i feel you tho
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Wanting to force someone who doesn’t want to learn (cheats) seems like entirely the wrong approach. I don’t think their target market are 4 years old.
Amen.
This argument never fails to make me laugh. Can you imagine if we thought that way about everything? We’d all be utterly incapable of doing anything for ourselves.
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No one is forcing anyone to use WK if they don’t want to learn
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i’d not want the ability to discard any items built in as a core functionality. however, if there were a way to do so via the API, so that people could make userscripts for that, it’d probably be okay.
WK obviously doesn’t want people to “cheat”. there’s no way to undo an answer if you make a typo, or actually really knew it, or whatever. you can however undo wrong answers via scripts.
for many people, being able to “cheat” like that is a slippery slope. getting that item to guru, getting that level-up on schedule, these things can be quite addictive. if WK had a built-in function for undoing wrong answers, i’m quite certain that many people would abuse that function. that would not only be bad for the user, who cheats themselves. it would also in aggregate reduce the quality of the service WK provides.
some people do want the ability to undo answers. i can understand them well, it can be very frustrating when a typo keeps you on a level for 3 extra days. so WK allows it via userscripts, and puts the responsibility for it on the user.
i think it’s similar with discarding vocab:
WK presents us with a more or less balanced set of vocab and kanji. some might be more useful, some less, no doubt about that. and the advanced learner might well be able to judge which words were helpful to them, and which weren’t.
but for many if not most users, it’d be really difficult to judge if a word were useful or not. on the other hand, if people could just make a word disappear which is causing them trouble, i have no doubt that people would abuse that option.
i don’t know if that is actually WK’s reasoning. but it’d be my reasoning for oposing such an option as a built-in feature, and putting responsibility for using it into the hands of a user who decides to install a script.
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Honestly, I’ll probably go ahead and do the “a” as a synonym skip option trick for myself; simply because I started WK after already having taught myself JPN for 2 years and lived there for almost 2 on top of that; it’s super redundant to type, even if it only takes about a couple seconds, I have absolutely no need for it. It is a literal waste of time. I will never forget those words or how to create such a phrase simply cuz I’ve seen/heard/read them more than a thousand times at this point. Plus, I don’t even know if adding things like ベッドの下 or 力いっぱい is a good thing for beginners cuz like…if they’re learning their vocab from only WK, and not learning grammar…learning ベッドの下 like that is almost akin to memorizing it as a phrase? and not learning how to formulate your own directional/positional grammar phrases with “の” and “下” and “いっぱい.” Maybe it’s good for more kanji recognition but not sure if that’s the best way to go about it. If people like it, sure, let them keep it by all means; more power to them. For me though, it’s completely unnecessary and I’ll be skipping it the lazy way. 
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I think there’s a difference between not wanting to learn and not knowing (yet) the best way to learn or the scope of what there is to learn.
Wanikani was my introduction to SRS, and kanji, and so a huge portion of its value wasn’t just the material but showing me what productive use of SRS to learn kanji even entailed. I’m positive that if, for example, the level restriction wasn’t in place, I would have had an initial burst of enthusiasm and done like ten levels of lessons right out of the gate and probably had a much worse time.
Now I use Anki constantly, adore its lack of restrictions, and get a lot out of it, but I wouldn’t have known how to do that without Wanikani’s example, or at least it would have taken me a lot longer to get there.
4 years ago, I assumed I hated flash cards. Now I do hundreds of them in Anki every morning. And the process to get there was less a conscious exploration of my own study methods and more Wanikani tricking me into a process that worked, if I’m being honest.
I get the impression that that general arc is true for a lot of other people, including some portion of Wanikani’s main target audience.
It’s easy to want to learn a language but still be ignorant and/or hubristic about it without being 4, after all.
That “teaching the process” effect is what I’d worry about losing if the base site’s system was more compromised by simple options that specifically lessen the review load.
In a parallel universe there’s probably a contentious forum thread about somebody who advocates disabling all vocabulary and radicals to learn the kanji more efficiently. Or just somebody who quietly disables words they think they know already and then forgets them that much sooner.
Not the end of the world, either of them, but in my book Wanikani isn’t just teaching kanji, it’s also teaching how to learn kanji for people who are new at this. And that requires a knowledge of scope - that it’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of reinforcement, and that there’s a whole lot of words to learn in a language. Encouraging newbies to grapple with that, is I think a positive good.
That might be small consolation to the folks who came here already knowing how they like to study, though! And to be clear: I still think if possible it would be great if everyone had the ability to modify the site exactly how they want to use it.
But that’s my piece on why there might also be some benefit in some of those options staying as workarounds or scripts.
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As a paying customer, rightfully i have sent my request to their email address. Let’s see how it goes. if they decide to implement it, amazing. If they decide it is against their core design, still ok, not the end of the world, and will keep using wanikani as there is still a lot of value in its current form and help us to learn Japanese everyday.
As a side note, someone above calls us, who wants that feature, as 4 years olds. Please stop insulting us.
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Nah, they were saying that WK is treating its users as 4 years old by not implementing the feature
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oh, I misunderstand then. apologies. Thank you for clarifying it.
