Average %Correct

It would be nice if, beside our own %Correct for radicals, kanjis and vocabulary, we could see also the average value for all WaniKani users and those at our level only

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But how does that help you learn kanji?

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Might be interesting, but I don’t think it would give you many insights :slight_smile: Some people go very slow in the reviews to never make a mistake, others go fast and enjoy many repetitions in the beginning, some already know the kanji in the beginning and didn’t really have to learn something new for that level … You will probably get some very average 80% or something all the time.

There was this some time ago, with varying results :wink:

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It can help you determine the leaches/ difficulty of item. By the way, I’m not against the idea of having a system that says which items people fail on most. If implemented, then we could have competitions on the forum for who can make the stickiest mnemonic for those items.

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This is a brilliant idea.
More community is rarely a bad thing in these instances. It’s very lonely doing reviews right now…

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Does it need to? Many things on Wanikani do not directly make me learn kanjis. A cute mascotte or bright colours do not help me to learn kanjis for example. However they make it a more polished product and overall more enjoyable to use, which as a consequence encourage people to learn kanjis. Many people like statistics and to compare their learning with others (look at all the competitions on this community for example), and as mentioned above if an item is difficult for many then this could be addressed with different mnemonics.

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You’re right, it doesn’t necessarily have to, but given the staff’s limited resources, they may have other priorities. Personally I’d like them to work on something that’ll help me learn Japanese, but that would be a very interesting statistic I wouldn’t mind having!

Well, I am sure that the people developing the web app (programmers/web developers) are not the same people who introduce new kanjis/mnemonics, so the two things can happen in parallel (unless, of course, the developers are not full time employees but just contractors payed per job).
As for the content, I’d love if wanikani covered at least all Joyo and JLPT kanjis, I don’t see why is shouldn’t as it’s already very close to it (I guess 5-10 extra levels would be enough to cover that).

That’s not what the OP said. He wanted to compare his correct percentage to other people of the same level, not which items are leeches.

Even if everybody else is getting 100% correct every time, that will not help me learn kanji at all. What helps me learn kanji are the mnemonics and the SRS.

There is a difference between visual design (layout, colors, Holy Crabigator) and the hard product. The visual design is there not to help you learn, that’s correct. It’s there to make the website look nice, and that’s important too.

But the hard product is there to help us learn kanji. And if WK keeps adding new features to the hard product that don’t help anyone learn kanji, the site will become cluttered with extraneous stuff.

In fact, that was definitely part of what I said: knowing the average %correct of people of your level helps you to gauge the difficulty level of a kanji for people who know as much as you do (roughly), whereas the %correct of the wanikani population as a whole give you an indication of how hard a kanji is for experienced users (the users who can see a kanji you are about to learn are always on average more experienced than you).

What is extraneous or not is entirely subjective, people write scripts that introduce features that were not present in wanikani “naked”, you might consider useless some of those “extraneous” stuff that don’t help you to learn kanjis, but we are all different, and what you find useless some other people might find useful and enjoyable. I suggest you to be more openminded and to not be dismissive of things just because you don’t think are useful for your own learning process.

Personally, I find rewarding to know that I managed to learn a hard kanji, and this DOES help me and motivate me to learn more, so knowing how difficult kanjis hard for other users actually WOULD help me to learn more kanjis.

I still don’t see how knowing that other people struggle with a kanji will affect you at all. Other people’s brains are different from your brain.

Which is why those scripts are not part of the WK hard product. They are optional, I don’t have to install all of them.

There are definitely patterns, and statistics is exactly what helps you to find these patterns. If a lot of people struggle with a given kanji there is a good probability that you won’t find it easy either. Of course you could, and that’s when you’d have a boost because you did better than the average. Conversely, if you struggle with a kanjis and see that most people struggle too, you wouldn’t feel that bad because you’d know it’s a difficult kanji. Finally, if you struggle with a kanji that most people find easy, you’d try to understand why: maybe you didn’t get the mnemonics or you need a different one? Some mnemonics make more sense if you are native English speaker, much less if you are not etc. I am quite sure that the average %correc of 一 is higher than 累 for example, despite brains being different.

The whole point is that I think that this would help me and others to make the kanji learning process more enjoyable and overall more effective, of course I understand if you feel it wouldn’t help you, but after all you don’t have to use features you are not interested in. I don’t use most of the scripts out there, but the problem is that this can’t be a script because the API doesn’t release the information. So if wanikani doesn’t want to implement this feature they could at least include this information in the API, so other people could write a script. A more complicated (and less effective way) to achieve a similar result would be a script that collects the information from people using the script, so rather than having the statistics for wanikani users (a larger and more balanced sample) you’d have it only for the script users (which would be a biased sample).

The problem with displaying other people’s accuracy is that it could discourage people from learning the language if they are below average. People should go at their own pace without having to worry about how others are doing.

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The problem is that even if you are at the same level with somebody, that doesn’t mean that you are at the same level of Japanese proficiency. There are people here who start kanji for the first time, and others who have studied kanjis in the past (with different levels of success). So adding a statistics without the proper context is only going to discourage people who are starting for the first time, and make veterans feel unnecessarily good about themselves. IMHO

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That’s true, it would show some information but wouldn’t tell the whole story.

Late to the party, but I would totally dig having entire aggregate userbase stats available, even if only through the API. I mean, I hear what you’re saying (or what you said months ago :smile:), but presumably people who go fast tend to continue going fast, and perfectionists continue to be that way. The number for any given kanji wouldn’t mean anything, but compared to others it might. A kanji that’s failed two-sigma more than the average could mean the mnemonic isn’t really working for a lot of people, or maybe that one’s just visually similar and tricky… could mean a lot of things.

It would be an interesting experiment.

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