I’ve seen a lot of discussion about this and the general consensus I’ve seen from it is:
You will always come across kanji you don’t know, no matter how many levels they add, not matter how much vocab any website adds, there will always be something.
There comes a time to move on from SRS and to start digging into Japanese content, grammar, listening, etc. Once you know 2000 kanji, that’s about the same as an average Japanese adult (according to various sources), and SRS will see diminishing returns. Already at the high levels people talk about the low usage of kanji and vocab, adding more will exasperate that issue.
I don’t think the first point is a good one. Sure there are 48,000~ kanji and obviously I am never going to no them all, but there are still a few hundred kanji that are very common that are not on WaniKani. Also their message recently about “teaching all the vocab for reading Japanese” fits perfectly with this because there are many common kanji in books that are not on here.
I agree you have to move away from the SRS at some point for Japanese in general but I study for kanken. I’m taking level 1.5 next year, I need an SRS to help study the kanji and vocab for this test because I will not encounter most of them anywhere else. I’m not going to practice reading archaic texts just to get exposure to them. I know this is a very niche use case, but WaniKani was great for learning kanji and even though I’m a life time member, I would not mind paying for additional levels.
That is fair but I still think even just looking at the wording it is mainly emphasizing the kanji aspect and how it is a particularly helpful tool for learning to read kanji. It is fairly implicit that the vocab it’s referring to in WK is related to the kanji you’ll be learning, considering the readings change depending on the word it is in (i.e. the vocabulary). The vocabulary always help me reinforce the readings. To clarify, this is my interpretation of WK when I call it ‘kanji learning tool’ (kanji + related vocab). Vocab in that capacity also appealed to me when I signed up for WK and I see that as an inherent part of learning kanji. And that is kind of the crux of people’s frustration: We all knew vocab is a part of this process, but not necessarily kana-only vocab.
Does WaniKani claim they provide vocab needed to be able to read in Japanese? That sounds quite dubious to me .
That’s always been my assessment of their priorities as well. Especially, considering some chosen words are rather uncommon yet they appear on WaniKani.
I get that. There’s a lot of sites that list how many kanji you’ve learned of some frequency on WK and it doesn’t get all of the top 2000. Hell I encountered a kanji in a kids book that I haven’t seen before, but if the team spends all their time working on adding more kanji that are used less and less frequently, over time you’ll see diminishing returns. According to WKStats, at level 60 you can read 99.25% of kanji in the general news. The jump of percent from level 1 to 2 is 7.40%, from 59 to 60 is 0.02%. There is a point where adding new levels could potentially do nothing, and WK is very much almost, if not right at, that point.
Nothing to say on your second point as that is something that primarily applies to you, and I am not in that situation.
I mean I went through all 60 levels and can read actual books without a dictionary so it’s not wrong in my case at least (most words I don’t know are kana-only, if not kana common, so based on that statement, the WK teams does have a reason to add kana vocab. I do get why people want an option to disable it though).
Absolutely reasonable and a standard feature of virtually every language learning app. Dosen’t even Duolingo offer “placement tests” to skip the easy stuff for advanced students?
People keep asking because people keep needing. I started WK very early in my Japanese language learning journey but if I already knew a couple hundred kanji I probably would have given up on the website because I couldn’t be bothered to go through the same content again.
Yes, but also that’s a very different proposition and I don’t understand why you would equate one to the other.
When I started WK I knew that I wouldn’t be able to skip kanji and I accepted that when I committed to it. Kana vocab started happening when I was halfway through.
This has been debated to death already. Just give me the toggle that was promised and all the complaining will go away.
You may think that it’s not reasonable to complain about the kana vocab and that’s fine, but I think it’s not reasonable to take several months to implement a basic content toggle on a $9/month service.
I think whether it’s good or bad, doesn’t really matter. Wanikani came out of Tofugu which tries to be the Japanese teacher they never had. It’s of course fine to disagree or not like it, I’m just saying that I think their thinking and approach hasn’t really changed and the addition of 1% more words that are kana, isn’t really veering off into a completely different direction. I’d even boldly claim, if they added 60 words in Chinese it wouldn’t change much, because it’s such a small amount, but here I’m only semi-serious
I concede this point. The hierarchical nature of radicals and kanji is different from the kana words.
It really almost does not. It’s such a small amount of words.
