Not at all. I even called myself out and said I deserved to be marked wrong when I don’t pay proper attention. Which I still do from time to time if I’m not careful. If you answer a question incorrectly why shouldn’t you be marked incorrect? Why is that considered to “be on a high horse”?
Did your teachers accept that excuse from you if you provided a wrong answer on a test? “Sorry, I couldn’t be bothered to double check my answer. Can I just not be marked wrong?”
But those tests are a formal evaluation of your knowledge on the subject. When you’re doing that kind of test, it’s like signing a contract saying “this is what I know”. It doesn’t have the purpose of aiding memorisation. Using WaniKani is more akin to your teacher asking questions, not actual testing, and your teacher would have the capacity to notice if your answer was likely to a misheard question. Not to mention just asking why you were wrong and telling them the question you thought was asked. They will tell you to pay more attention, but not think you didn’t know the answer if you could provide it after.
WaniKani is a memorisation system, for it to do what it does, it only needs to know if the item being memorised needs pushing forward or back. If it marks you wrong for irrelevant information, the system no longer is keeping track of your actual performance on that item. Not to mention, no one is going to get the meaning/reading mixed up when actually reading, which is the skill being trained here.
Proofreading/typing/etc is a separate skill, and I don’t think anyone can even be judged to have bad typing/review skills because they get lazy inputting 300-600 tidbits of information that is only used as a tool for our learning that we can correct ourselves on if we have the script.
To punish your Kanji knowledge for every mistype will hamper your learning of those Kanji. It’s a rather abstract, ineffective punishment if intended to improve typing. If you want to practise typing, it’s to be done separately. To say they deserve that is some weird abstract moral enforcement that doesn’t actually serve a purpose. I could understand you saying it’s “to be expected” of the computer program, but then that wouldn’t rebut the idea of changing the program to accommodate this thing that won’t negatively effect kanji learning, but improve it’s robustness in it’s responses to human input.
Wait, that’s a thing? I use a dark theme add on and I think I might have broken that. I tried turning it off early on to make sure I wasn’t missing anything but I guess that part didn’t come up.
Crap. Now I guess my problem is that everything needs a built in dark theme.
Be careful of saying “just” when you don’t know the internal state of a particular piece of software. But I do agree that @Iyaonas is significantly overstating the work needed.
Yeah, a plate of upside down spaghetti with a side of gum and paper clips is always an option.
Still baffling to hear people talk about every change like it requires 9001 coder hours. This feature is one with the potential to be downright trivial.
So trivial one could probably write a script for it. The wiggles are obviously client-side and the existence of the ignore script means the site doesn’t accept your answer as right/wrong until you’ve gone onto the next review item.
Close but no cigar script is also likely related (stop WK accepting your wrong answers, one person was wondering why there were two kanji for “ice” as it was accepting it for “rice”).
I had that issue as well (confusing readings and meanings) but it rarely happens to me now as i’ve gotten used to the colors. I thought something like this would’ve been nice my first week, it bothers me less now though.
Yes, it is sloppy to not want to proofread. If this were a classroom you’d expect a negative mark for misspelling something. It’s not about please the robot masters, it’s about taking the time to help yourself learn. I’ll get on a fast roll at times and tap the wrong key when typing the reading and get it marked incorrectly and that’s my fault for not taking the time to double check what I typed.
I’d like to have sympathy for you, but I really can’t because it just sounds like you don’t want to actually learn this language.
Never in my bad-spelling, bad-hand-writing school days did I receive a negative mark for such things.
The fact you still start doing them too fast shows that the punishment doesn’t work.
Accepting it as wrong will hamper your learning of the Kanji, with no benefit. It undermines the point of using an SRS system like WK.
This is baseless and accusative, to be honest. You’re not making a logical argument, you’re trying to make your point sound more reasonable by being aggressive about it.
WaniKani’s only purpose is to teach us Kanji, not typing skills. There’s no benefit to receiving a bad mark for spelling, reading/meaning mistakes, as they have nothing to do with Kanji.
In what way is it not? I’ve accepted all the many reasons for strict grading on certain items but this one in particular serves no useful purpose and I wanted to call it out.
It eventually gets to where it’s (usually) second nature to check whether it’s the reading or meaning. But I installed the override wrong answer button for situations where my fingers move faster than my brain as it does still happen from time to time.
If you have android I feel the wk app over there has this built into it? I’d have to double check.
Edit: Just checked, it doesn’t.
But to what others have said, you’ll get use to it. Though, I use the 1x1 plugin so it’s always Japanese Reading then English.
If it were really that simple they probably would have done it don’t you think? I suppose the alternative is that they fundamentally disagree with you and think it is better for WK to count readings entered into the meaning field as wrong instead of rejecting them.
I don’t believe I made any statement about the work needed to implement such a change, merely that the opportunity cost is not worth it. Now that is obviously just my guess as I am no more privy to the inner workings of WK than anyone else.
Regardless, this was more or less what I was getting at.
You (perhaps unintentionally) implied that a change would need to be made for all items individually, whereas it would almost certainly be done programmatically.
Yes! I tried making this type of argument about a month ago on the kanji/vocab thing. You’re not going to find a lot of support for it here. The WaniKani community seems pretty bent on defending the current system no matter what.
I was under the false impression that many people were here, like me, to get better at reading Japanese. It seems a lot of people are actually here to get good at WaniKani. Once you understand this mindset shift, their replies make a lot more sense.
@Hilbert90 Or perhaps people just don’t want WaniKani wasting time on features they think would be useless? For the record, I’m not against the suggested change. But I think it’s solving the wrong problem. I don’t think any other SRS flashcard program has the proposed feature either. But they don’t need it because they have a way to undo typos and mistaken entry like this (at least Anki, iKnow, and Kitsun support this). Really WaniKani should just get over their weirdness about not supporting an undo button and give people more flexibility.
@SparklingLimeade If you’re looking for something to help while this feature doesn’t exist, try the Double Check script. It won’t catch your errors ahead of time, but it will let you undo them after the fact. It also has built in (via its settings) a delay so that you can’t accidentally press Enter too fast and move to the next question after a typo.
To be fair, the only required changes I see are already implemented in scripts: Override for when a mistake irrelevant to your Kanji learning occurs, and Close, but no Cigar for when it wants to make you learn something incorrect for some reason (rice is ice, etc) (just don’t type the right answer in if you did make an actual mistake, as you can’t ignore correct answers).
The Double Check script might do this better, though. I’ll need to try it.
Software will always need babysitting by an educated user to perform it’s best.