Yeah, I just roll my eyes everytime I see kana vocal in my reviews. I am baffled why there isn’t an option to burn items you already know. Bunpro has this. But then again, Bunpro also has a summary page, and even made it more beautiful lately.
However, I am not opposed to kana vocab, I think I am actually at a point, where they might get useful. ほとんど for example. More of that, less of “Yes” and “No”
The decisions this year to update the app so that most scripts broke, to remove the summary page, and to add kana words, along with the fact that WK has not added more advanced kanji and vocab with unusual readings make me worried about the direction that the app is heading in.
Waking up this morning to see the new available “level up” feature when the summary page still isn’t back and… Geez, maybe they are really working on it in the background (because wk team most likely doesn’t work on one project at a time) but it is very annoying to see such a crucial feature gone and something “useless” appearing. I am sure I will like the level up alert feature but it makes me doubt where wk priorities are as of late. I just wish they updated us on their plans regarding the summary page (or even their lack of plans).
Still waiting for WK to add “impossibru”
That’s likely impossibru to appear
Yes those loanwords can be confusing on first sight, but no - don’t put them in WK.
First of all, you’ll need a certain degree of proficiency in English in order to use WaniKani anway.
If we assume that the average WK user can speak English quite well, then you shouldn’t have any difficulty in remembering most of the loanwords. hotel, radio, personal computer, et al. … come on … you see them twice and you’ll never forget their meaning. It’s just a waste of time to “learn” these loanwords with a 5-6 lvl SRS system.
While I agree WaniKani is likely not a great place to learn them, because creating a mnemonic for a word which already sounds almost like English is counter-productive, I wouldn’t agree they’re easy to remember for people who speak English fluently. We have a couple of people on WaniKani who already got tripped on “convenience store” being transliterated into katakana. Also, some of the words have non-obvious transliterations or come from Dutch, French, etc. or are actually acronyms like タオルケット (towel + blanket) or are slight misuses of an English word like コンセント.
That being said, the batch that’s been added recently is really bottom tier.
Ouch, painful memories.
And now we have to relive that experience with WaniKani.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Perhaps it’s also just easier to find JS programmers than C++ ones in this day and age. Either way, regardless of motivation, I wish companies had more respect for their end users and wouldn’t deprecate what came before if there was no suitable replacement yet.
it was fine for me. i was happy to finally learn konnichiwa, ringo, moshimoshi, kore, etc.
Exactly! I think ほとんど is the only kana word so far that I didn’t use ‘s’ as a synonym for
I hope the s is a synonym for super feature
Ahhhh but what about this new banner to help tell you about you levling up?
I could not agree more. The recent updates have made the site far less user-friendly and have taken away more than it has added (is an usabilty sense).
I went off on a long-assed rant with far less dcorum than this, but your point about the kana is very fair. In my opinions it infatalizes the users, I mean, surely the whatever god one may beleive in, a Level 30 users would know what apple is in Japanese.
TBH, these recent changes gave me a sour aftertaste in WK.
I loved my first 60 run, but right now I am getting more and more disgruntled in all of it.
Kind of what happened with the season final of game of thrones, great show, wholy ruined.
I do hope this won’t last long or I might not finish this go to 60. Welp.
after kana only addition:
“in just over 3 years” am I right? 
I cancelled my subscription and switched to Anki to learn Kanji. WK shows no respect for their users time with their vocab additions, and time efficiency is the only reason I used WK.
My motivation since the summary page has been removed is… next to zero. It’s weird to explain but it was such a central part of the experience… It felt really good when you did a lot of reviews and you could check which ones you failed, how many you got right…
I think it makes a lot of sense. I have bad memory so when the heatmap script broke, I started wondering, what did I do today? It wasn’t like I could check either unless I went to look up every single kanji. Double that feeling without the summary page because it becomes hard to even check what you just did. Then suddenly, you start to have this feeling, wondering if you’re even making progress. It’s hard to tell for anything other than the current level’s kanji and even then, it takes at least a week for most levels.
I don’t think it’s that surprising at all.
I do think it’s a bit funny right now though that physical flashcards have a one up on WK because at least you can sort them into piles of right and wrong and then check them after you finish a session.
I guess Anki would also have a one up here, because it keeps track of your retension in a local database over the span of several months and years. It also gives some useful statistical insights into one’s progress and limitations.
paradoxically, i feel motivated to put in more effort, to get as much use out of WK as i can before they go and do something even more stupid like block all userscripts.
edit: but only because i’ve been able to replace most of the missing functionality with userscripts…