As someone who works in IT I am no stranger to be met with countless software updates that almost always make the experience worse, but I always thought that WaniKani was an exception to that.
But lately, things have been very questionable to say the least. The site was modernized. Hooray? Except that the summary page is gone now and has been missing for what feels like ages. I am not sure why an update like that would get pushed out when it means such a crucial feature goes missing, but I guess thatâs how it is in this world where software becomes more developer-friendly and user-unfriendly.
But I still wouldnât be making this topic even if it wasnât for the baffling kana vocabulary additions. In general, I think itâs a cool concept, but the integration is abysmal. I am now 30 levels into WaniKani and I am forced to learn words like âthis oneâ, âhelloâ and âappleâ. Itâs almost insulting and itâs been annoying me so much that I will just put WaniKani on hold until I can opt out from this elementary course.
I know this is not the first topic to discuss this, and I hope it wonât be the last. Updates like these should just not be put out when they just result in frustration for the users.
Thatâs an interesting take. In my view, todayâs software becomes increasingly developer-unfriendly too. See: Twitter and Reddit closing down their APIs, the many hoops you have to jump through if you want to publish a mobile app (especially for iOS), entangled messes of Kubernetes microservice hells that have to be maintained by understaffed teams, undebuggable framework monstrosities, shiny new tech introduced by clueless juniors that stops getting updates after a year, supply chain attacks, users trying to DDOS your servers, âŠ
I really miss the review summary page man⊠It sucks a lot that itâs gone, and the fact that the devs have been relatively silent(or vague) about their plans about it is doubly worrying.
I agree. Just came back from a long hiatus and itâs less fun than it used to be.
I would have been hoping for more options/features for serious users, and instead weâre going in the opposite direction, catering to seemingly first-day-of-study students, which isnât how you keep people in for the long haul.
Iâd love something like a barebones path where you only learn a minimal amount of vocab per kanji so as to fast track your way into reading/immersion (perhaps after finishing that you can opt to circle back and do a couple thousand more vocab).
The philosophy of âweâre not going to develop those features, just open our API to the public and let them build their own userscriptsâ is really a horrible one. Itâs outsourcing your job to other people who donât get paid to do it and causes all kinds of chaos when the API gets too many requests to handle.
this is of course very suboptimal, but there are userscripts which do somewhat replace these functions.
thereâs both âLesson Filterâ and âReorder Omegaâ which both allow us to opt out of the kana words, and âReview Summaryâ which gives a replacement session review.
it really sucks that WK doesnât have these features by default. and the kana vocab really really should be opt-in. but for us who have already paid for lifetime membership and canât vote with our money, at least we can still continue to use the service we paid for the way we paid for.
Iâve given up using the wanikani page for my lessons and reviews and solely use the Tsurukame app so that I can a. filter out the kana words and b. have a summary page at the end of each review session.
This whole kerfuffle thatâs gone on at WK recently has definitely reduced my motivation for learning Japanese as a whole as well. WK used to be a key part of my Japanese learning journey, whereas now itâs just a bit of a chore. If I wasnât a lifer, Iâd given WK and learning kanji up months ago already.
The only reason I hang around the forum is that Iâm clinging onto hope that I one day see an announcement that the WK team have come to their senses and fixed the two major issues mentioned above but Iâm being probably overly optimistic here.
To me this sounds like the devs were not aware that the feature is used by many. Strange, but perhaps thatâs the case. Then the question is - why was the plan to remove the feature not communicated to the user base before removing it. Removing features is one of the no-noes in software design and should be done with care.
It sort of works on an end product like Skyrim or Fallout where the game is finished and the users are left to fix what the devs couldnât fix on time. Not so much on a live service .
But also, Iâm just going to @Mods , because we have several threads on the same topic with lots of disgruntled users, but no response from the staff beyond âweâre working on itâ.
Yeah, those are fair points. I was mostly referring to software being recreated in environments which makes it easier for the developers to work with, while users reap little to no benefit. For instance Skype 7 to Skype 8 was mostly just so developers could easily do cross platform development while the native versions prior were simply superior in every way - they ran faster and had more features.
I know this is just a work-around, and that the kana-only vocab will still be annoying to many folks even with this workaround, but it is a workaround, for anyone who wants to work-around the kana-only vocab:
Workaround for Kana-Only Vocab
For each Kana-Only vocab that you would like to be able to quickly skip:
Add a very short (e.g. a single letter) User Synonym that is the same for each such vocab you want to skip. For example, you could use the letter âsâ for âskipâ.
Make sure that you use the same shortcut for each item, so you donât have to spend any brainpower on thinking about it.
Whenever you get a Kana-Only vocab during reviews, just press âsâ to skip (or whatever shortcut you chose).
The item will be marked as âcorrectâ, and without any real mental effort wasted, you will be able to Burn it as soon as the SRS schedule allows.
This is not necessarily done for the convenience of developers, but in order to keep total development cost low. Writing native applications for every platform (desktop and mobile) is prohibitively expensive for many companies, especially smaller ones.
On the other hand, I wish the industry had standardised on better cross-platform technologies than âletâs bundle a web browser with every applicationâ.
Ok they even made it worse for me⊠" We are working on it ⊠" â Dropping a new âfeatureâ ⊠They spent their time on something nobody is asking for instead of fixing all the broken / removed things. Great Job.
The list of new words that have been added to the introductory levels is quite strange. The vast majority of them technically do have kanji but those kanji spellings have not been common use for decades. ăăă« should not be on the list at all. Itâs a loan word. ææȘă»ăăă, for example, may come up every once in a while. Iâve seen it in mid 2000âs song titles. The last time I saw æ€ă or äč as ăă was something I read in university dated late Edo period. The average Wanikani user isnât trying to read pre-modern literature in the original with æ§ćäœ; that requires classical Japanese training. If Wanikani were designed for JLPT or advanced reading knowledge, then kanji where an onâyomi exists but Wanikani refuses to input it to the card deck would not exist.
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