Cure Dolly from the Organic Japanese YouTube channel recommends having japanese on the back of flashcards.
I’ve noticed that Wani Kani allows you to have user synonyms.
I was thinking of adding some japanese synonyms to flashcards.
Like for 寒い, I could have 熱くない (Cure Dolly sensei’s suggestion)
Would this work?
Then when I see the flashcard for 寒い, can I type in my user synonym 熱くない?
If you’re asking if, at present, WK allows you to type japanese reading synonyms… the answer is just no.
What about the meaning and reading?
You could make 熱くない a synonym, but you wouldn’t be able to enter it when doing reviews because the meaning side rejects Japanese input, IIRC.
You could compromise and use “atsukunai” as a synonym if you wanted.
I actually believe the way WaniKani rejects input that couldn’t possibly be right to be really elegant and a common-sense way of doing things. It would be really great if there was a way to disable this particular check to allow for Japanese Meanings though…
Even if Wanikani relaxed the input restrictions and allowed Japanese user synonyms, it would only work somewhat well for a limited amount of vocab. In many cases you will not be able to write a known synonym or antonym there, many words require at least one whole sentence to explain them in Japanese. There’s no way to remember several sentences for several different vocab word-by-word without spending a lot of time on it (and even then, good luck trying this with thousands of vocab), but WK requires precise input for its answers.
Anki and other flashcard programs which do not require user input for the answer are better suited for monolingual cards, since you do not have to recite what’s written on the back of the card precisely and only need to confirm that the answer matches with what you thought the vocab would be, its nuance etc.
Another thing: Just because Cure Dolly recommends it, it doesn’t mean that you need to make Jp-Jp cards this early (dunno how long you’ve been learning Japanese though!). Personally I’ve started making monolingual cards in Anki after a bit of under a year of starting Japanese. They currently comprise the majority of my newly created cards, which doesn’t mean much because I’ve been slacking a lot on creating new cards in the last few months as I was approaching level 60, lol.
I do see the advantages of doing this and I do not want to go back on solely creating bilingual cards, but even then I regret doing it this early a little because my card creation process and especially my review time per card ended up becoming longer, which is not nice, especially if you have to take care of other SRS systems as well (in my case mainly WK and Bunpro).
Btw. as long as you understand for yourself what 暑くない would mean here it’s fine, but just because something is not warm, it doesn’t mean necessarily that it is cold the way 寒い would describe it 
. For cases like these I would probably use some symbols to describe that the word is an antonym. Japanese dictionary entries usually use a symbol like “⇔” (without quotes) for that, e.g. ⇔ 暑い , which is not easy to type so another case of not using WK for this, lol.
Indeed. If someone asked me what the weather was like, and I said “well, it’s not hot”, generally I’d be implying that it’s cool-to-middling rather than actually cold.
Something like:
Opposite: hot, would be better
I’m only using WaniKani at the moment which I’m finding super neat.
In the future, I might want to switch to using an Anki deck and make proper monolingual cards.
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