So the lifetime subscription sale is almost over this year, and I am considering purchasing it, albeit very begrudgingly.
I think WaniKani has serious flaws as an SRS:
Scheduling down to the hour is problematic for intervals longer than a day. If I’m out a little late, but come home and complete a review at 11:30 PM, and the scheduler needs to show me the review a week later, I shouldn’t have to wait until 11 PM on the scheduled day. Even in other scenarios, having time between 2 and 3 PM but not getting to do the reviews until after 3 PM is infuriating. I would suggest WaniKani absolutely needs to change this and, for intervals longer than a day or two, either schedule those reviews at least a few hours earlier, or do what any other SRS does and allow you to do reviews scheduled for a certain date any time on that day (or, as some SRS systems do, let you set a cutoff time when you’re asleep, for example, maybe you stay up until 2 AM regularly and any time before then should not be considered the next day, in which case you could set 4 AM as the cutoff time).
“I already know this radical/kanji” feature is desperately needed. It makes sense to wait until you have a sufficiently long term memory of a radical before you learn any kanji using that radical, but for those of us who have some sufficiently solid prior knowledge of some kanji or radicals, it doesn’t make sense to keep us waiting on those radicals we already know before introducing the kanji (or make us wait on kanji we already know before introducing the dependent vocab).
I think these are very serious problems with WK, and as such, I don’t really want to spend money on it.
And yet, the organization and method, along with other features (adding your own radical names or kanji meanings, mnemonics, etc.), are superb. (Not all the mnemonics are superb or even helpful at all, but in those cases, you can come up with your own–which is a good practice anyway because you remember things you actively create better than things you merely read.) And having WaniKani feed things to you is very convenient, especially for those of us (such as myself) who have the bad habit of spending more time planning how to study things than actually doing the studying (WaniKani does the planning for you and minimizes the effort required to stick to the plan). Even if the flaws in the scheduling are infuriating at times.
Thus, I am, extremely begrudgingly, considering spending a couple hundred bucks on what I consider to be a seriously flawed SRS.
I’ve been using it about 3.5 months now and have never saw the hour intervals to be a problem. Yeah I’ll see reviews spaced out through the day. But typically it turns into:
Reviews when I wake up.
Reviews during lunch break from work.
Reviews when in relaxing on the couch in the evening.
If I see one after my bedtime, I’ll just conquer that one in the morning.
Regarding your second comment, I have no Japanese prior knowledge (other than studying kana), so I can’t speak to that. That being said, I find it easy to spend money on lifetime considering I have no prior knowledge, and this is conveniently setup nice and pretty to feed me all the Kanji knowledge! $200 on a lifetime skill is a win for me. And yes, I know there is so much more to learn outside WaniKani, but I’m not to that stage just yet …
I’m definitely with you there for point #2. I almost didn’t subscribe at all because of the condescending FAQ article about this that was basically “well if you know all this stuff you don’t need us, and if you only know 100 or so you get to review with the free levels”
Like no, I sort of knew about 600, and I don’t mind reviewing the ones I don’t know that well, but there were probably about 200 where I already knew the meanings and common kun’yomi and on’yomi very well and it was quite annoying to wait like 6 weeks to finally reach a few items I didn’t know that well. I don’t mind waiting a day (that’s why #1 doesn’t bother me), but waiting weeks is annoying.
But ultimately I decided that it was worth the temporary annoyance if it meant a streamlined kanji quizzing system that was similar to how I had manually taught myself kanji in the past, and I just accepted that I would have to review them.
Now that I’m getting more stuff that I either don’t know, or don’t know that well, I’m really happy I got WK. I probably would have upgraded to the lifetime if it weren’t for me not wanting to deal with the partial refund (because I paid for this via a work program, not because of anything bad on WK’s part).
if the SRS interval is a week+, it makes little difference whether you do it on day 7 at 11pm, or day 8 at 2pm or whatever time is convenient for you. At the point where SRS intervals are at a week, they no longer contribute to level progression.
if you are really itching to do reviews and lessons as they are scheduled, the timing is set up such that you can expect to do them at the same time and day each week with a bit of leeway.
Yeah, there’s a good chance it’s still gonna be faster than me trying to create some kind of regimen to study on my own, even if I base it off of WK’s levels (all the information being available free, only the SRS being locked without a subscription).
Exactly why it should let you do it at whatever time is convenient for you instead of making you wait until the hour you completed it last time (regardless of contribution to level progression - that’s more of a concern about the lack of the “I already know this one” feature).
I respectfully disagree. If you have a super consistent schedule and perfect habits, then sure, but as as soon as you forget or have a schedule conflict for a few hours one day and then do your reviews a few hours later, then it doesn’t show those reviews at your usual time anymore.
The first one is a massive problem that I’ve raised multiple times hoping they would add a very easy fix considering the system already knows exactly what reviews you will have for a day.
You will get random resistance from other users which you’ve already got here for even suggesting it.
Here’s threads I raised which even got a response from the actual owner and it still lead to nothing.
Both points you raise are valid imo. Regarding point one I’d even go so far as to say that not being able to adjust the SRS intervals at all is an even bigger flaw. Like one set of intervals could possibly be right for every user. And this isn’t even raising all the other issues the system has. (My personal favorite is the vocab ordering. A top ~200 frequency word like 一緒 / 一緒に really shouldn’t be on level 38.)
But this is WaniKani. They chain you to a handcar and set you on the rails. You just need to keep slaving away and you’ll reach the goal eventually, no thought on the how required. Are there more efficient ways? Most definitely. Are there any as easy to get into as WaniKani? Not that I know.
But, here’s the thing. It seems like you already have some experience with Japanese. Do you really need the (very pricy) training wheels?
This is the internet. Don’t you think someone has already done that and shared it?
Several someones have
