Hey everyone. I dropped WK after the kana update and was just pretty tired of learning “babies first words” alongside kanji middle schoolers don’t even know and just wanted to know what has changed and if there is a compelling reason to come back and finish the last 13 levels.
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No more reason than before I guess. Some changes to the flexibility in choosing what lessons to do. There still seems to be only a handful or two of kana-only items that take two seconds to review, like a radical. Meaning, that hasn’t seemed to have taken over the whole site or anything. If that helps you decide. 
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I agree with you…
Lots of us who have studied some Japanese before (ie. Intermediate level learners), are forced to study basic vocabulary 
It really hurts the experience.
If I may insist, the solution is pretty simple (from a programmers perspective): Just create an “Insta-burn” button for vocabulary items only. That would help tremendously giving students more time to focus in those words they really don’t know.
NOTE: This is a humble suggestion from a user who is a few days from reaching Lvl60 and really loves the app. I give WK credit for its strong points, but forcing us to review lots of basic vocab can hinder the progress so much 
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Or an opt out button specifically for kana. This suggestion has been in the works for over a year maybe? But alas… Nothing has come of it.
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Kana vocab ended up being pretty insubstantial. I too thought it was worrying at first when they were rolling them out weekly, but in the end it was a pretty limited set. Just quickly typing them and knocking them out probably took a cumulative 5-10 minutes of my life to burn them all.
Flicked through the last ten levels to check how common they were and yeah, I’d say it’s probably worth it. A couple pretty everyday kanji per level in there and a whole lot that come up in reading constantly, would definitely speed you up to go through them.
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I’m in the last 13 levels so I’ll give you my take. I’m always happy to learn more words so I want to finish it, I could be learning just from immersion at this point but I feel like it doesn’t hurt to learn more new kanji. And I get ridiculously happy when I recognise them in the wild haha. But basically you have to decide on using time doing lessons and reviews or could you be using this time in something else. Your choice really!
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I suppose that’s fair. I could just go at a super slow pace at this point and not really care, but keep the routine going.
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Exactly:) I’m doing something like that so I have more time for immersion but just keep it going. 6 lessons a day, I level up about every 2-3 weeks depending on the number of items per level
Just choose manually which words you want to learn. I don’t want to learn baseball terms because I’ve never watched a baseball game in my life. I don’t want to learn words that I know perfectly well because I’m a railway nerd, like 駅. I just don’t choose them in the advanced mode.
I think I remain unconvinced.
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With 13 levels to go I think it would be quite difficult to recommend going back to WK over finding some other SRS that lets you select the words you’re actually encountering in your reading/listening/etc (assuming you’re not fed up with the whole SRS approach and ready to ignore it and just immerse for a bit, which is also a totally reasonable choice).
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I do it already just thought it would be nice to finish wk.
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kana update was just a few words, just mark them as correct and they wont appear so regularly.
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How much was that because of the backlash though? They did state they were planning on adding a couple of thousand
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They stoped after 60 iirc.
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Then it really comes down to how much satisfaction you think you’ll get out of hitting the big 60. If you’re already self-sufficient then going back and finishing it might be more counter-productive than anything. Putting extra time into something that’s likely not all that beneficial anymore is a good way to build up negative feelings towards how you’re spending your time.
Especially if you’d already quit over similar feelings.
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They stopped adding kana vocab and what’s left of the first batch is too small to really matter either way IMO, so it’s basically the status quo.
Having gone through those levels recently however, I don’t really think you’re missing out a lot by just studying kanji you encounter in the wild compared to pushing through WaniKani. You already got 99% of the practical value of WaniKany by level 48.
That was my main drive too. If you feel like rushing I think you only have “fast” levels ahead of you, so you can technically finish in 6.5 weeks if you “speedrun”. You can also cheat by only doing the kanji and radicals (that’s what I did, although I still eventually learned all the associated vocab in a few months after level 60).
But honestly as stated above, it’s going to be quite a lot of work for dubious practical gains.
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I don’t know that I have a recommendation, but here’s what I’ve noticed for myself: I’m pretty much picking up kanji in the wild now, no need to wait for WK to teach them to me. The vocabulary is kind of nice when it’s not one I’ve seen a lot before.
But here’s another thing I’ve noticed - when I’m encountering kanji and noting them for future reference, in my mind I’m using WK’s “radical” names. That’s super-useful to me. And to the extent there are more “radicals”, I want to learn those to make it easier for me to learn kanji on my own.
(Nothing’s stopping me from just paging through the radicals though, the SRS isn’t really needed.)
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Yeah, I’m more and more convinced they should have left it at the original 50. I personally did the last 10 levels just to finish (and not a little bit of pure spite).
Yeah, after having finished a few years ago now, I sometimes think about resetting, but I honestly don’t think I’d get any benefit from it unless I was looking at something like the KanKen. If you’re already reading, then I doubt there are many compelling reasons to finish up the levels.
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I really think the last 20 levels or so would be more enjoyable of they removed the arbitrary level constraint and let you pick and choose the kanji you want to learn and in which order. This way you could just select the kanji that are relevant in the stuff you read (and by level 40 you should really be reading seriously IMO…).
The whole radical thing also becomes really tedious by that point.
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