I understand this criticism more: If I could choose between more advanced levels or kana levels, I’d also prefer more advanced levels. I guess from a marketing point of view, it’s a bit more tricky, because only like 0.1% of users make it to level 50 or 60.
And I think that’s the crux of the matter. Being cynical, we could say it’s a money thing, fine. But being charitable, it really is a thing that most people only start learning a language and give up later. Starting to learn Japanese in WK would benefit tremendously from adding a few kana words for the people who only just started out or do not have time or resources at their hands like y’all are claiming where you are learning your kana from. Most people are beginners, it’s good to make it beginner friendly. You level 60 folks and dedicated folks should be a bit more understanding of the newbies among us
Duolingo is from hell and WK shouldn’t take any advice from it.
All in all I see two main lines of argument:
“it’s not what WK is made for” → WK has a terms and service agreement where they say anything is subject to change and vocabulary or being a general Japanese teacher has always been part of the program.
“It’s too easy/boring/time consuming” → As I calculated in the first post, it’s not a lot of time and I gladly sacrifice a tiny bit of time in order to have WK be more inclusive for lower level people who might greatly benefit from the kana addition.
That’s not what I was implying, just that even Duolingo does that. If you want other examples of websites that I’ve used that let you skip early level content I can think of Memrise, ClozeMaster, anything Anki-based of course, Lingq, Drops, Sakura Reader, Bunpro, Babbel and probably many others. In fact I’m not sure I know a single language learning tool that forces you to go through everything from complete basics, except for WK. I’m sure they must exist. I’m sure I’ve never used them.
That’s a false dichotomy. I don’t have to make my experience worse to make newcommers happy. Again, just give us the promised toggle and everything will be fine for everybody.
I also assert that even for complete newbies the way many of these words are taught on WK is not appropriate and won’t lead to good retention, but that’s moot.
Well yea duh, its not illegal for them to change it in this way… And its not illegal for people to complain about not liking the change either, so?
Even if that was thousands of words you know?
Because there is gonna be much more of them.
Yea for now its mostly just annoyance and habit breaker than actual time waste, but thats still something you dont want to introduce just for laughs.
Barely anyone is complaining that kana is here (although i think its still a bit of a waste of resources considering theres many upgrades WK could focus on, but fair), the problem is simply that its mandatory.
Yea i also think so, although i thought they would reevalute before they even pushed that out considering the feedback, so who knows really? It would be nice if they updated on how its looking instead of just small footnote in the email “we are working on it”, like many others im shocked this (and summary page) can even take this long.
Since they haven’t deleted those 60 yet, I think it’s safe to assume there will at least be several hundred more in the future, or maybe a thousand. Since we already have 2k kanji and 6k vocab, that could mean a 10% increase or so in items?
This is fair. With the announcement that they were hiring a software engineer, I was really excited thinking we were going to grammar. Instead, we got ここ、こんにちは、 and others, but 本日、明太子、and 様子 are “too common” to be added.
I’d take 疑う. It’s a funky kunyomi for a kanji that’s already there, packed in a common enough word that’s just the verb version of “doubt”. Was surprised to see a known kanji pop up after my colleague said it and I searched for it.
With the odd announcement that a grammar platform years into production has been through a reply on Twitter, it doesn’t seem like there’s an intention in integrating grammar or making a sister platform for grammar anytime soon. So WK hopes that you will be able to learn as much Japanese* as possible. Even if better choices are made with kana vocab, a resource focused on just kanji and vocab is going to fall short of getting learners there. Would kana vocab really help all those level 60 users who couldn’t read even when they completed WK?
I also like the addition of kana vocab words, and I’d like there to be a lot more in the future, but I think making it optional is the best for everyone in terms of satisfaction with the app. There wouldn’t really be any harm to people who like it if it was made optional.
Right, but did you use WaniKani exclusively to learn vocab? That’s the point I am trying to make.
I am not sure why people are hung up on the 60 words. That’s the words they added so far. Their goal as stated multiple times and brought up now by @DIO-Berry is to serve hundreds of these words.
But here is how this has played out so far
WaniKani team promises kana-only vocab, showcases onomatopeia (which are notoriously hard to learn), adverbs and borrowed English words (which can be confusing).
People are okay with it.
WaniKani team rolls out extremely basic, entry-level words without the option to opt-in or opt-out.
People are not happy.
There is a pretty noticeable gap between what was promised and what was given. 60 words or not.
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