(I checked Content Updates - WaniKani Community but nothing there…)
Did the reading mnemonic for 北 (north) kanji changed recently? I could swear it was “hoe” + “cookies” (ほく) but I was just having a review and it wasn’t accepting that and it turns out that for kanji reading it’s now using “keytar” (wth is that…) and vocab for norh fallbacks to that as well (previously it was “kit” to go to norh or something like that (?!)).
Yeah, I don’t remember ‘kita.’ When I learned this kanji, I’m sure the primary pronunciation was ‘hoku’ because I created my own mnemonic for ‘hoku.’
Looks like it was just changed:
That’s a weird change, the ホク onyomi is quite common too and is well represented in the wanikani examples (5 out of 6 associated vocab use the onyomi).
Would be nice if they posted that before making the change… one would avoid questioning ones sanity 
wasn’t the mnemonic for hoku about hawks circling above or something?
Uhm… I see they were adjusting it more often
I learned it with “Hoe Cookies” 
北のホクの読方は「北斗の拳 」で覚えているよ。
有名な「お前はもう死んでる」のよね。
This thing:
It’s essentially a portable synthesizer. Means you can move around on a stage while playing it.
I remember that as being about as rebellious as Canada gets, which being from the US and A, was obviously North. (Well, that and I had already picked up the きた reading elsewhere so I could play with that). 
uhm… the 80s are calling :DD
Just caught me by surprise, too. I don’t understand why they don’t always accept the on’yomi for the separate kanji.
It is no Sax-a-Boom.
Did you warn them about the dangers of Reaganomics while you had them on the line?
I just encountered this in a review… TIL that WK changes readings regularly! Kind of a weird choice.
I don’t mind the new reading, since I already knew the vocab reading before starting WK. But I did briefly think I was going crazy, because I was sure that I remembered the “hoeing cookies” mnemonic (it’s rare that I use the suggested mnemonic completely unchanged). And I generally question the utility of such frequent changes, unless the Japanese language is also truly changing that quickly. It’s nice that the “old” meaning is moved to a “warn list”, but it would almost be nice if it was a different kind of warn list. “You’re suggesting an alt” vs “you’re suggesting something that used to be correct” are two very different things.
Just FYI, if you ever want to look back at a previous version of the site, you can use something like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20250318082240/https://www.wanikani.com/kanji/北 (which is what I did to restore my sanity before finding this thread, and the “content updates” forum).
Very much +1 on this one!
Their rationale is always that the updated version is more accurate or will help users learn better. In principal I always support making the product better, as the number of future users who will benefit is greater than the number of current users who feel the friction of the change (and the friction is considerably lessened by using a userscript or app with an undo feature).
In this specific case, though, I really don’t like the asymmetry of 北 being taught with its kun’yomi while 西, 東, and 南 are all taught with on’yomi. It seems like there’s a lot of potential for confusion there.
Yeah it’s kind of funny, just last night, out of curiosity, I went through all of the kanji in L1-L3 to see specifically how often they use the kun’yomi as the “canonical” reading. It’s not common, and usually when they do it it’s either because (a) there is no on’yomi or (b) the on’yomi is very rarely used (i.e. in any of the vocab words).
I definitely can’t argue with (a), and I don’t have too much desire to argue with (b)… other than that it makes it harder for me to remember which reading is which. Admittedly I’m not sure that detail matters in the long run, my friend who is a native Japanese speaker says she doesn’t usually know which is which. On the other hand, the info pages so often remind us of patterns we can observe to know which reading to use in a word (e.g. all kanji vs kani+hiragana). But knowing “I should use the on’yomi here” isn’t actually helpful if you don’t know what the on’yomi is.
And in this particular case, the on’yomi is used a lot! Just open the vocab page and do a text search, and you’ll see it’s the more common usage (I’m on mobile so can’t easily illustrate). So I really have to wonder what motivated this change. Frequent changes without a really good reason seem questionable at best.
Apologies for the disruptive change to the 北 reading, everyone.
I’m sure you already know, but I want to reiterate that entering the on’yomi reading won’t punish you. You’ll get a message asking you to try again, like with all kanji subjects when you enter a correct but non-primary reading.
I know it’s still a bit frustrating, but there are reasons for the change related to usefulness, word frequency, scaffolding and level ordering in WaniKani.
For some kanji that have common and useful single-kanji vocab (in this case 北, north), we consider teaching the kun’yomi first. Also, unlike a lot of kanji, 北 takes its kun’yomi reading in plenty of common compounds — 北口, 北側, surnames and place names, etc. As far as kun’yomi readings go, it’s very useful. This was one factor.
The other factor was level ordering. We were teaching the ほく reading with kanji 北 in level 3, but also the きた reading with vocab 北 in the same level. This could lead to interference and recall issues. There were no vocab to support the ほく reading until level 5, when 北西 appears. Basically, the ordering was mixed up and not ideal for learning. We decided to focus on the きた reading, add more supporting vocab early on, and introduce the ほく reading a couple levels later with vocab.
Some of you brought up a really good point about inconsistency with the other directional kanji, and we are planning reading updates for the others, too, together with movements for better scaffolding. We didn’t do them all at once because these movements take a little more forward planning, and we wanted to fix the issues with 北 as soon as possible.
What about a better error / warning akin to: “hey, it was an old mnemonic that you really learned but we changed it” so that the user would be less confused?
And also maybe links/indications about item changes history so it would be accessible from the item page itself without having to go searching through the forum?
