ since that’s what I mostly associate with it here on WK. But, tbh, よそ is what I’ve heard in the wild. So, I’m defo going to change my answer or do them every other time from now on. Knowing both is of course great.
That’s my point. WK did not accept it as an answer at all. I refused it with the “warning” shake, and then I got the Brand New reading for the first time ever after responding with a deliberately incorrect kana.
Even if there was audio, 80% of the example sentences are total garbage inside jokes or something that completely escape me…
Yes, those are worthless. In the time it took to write those, one could have used examples of how one might use the word in a sentence while at work, or in a doctor’s office, etc.
