it’s not about quantitude, it’s partly a grammatical thing i agree. every pair of verbs i add a translation, my own, that is the same for both, as i am used to in my native language. works for me.
Actually had a frustrating experience with 営.
官営 市営 市営 県営 i dont think 00management is that hard of a concept. Same with 側. Like how hard is it to understand and visualize left side right side. Its almost like busy work. Same with transitive and intransitive. Its a kanji app right? That falls firmly into grammar.
I think its great that wanikani is turnkey. But occasionally seems too rigid. The line between program your own system with anki and customization isnt as thick as people make it out.
To bring some more positive energy here, I think new vocab is a good thing. It might not sound the most useful, but things like 山びこ might eventually come in handy, even prove to be life-saving in certain extreme scenarios. Also, 山彦 is a mountain guardian deity (courtesy of jisho.org) so a fun piece of trivia right there 
.
Sure, its fun trivia but what is it reinforcing exactly? Yama has been covered multiple times. Mountain isnt exactly a difficult concept and yama is a common reading so yes it begs the question what made it so important to add?
That’s kinda the point of this subtopic: to discuss feedback among the community. You could just email hello@wanikani.com and call it a day if you wanted.
And when it’s a divisive suggestion, I see nothing wrong with other paying customers weighing in with their opinions.
That is true. Though I definitely get the air of ‘you ignorant fool you clearly dont understand wanikani’ response in a lot of posts.
Fair point. Although I think the majority has been pretty civil.
Oh yeah it rarely gets outright aggressive but it can be a bit terse? Lol.
‘Just use another app’ ‘How much time could it add making a mountain out of a molehill’
Its just a thing I noticed when it comes to even fairhanded mild criticism of wanikani.
The OP isn’t terse? It’s like WK is out to get them by adding vocab items.
Maybe some day WaniKani will allow people to skip items. Until then, it’s basically one of the things they say not to make threads about. That is also what contributes to the reaction these threads get.
Is it explicitly banned? And yes it is a bit silly that op should know at 22 that no, you cannot skip words (without scripts).
However there us definitely an air of defensiveness at any post slightly critical of wanikani.
Just my observation.
I had only seen the やま reading once in a vocab until I got to level 14 where we get 山登り.
Similarly, I had only seen the ちから reading for 力 once until they added 力いっぱい.
I feel it does help to have a couple of vocab words for each reading earlier on.
In the pinned thread for the Feedback category, they list two things that they don’t think they need feedback on.
Some things probably not worth posting about:
- WaniKani is too slow
- Let me undo a wrong answer (because I typed a typo, or really any reason at all).
“Let me skip items” is one flavor of “WK is too slow” complaints.
They’re not literally banned, but it’s just that WK is aware that some people want to skip content, and so they don’t need to be told again.
ちから for sure needed some reinforcement. It only had the one vocabulary for that reading out of dozens.
やま had a few but it wasn’t too bad of an addition.
The slow thing is a silly complaint by people not used to SRS.
But the skip and redo seems like a weird mountain to die on imho. I mean not a problem for me since I use scripts and apps.
Though there is something I would kinda like to ask since you seem to be pretty in the know.
Wanikani is a kanji app right? Explicitly so right? So why include the same trans/intrans and the vocab sets like 市営 県営 私営 官営 or 左側 内側 and so on.
Now if we say its to reinforce prior lessons I wonder if they dont trust their own srs system. Like you got the readings for 左 右 and they gave examples at the time.
Idk I bet this is another “oh lazy person whining bleh bleh” Im not lazy or in a race (though I am time poor with 3 jobs, kids, and school) just kinda random thoughts when I see these weird repeaters and wonder why instead of several iterations of 00 management something like 経営側 wasnt included.
But hey Im not a 経営者 so who knows lol.
It’s not like I have any special insight into the minds of the creators beyond what they say here.
It sounds like you’re saying that if they think of themselves as a kanji app first and foremost that they should put their money where their mouth is and not have any vocab items that don’t teach you something new about the kanji item itself.
I can’t really answer to that, you’d be better off sending them an email.
All I can say is that my understanding is they want to be primarily a kanji app, and yes, vocab is primarily chosen for how it helps you learn kanji. But there’s a balance between having literally only 1 item for every possible reading, and teaching everything that could ever be known about vocabulary.
My guess is they feel they are striking the balance that they want. Others could make a site that balances it in a different place.
You pretty much (more) smartly stated my opinion lol. I guess I get confused because (back on topic lol) the primary response to “why this weird word and not more common word 
” is “You fool, this is for learning kanji!” So I must have internalized it.
I think the fact that wanikani is pretty darn slick and efficient compared to other programs is what frustrates some people like its just noticeably missing some key features. But Ive been learning Japanese for 11 years (pray for me) and wanikani despite its drawbacks is the best for forcing kanji down your throat. Got me to JLPT 2 amd will carry me to JLPT1 in the future (maybe next year July)
PS
Isnt it funny how often the “weird word” isnt really that weird/rare and the ‘Japanese’ person in question might just be dumb? Lmao
I think of it this way. Imagine the average person on the street. Not the average language learner. And then imagine a person learning English and asking them about something like “ephemeral” or “despondent”. It’s very easy to imagine most people saying “we don’t say that.” And it’s true in a sense… it’s just not helpful. But I guess the sooner people learn what things natives are and are not helpful with, the better.
I want some of these people to talk to my husband. Hes so unhelpful. Japanese born and bred college educated left the country twice for a total of 3 weeks. Just smh lol.
My take on this is that you should just go use Kanji Garden. Only teaches kanji, no vocabulary items, you can skip whatever you want, you can even mark specific kanji as learned.
I used that for 1-2 months and it was an absolutely dreadful experience that didn’t help me learn anything.
Wanikani focuses on a very simple fact of human memory: the more you see something, the better you will remember it. Heck, if you particularly hate a word, you’ll remember it even harder.
Many people (I’d wager most people, including me) would probably end up abusing an ignore system. Same with undoing wrong answers. Good user experience must also protect the user from themselves, that’s why features like that work better as additional scripts. I abused scripts before and I ended up having to reset from level 24 back to 4, which cost me a lot more time than if I had simply not abused them.
On the topic of an ignore button, I imagine that isn’t terribly hard to implement, I’m surprised the script doesn’t exist yet.
Well, people don’t complain about items taking 6+ months to burn because of the SRS though, but rather because they’re not able to take on more lessons at a time to finish all 60 levels more quickly.
There’s definitely people who have completed Anki decks the size of WK in way less time than what’s possible on WK (which is just over a year). There’s even Anki decks that contain all the vocab&kanji from WK. So, like others here have mentioned:
People who want the Anki-experience on WK could just…well…go use Anki instead?