I’ll admit this basically stems from my laziness at not wanting to switch my PC keyboard language incessantly back and forth and is purely related to time-saving, just wondering if there was any official line on this? (I’m guessing it’s since WaniKani essentially doesn’t contain romaji so there’s a whole load of work that would have to be done to parse the hiragana, or something along these lines).
What IME are you using? Usually there is a single key hot-key/shortcut to toggle.
Given that you are here to study and improve your Japanese, wouldn’t leaving the crutch of romaji behind and working in Japanese be better? Granted, you are typing exactly the same thing so yeah, I get the it is laziness aspect.
At this point for me hitting the shortcut key to toggle has become a unconscious part of typing. The problem I have is sometimes having to do it twice because I am already in the mode I want to be in.
I actually have a reason for this which isn’t just laziness, surprisingly… I currently do the bulk of my reviews on a computer which does not have an IME installed and which I would not want to install one on (company computer). If I ever want to search something on wanikani, I either have to wait until I get home, or I have to pull up an online kana keyboard. Kind of an edge case I guess but I would also appreciate being able to search by romaji or like… have a little toggle on the search bar to convert input to kana like is done in reviews, that’d be even better in my case. Ah, one can dream…
Yeah I would love for there to be a romaji search function here. There’s no good reason I should have to switch to my Japanese IME to search for something in hiragana. It’s not like it’s hard to hit the hotkeys and swap over, but it is annoying and adds just that little bit of friction that makes the service less user friendly.
I don’t really buy the “ditch romaji and work in Japanese” angle either for this. Getting used to typing in hiragana is great and I’m not saying you’re wrong for suggesting it @mgrice , I just don’t think that it’s applicable in this particular situation! This is a service for learning kanji, and it already assumes from the start that you know hiragana and katakana. Most of the site is in English, I just don’t think they would force hiragana search for learning purposes since that doesn’t seem to be their goal with WK. With the search I’m treating WK like a dictionary basically, and I would expect any dictionary to allow me to do a search using romaji - if jisho.org didn’t allow me to search in romaji I would have left it behind long ago for something more convenient.
Takes me two hotkeys, because for some reason I’ve never been able to figure out, my IME refuses to remember that I want kana output and not romaji output. Like, why would I switch from my English keyboard to my Japanese keyboard if I want to type in English?
I take your point, but for me I actually find typing in Japanese can often be even more time consuming, since it often auto-suggests kanji meanings and I have to fight a little to get to plain hiragana (typical use case for me is hearing a word in a podcast and having no clue what the kanji might be). As mentioned by @Gigahercz I find Jisho’s behaviour perfect in this scenario.
At the very least you’ve encouraged me to identify my keyboard shortcut for switching inputs, so thanks! (I’m on Mac, so it’s Control + Option + Space, though I will admit this new-found power has also led to me typing multiple portions of this reply in hiragana before realising ).
or like… have a little toggle on the search bar to convert input to kana like is done in reviews, that’d be even better in my case. Ah, one can dream…
).