Change of japanese voices

[Wis]

It is not easy to understand the reason for the selection of Japanese voices. First of all in real life you will meet different persons not only man, not only women. Second, even though it might look preoccupied, I believe wanikani is not a platform to judge gender issues.

[Arzar33]

You can set the voice selection to “Random” in the settings if you want:

[MQM]

Can you explain more in detail what your issue is?

Do you want more different voices? Cause recording additional voices takes a lot of time and effort. The main benefits comes from having 1 voice, because you can hear a native speaker say the heard. The second voice, if it sounds different enough, brings a bit of value because of the contrast (high/low voice sometimes sound different). After that, the educational value of adding even more voices starts to decline. I think 2 has the best return of investment.

Or is it the fact that you can select that you only want male voice or only female voice? In that case, some people simply prefer it one way, like how you can adjust the voice of a virtual assistant.

[simias]

I think the original rationale is that some people prefer to always have the same or similar voices reading everything to get consistency and better compare and contrast words while others prefer variety in order to get more realistic variation in the input.

Framing that in terms of gender is indeed arbitrary, and the relationship between language and gender is a complex topic, but it is true that there are differences between how men and women speak so it might make sense to group them in such a fashion.

One interesting such aspects is the fundamental frequency of speakers which varies based on gender and language and culture: Language pitch · Erik Bernhardsson

More generally I don’t think that there is any judgement from WaniKani regarding anything here, they leave you the option to do whatever you want with this.

[Wis]

Thanks for the reactions. It is not so much to always have the same voices, rather more different voices, but understandably (too) expensive. My point is that in those day were gender is a public discussion item and than seeing WK provides man only and women only both in 2 variations, one can easily be mislead for WK taking a subtle position in this public discussion. That, having no dedicated opinion in this matter, is in MHO not a task for WK. That's what I wanted to bring across to WK. It might not be the case at all in which situation you can forget my remark.

[pembo]

You’re the only person finding an agenda where there isn’t one.

[Kumirei]

@Wis

Thanks for the reactions. It is not so much to always have the same voices, rather more different voices, but understandably (too) expensive. My point is that in those day were gender is a public discussion item and than seeing WK provides man only and women only both in 2 variations, one can easily be mislead for WK taking a subtle position in this public discussion. That, having no dedicated opinion in this matter, is in MHO not a task for WK. That’s what I wanted to bring across to WK. It might not be the case at all in which situation you can forget my remark.

FTFY