It’s possible for it to be just that you didn’t notice that it was a vocab question. That’s the situation where people make topics to complain. But it’s also possible that you did notice and just didn’t know which reading is right.
THAT second situation is exactly the same as the one I mentioned.
But the proposed behavior doesn’t distinguish them.
Ah ok. I didn’t think about the possibility of getting the onyomi and kunyomi readings swapped in your head. Makes sense.
Yeah this must be it. I use the Android app as well.
Yep I agree.
It would be one thing if they presented the vocabulary words in the context of a sentence, then reading the on’yomi is 100% wrong. But just seeing the same kanji with a different coloured background is really a pretty abstract criteria.
I understand the rationale behind on’yomi answers to vocabulary being immediately wrong, but it does seem like it’s too punishing - at least for the first few levels. It’s hardly if ever a problem for me anymore, you do get used to treating things with purple backgrounds as if they’re standalone words, but it is pretty arbitrary for the first while.
Mistakes/accidents happen, but they’re just as likely to happen while entering an English meaning as when entering a Japanese reading. That’s a separate issue, and if you want to use the override script for such situations then more power to you.
The issue at hand is just not understanding the question WK is asking. Responding with on’yomi thinking that is what’s expected, and then instantly failing because that wasn’t what they were asking for. And, given the surplus of these posts floating around the design of this system is obviously not 100%.
Arbitrary? Sure. Useful? Hell yeah.
Wanikani needed a way to distinguish between reviewing vocabulary (standalone words) and Japanese characters (kanji). They employed two solutions:
It really doesn’t take that much work to familiarize oneself with the system… I think most of these complaints stem from the misunderstanding of the difference between kanji and vocab (including single-kanji vocab).
I’m sure they could find a better way to present the information. But giving a do-over when you type in the wrong answer for a vocab question is not the way to go. The reality (unfortunately) is that WaniKani has no way of knowing if the user answered wrong because they misunderstood the question or because they actually didn’t know the answer. So to me, it makes sense to err on the side of being strict and always mark you wrong.
i don’t have any issues. every feature that WK doesn’t have that i’d want is available via script. just because i think i’d like it this way, doesn’t mean anyone else would have to put up with it 
Completely agree with you here. If you don’t get the word exactly right, then yeah, it’s wrong. Sometimes I make typos but that’s fine if it marks them wrong. I still think presenting vocabulary in the context of a sentence and doing everything else the same would be a vast improvement.
Of course being able to read vocab in sentences is vastly important, but I think that always having the context of a sentence to provide clues can be another crutch and make it harder to read the word by itself. It’s kind of like how I’ve known the word 綺麗 for ages and have a 100% correctness rate on WK, but I have less than a 90% correctness rate for each kanji, and I still haven’t burned 綺 yet.
That’s a solid argument.
but that’s how it works. japanese people recognize words instantly, while figuring out a kanji takes a moment, if the kanji itself is not a word on it’s own.
you can almost see them rummage through their memories 
and then, they remember it not as a single unit, they remember words it pops up in.
the reason is, they don’t learn kanji one by one after the first 2-3 years in school anymore. they learn words only. they’ll never encounter them standalone, so learning them like that wouldn’t make sense.
i think some people don’t know this and just trust that “koichi knows best”, while others are aware and try to be more japanese than the japanese.
learning them as single kanji is useful imo, but don’t beat yourself up for not recognizing them when they pop up with no context on a flashcard website.
I see individual kanji on those little chalkboards they use for teaching the stroke order and important elements (hane, harai, etc) in all elementary school grades, not just 1st to 3rd grade. Obviously they also do drills in booklets that mostly focus on how the kanji appear in words, but all grades do that too.
But once they’re in middle school, yes, they stop doing the thing where the form of new kanji is focused on in a lesson.
some people do this even as adults, when learning for the 漢検. kids also learn them mostly by drill via handwriting, so the situations aren’t the same at all, i get that. what i meant though is that it doesn’t make sense for wk students to lose hair when they don’t recognize a kanji from a word they get right every time.
it will come. sometimes it takes a little, but that’s no problem. that’s where i would recommend the addon “vocab beyond”, at least to people with some vocab knowledge. it shows you a long list of words the kanji pops up in that don’t appear on wk, and if you see the thing in several words, your knowledge of it’s meaning becomes clearer and the memory stronger.
Right, I agree that people need to be able to recognize the vocab instantly even if there’s no sentence surrounding it to provide context, which was what I was arguing for. The kanji was just an example I used because it was a similar situation, I don’t actually care much about recognizing those two super rare kanji in isolation. Besides, WK is already lenient towards kanji readings…
yeah, vocabulary is way more important in my opinion, which is why i’d couple level ups with vocab, too.
some people do only kanji/radicals and think they’re good, they’ll get vocab through reading or anki or black magic, but i wouldn’t count on it.
Yeah, I don’t understand why people would do that, lol
Has anyone actually gotten to lvl 60 doing that? I know there’s several people that say they do but I don’t hear from them again after a while so I figure they’ve already given up.
yeah, lol. it strikes me as kind of naive to expect to pick up vocabulary by learning individual kanji. many kanji have so abstract contexts that it’s quite a stretch to fit them in a word, meaning-wise.
it’s way better to do all the vocab here, and maybe some elsewhere, too. iknow for example is great, has words, sentences, speech, activities for listening comprehension and such.
i can’t imagine. i’ve seen a lot of people come and go here, and quite some said they’d do their vocab on memrise or by reading or playing games. there’s not so many 60ers, and i only recently returned to WK after 3 years of absence.
i know that i wouldn’t do it that way. i do all my vocab and i use “vocab beyond”/ can never have enough vocab.
Yea that’d certainly be crazy, that’d be quite the commitment to being stubborn too. While WaniKani vocab isn’t the best (looking at you military, religious, political, and baseball terms) it’s certainly a huge help. I think I really started diving deep into reading somewhere around lvl 20-30 and it certainly would have been a much bigger struggle without all the vocab I got from WaniKani.