I’m talking about adding to the reviews when you get it wrong can open the drop down menu. Adding the visually similar kanji section into there, I feel can make the user experience better as I tend to mix some kanji up completely, but the hassle of having to search them up each time is sometimes frustrating. I think how the Tsurukame app does it when you get something wrong would be a great example of what I mean, as it’s right there just to make sure you didn’t mix the two things and makes it easier to see the differences
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The closest to what you’re looking can be done with an userscript (if your cool using them). Hopefully it works for you.
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Also when reviewing kanji, when you open the item info, you don’t see all the vocabs that use that kanji. That should be added as well, to reinforce the kanji reading.
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This is the one thing that I’ve always wanted from WaniKani, alongside the complete intergration of the Niai Visually Similar Kanji Semantics userscript into the system.
I always found that WaniKani’s visually similar Kanji on its own without that userscript is sorely lacking.
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Wanikani doesn’t do this natively no, but there are 3 user scripts that come pretty close:
Also helpful for disambiguation, before you even answered stuff wrong, there is:
and
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Absolutely +1 to this. And perhaps using more synonyms for kanji, possibly derived from the vocab later taught.
@voxelbox I think other than a dropdown of visually similar kanji, it might be a good idea to incorporate that in the explanation for a kanji to see how the various kanji are related. Some have overlapping readings which too would then be more noticeable.
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Yes! This please. I will often open the kanji main page for a kanji in a vocabulary so I can reinforce which use which reading, or more often, which are rendaku’d.
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Level 10? Sigh… what is your accuracy rate? what is your Level up rate? If you are already seeing similiarities in the kanji then you need to stop right now and reassess your process for memorization. Hopefully my latest post here will help you, which is based on the success of a previous post called “Hump Day: 40 and beyond” or something like that.
By level 10 there are already tons of visually similar kanji. 夫失矢生牛午 (I’m not certain that all of these are level 10 or under, but they’re pretty simple so they should belong to the low levels)
As for “memory palaces”, I think these only work for people who already have a very powerful memory and a strong imagination. You need to be pretty skilled to remember the details and layout of a mentally constructed environment, especially if you intend to fit thousands of kanji in it. I couldn’t even begin to use that technique, though I can learn kanji fine without it.
In case you were wondering, this is my accuracy:
| Reading | Meaning | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accuracy: | 95.01% | 94.97% | 94.99% |
| Radicals: | — | 98.04% | 98.04% |
| Kanji: | 95.71% | 95.94% | 95.83% |
| Vocabulary: | 94.81% | 94.51% | 94.66% |
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You didn’t watch the video did you? So dissapointed.
No. Just no. It was Yan-Jaa Wintersoul who said, “Anyone can do it.” I thought she was nuts. She was absolutely right. Creating memory palaces is a lot like doing pushups. In fact there is a part of your brain that is proven to literally grow as a result of creating these new neural pathways.
Don’t be lazy. Get to it and save yourself the pain I went through!
I don’t particularly like the “if it doesn’t work for you, you’re doing it wrong.” argument. This isn’t the first time I’ve looked into memory palaces, and it’s even been brought up on the forums before, probably more than once, this is just the one I remember:
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60 Memory Palaces. not one.
It’s things like this where I get the impression WK is stuck between creating an elegantly (well, relatively) simple interface for monkeys and having more productive learning tools for power users. I hope the staff cave at some point and add a togglable “advanced” mode or whatever with some of the features in these scripts, because it is really annoying dealing with these issues.
I’m a fairly careless person, so especially with the case of seeing out of context kanji I frequently mix up the visually similar ones. Even if it’s not great, just having the official info added to the review info would be a big help and save me decent amount of time. With the current system it’s so annoying I tend to say screw it and not even bother looking it up.
Personally, I can’t really say I like using memory palaces for kanji, but I can see it helping out others especially those who struggle to memorize things in general. I’d encourage people who haven’t tried it to check it out not for WK, but as a sort of gateway into finding what learning techniques work best for them. WK is kind of tailored for a imaginary “normal” user, but learning is a fairly personal process.
For people who like uh, inspirational takes on these things I think there was a ted talk on them that was interesting.
But getting back to WK, I think I would help a lot to get a user submission/upvote system for mnemonics and not just the official ones. They’re ok, but I think they value novelty over any kind of specificity and are closer to a minimal viable product. I think that sort of thing is yet another reason why similar kanji just kind of suck to deal with. If I get stuck on a kanji and have to fall back to memorization tricks it often becomes an issue of remembering that WK’s mnemonic plot twist was a nailbat for A, and genji for B which… is kind of useless.
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Maybe we should do about 2000 Memory Palaces.
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No, 60 memory palaces. One for each WK level. And then the WK team moves kanji from one level to another, and you have to re-do your memory palaces again. Fun is had by all.
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I haven’t tried it, but how about grouping to the number of strokes? Only 29 memory palaces should do for 2500 kanji—no need to worry about changes.
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You have a very good point/suggestion! Maybe I’m mistaken but if I recall correctly, in the past, during the reviews, there used to be more information on an item if you clicked on it (I’m not sure if the visually similar kanji were shown or not) than nowadays. Given that, as others said, your best bet is some extension. I strongly recommend using extensions as soon as you can. The one that identifies the phonetic components of kanji has been crucial for me [Userscript] Keisei 形声 Semantic-Phonetic Composition This extension is not what you are asking for but it is a nice complement to the others people are mentioning. Most people around are nice and don’t make assumptions about what a WK lvl should or should not entail.
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Thanks for the suggestion! This is something we’ve received feedback on before, and it’s something that we may want to work on in the future. I do think it would be beneficial for users to have this info available during reviews and lessons. We’ll keep your suggestion in mind 
Ah, good point. I think this would be helpful to have too. I’ll pass along the suggestion!
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There was visually similar kanji when you first learn the Kanji I believe, but it does not pop up during reviews which can be a bummer.
@RachelG Thank you for taking the time to pass our requests on 
Hopefully we can see them in the future
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