Yes I think it’s 1872 which is not so far in time from the US
I agree it is nice to learn new details of Japanese culture along with the kanji and vocab, but at the same time I still think it would be useful to add a skip option. I’m not a US citizen and have no plans to move there, so there’s no need for me to learn how to type Seattle in katakana - that one left me particularly rankled every time it showed up in reviews.
And just like people can resurrect burned items, it stands to reason that they should also be able to resurrect skipped items, if they later realize this or that vocab are actually useful after all.
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Me too. But I put up with it because, on the other hand, WK has all these cool military terms I like as well.
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True but this is also true of features that currently are implemented natively (I ignore context sentences completely for now, but I understand that some people like them, for instance). It doesn’t say anything that the entire user base won’t benefit from a feature.
- If you have a feature available and some people don’t want it, they can ignore it and those who want it can use it.
- If you don’t have a feature, those who don’t want it are fine, those who do aren’t.
In one of those cases, some users’ needs are not met.
There are certain degrees of freedom that just can’t be expected here though, even in a scripted environment essentially because this is a course program and there are far easier ways to customize elsewhere. There is a commitment to fully accept the platform for what it is (or not) and trust it will improve it’s intended goal, assuming reading for most of us. Locked course work like this will always favor beginners over experienced users.
It’s also an incentive not to linger here too long, just serve your cage time without having to make any study decisions and then escape into the wild with (hopefully) a new found sense of freedom. From what I see they made the program exactly how they wanted it and purposely made if difficult and inconvenient; perhaps to discourage full resets as well.
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We are still talking about an optional to use kanji website aren’t we??
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I think the reason this particular function is not built-in is because it would defeat the purpose of the vocab. You already know it’s there to reinforce readings/teach readings you didn’t learn with the kanji. So if you skip them and immediately learn the new radicals/kanji, you’re just going to end up piling up new vocab faster than you can keep up with them, since one single kanji unlocks multiple vocab words. And if you keep up that cycle, the end result will be hundreds and hundreds of skipped vocab lessons from 10 levels ago and you’ll only ever learn 1/2 of the readings for all the kanji and never get any practice/reinforcement of them through the vocab.
If all you care about is learning kanji, just use RTK or make your own Anki deck. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
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No, the creators are actually just sadists and they just chose kanji as their means of torturing people on a whim.
Apparently.
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a lot of people use that script to reorder so that the radicals are done first and then the leftover vocab to make learning more so that all kanji can be unlocked without delay.
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Wow, kinky
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and i am the masochist paying them to torture me!
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One last thing I would point out is Wanikani is oriented towards reading, and pre-emptively slicing off parts of a language to ignore seems like a strange path to literacy to me.
Like, I can basically expect my friends won’t talk to me about a subject I don’t care about. I can’t expect the same from a flyer or a newspaper or a store sign or a novel. And I’d need to be able to read some basic terms about the subject to be able to tell it’s not relevant to me.
Also, only reading about things directly relevant surely misses out on a lot of metaphors. English loves baseball metaphors, and I’d have to imagine Japanese is little different.
I think that’s the biggest disconnect making the thread so contentious.
If I’m hoping to learn vocabulary to talk about, then sure, there’s some things I’ll probably never say.
But if I’m hoping to learn vocabulary to be able to read, I’m bound by whatever the author for the material chose. Ignoring sections of a piece because they look irrelevant or boring is a bad habit to instill in a reader early on.
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One of those cases costs development resources. That’s the balance. You have a finite amount of resources so you have to make decisions on where to put it.
And while you could request that they put them in one place rather than another, at the end of the day they have to pick something, even if it’s not the place you would want.
Aye. Plus I think there’s a lot of hair splitting going on. Because either way, you’ll get to a place where your facility to read improves
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It seems like a lot of people are mad at an apple for not being an orange. WaniKani’s basic function is to act as a prefab skill tree, but it’s really not doing anything that any of us couldn’t do ourselves (especially since as far as I know, their entire pool of kanji and vocab are open to the public). I’d go so far as to say one of this site’s secondary functions is to get us to a state where we know how to continue studying on our own. Teach a person to fish and whatnot.
Personally, when I saw those six words, I found them comforting. It’s gratifying to know that no matter how bad a day I’m having, I can knock out a few easy ones and boost my own confidence.
Of course, we all have a right to leave feedback and feature suggestions for a site that we’re paying for. But I don’t think having an option to just throw out vocab would be in my best interests, at least. There are plenty of words that frustrate me, and I have my share of leeches, but the human brain doesn’t learn when it’s comfortable. Learning is a delicate balance of deliberately annoying oneself just a little so the memory sticks.
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interesting mood in this thread. on the verge of going south but disregarding some imho overly snarky comments this is actually going fairly well i think and good points are made 
i’m actually in principle fully in favour of more customization - after all i have around 30 scripts installed (not even counting the ones for the forum) - but for the same reason i avoid the ‘override’ script (marking wrong answers as correct) i wouldn’t like to be able to throw vocabs away. in moments of frustration, which inevitably come, i’m just too tempted. i’ve noticed it on bunpro too, where i’ve installed a script to prevent the use of the natively implemented undo function at least at the last SRS stage. “ah, i won’t really ever need this complicated word won’t i … yeah …”
i guess it’s users like me who ruin it for the rest of you, who have more impulse control. weakest link and all that 
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That’s really the essence of it for me too. What students think they want and what actually helps them never overlap totally, not even for me.
I don’t even know if you’re still reading this thread, but seriously, don’t go down this road.
I thought kanji was all I needed too. For about five years, that was the only part of Japanese I studied. I just had a huge Anki deck of about 1200 kanji and all I’d do is go through 100 a day and miss them over and over again until I got them right by accident. It didn’t make me better or faster at reading Japanese at all. I’ve been studying Japanese for over 20 years. That was my biggest mistake and the most energy I’ve ever wasted.
If you want to get to a point where you can read words and particle phrases and then picture them in your mind’s eye as you do with your first language, that will never, ever happen if all you do is study kanji.
Don’t make the same mistake I did.
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Narrowing down the number of reading options from “anything” to 2 (similar ones) could be enough for some people. And instead of then putting in ten times as much effort to bring that number down to 1, I’d rather get familiar with 10 other words and approximately learn their reading. I’m a quantity over quality guy when it comes to learning languages.
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The problem is that まずい and ますい are two completely different words. Same with かずand かぞ.
I get that different people have different goals, and being able to look at 不味い and know that it’s possibly either まずい or ますい is more knowledge than someone who doesn’t know kanji or Japanese at all… But despite the apparent closeness, they’re still quite far away from each other in reality.
That is to say, if someone says “well, that’s good enough” they may find out that it’s not.
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You’re right it does have to individual goals. I don’t see those two words being similar as a problem. I’ve come to rely on language error correction a lot in my studies, because I find it to be very powerful. Maybe it’s just me though.