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4 year olds who are in cages and happy about it.
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Thanks for the response.
That seems fair enough and I can respect that.
Definitely agreed, if the changes made are too drastic, and this is likely the sort of balance the WK team tries to strike.
I think the gripe is not so much that there is structure but that there are too many limitations that make it harder for a learner to take much responsibility at all. I guess a metaphor would be when you first start learning to ride a bike. Someone holds the back of the seat and helps push you and keep your balance, but they don’t hold for “about a year”. They trust that you will figure it out, won’t just buy training wheels to permanently attach to the bike and they recognize that, when it comes down to it, the only person who will suffer as a result of your “cheating” is you.
The specifics is where things get murky because there are as many possible implementations as there are people, but I don’t think the leveling system and the restricted content per level is the primary problem (anyone familiar with gamification is used to leveling of some sorts), I think it’s more that even when you’re on a level, and you’re putting in the work, you’ve sat down in your chair and you know what you’re doing (the system you rightly describe as “teaching the process” is working), even then, you don’t have the ability to decide for yourself what you should and shouldn’t bother with. While I’m not advocating for one specific implementation, I am saying that the lack of specifics for an implementation does not make the restrictive (current) option necessarily the best one.
Do I personally think people should be skipping all vocab because it’s a Kanji website? Absolutely not. The vocab oftentimes reinforce readings and teach new ones. But there are other reasons that make it a valid thing to do (when you already know the readings and you choose not to do those vocab items, or when the vocab seems pointless to you). Also, allowing this would not impact the integrity of the levels as you would still need 90% Kanji to level up.
I will concede that it’s not an easy balance and the closer you move towards allowing for more freedom, the more people ask for and the more likely the balance tilts the Anki way (which is just a bad implementation of Kitsun 
). But this is the case for most things, so…
I do want to thank you for your input. It helped me crystallize my position and gave me pause.
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#kidsInCages 
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That’s not an option to pick from install scripts though, that’s only a subset of functionality I would have used if I had a PC.
And my comment was only on validity of Kumirei’s method of establishing whether usage of scripts is negligible.
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It would be nice if you could bother to read what i actualy wrote about umareru.
Im using Wk because i do not want to create/maintain a deck of cards myself Anki or otherwise.
Ill happily pay a few bucks a month for that.
What i want is their Kanji database and the Vocab that are useful for either the Kanji or in general.
Something like テーブルのうえ isnt a vocab. Its a phrase that should be in a grammar lesson, not in Wk.
What i do not agree with is the borderline arrogance of whoever is responsible for creating the learning experience. They seem the be of the opinion that their way of learning is the best and there is no way it could be different for different people.
But its really not a surprising attitude. If noone ever questions the method why would they think it could be anything less than perfect. Its funny how so many arguments against any change dont go much further than “use anki lol”. Stockholm is a surprisingly fitting word.
Would you not say thats kind of catch22 or chicken and egg situation?
“People do not use scripts ergo we do not need to implements options” is a nice way of deflecting any sort of responsibility to improve the user experience.
Maybe people would use those options more if they were available natively?
Maybe people do not want to install scripts on their browser? I do not. Call me careful or paranoid.
I will 1-up you here. Give me an option to have WK totaly ignore, or atleast whiggle agressively,
on any chi/ji ha/ba/pa shou/jou or any other of these.
Half my wrong answers and many of my leeches are because i cannot hear the difference in these pronunciations. This makes it really hard to remember them and makes alot of these words a straight 50/50 even though i know what they mean. At this point ive started looking them up because it has become extremely inefficient trying to remember wether its masui/mazui or kazu/kazo.
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You are careful. And also paranoid.
Can I haz cookie now?
No one can say you shouldn’t cheat, since it’s only yourself it impacts, but what do you gain from looking stuff up? Why pay for a system to test you as you learn kanji readings and then avoid being tested?
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WaniKani’s kanji and vocab lists aren’t proprietary or paywalled, they’re available to non-paying users. My suggestion that you use Anki wasn’t facetious, it’s genuinely what I believe would be the most beneficial method of learning to you if you find the way WaniKani manages content to be counter to your preferences.
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Serious question: is the level organization of the Kanji proprietary or only the specific SRS implementation and UI/UX?
It’s never been 100% clear, but since the kanji and the vocab are public, the things that are proprietary would be: ordering, example sentences, mnemonics, and radical names. Their specific SRS implementation is technically proprietary, I’d guess, but realistically anyone with an Anki deck could copy it. Personal use is obviously less problematic than commercial use, in general terms.
You can see the full of terms of service here and I’m not an authority on content use, I’m afraid.
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This seems like a major point.
I feel like an analogous situation would be if a native Japanese learner of English said something like, “Well I can’t hear the difference between election and erection so I’m just going to treat them the same and don’t want to be corrected on it. Now can someone tell me about Obama’s big erection in 2008?”
Like this is the exact situation of someone shooting themselves in the foot by taking an easy / lazy way out.
The syllables of Japanese are so fundamental the language, wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on some listening practice to distinguish these sounds? It just takes some time and focus. To skip over that would be building language study on a crumbling foundation that will never hold up.
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