Do you want a WK-like tool for vocab learning? [Poll]

Right… need MUCH more low level content on Kindle US store.

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I would love that. My dream book would be a good and interesting novel or manga in Japanese which starts super-easy and gradually, gradually, gets more difficult as it goes along while re-enforcing what came before.

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Regarding the idea of a new SRS website for vocab.
Lots of people have said that it is not necessary because of anki.
I use a Chromebook and so don’t have anki, for people like us it would be great!

Thank you all for your opinions so far!
Your feedback definitely gave me some ideas :slight_smile:

I didn’t know it’s possible to create flashcards like this in Anki. That is indeed close to what I’ve been describing. It’s not exactly what I was thinking of, though :wink:

As others already stated, WK’s main goal is to teach Kanji and reinforce them with suitable vocab. It doesn’t teach the most useful words, especially not for beginners.

I have no financial interests in creating a new SRS vocab application, so it isn’t really a competition for me :smiley: Just wondering, are you developing a website, desktop application or mobile app? Or everything? :wink:

The idea is to create an application that teaches you vocab in the same way WK teaches you Kanji. Many people (myself included) don’t like Anki for various reasons (see Guys, I just.... I think I hate ANKI. Help me like it? for example).
Not sure, but isn’t there a web version of Anki you could use?

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I chose Yes/$3 but more as a hedge. The quality of the product would dictate how much I’d want to spend. Basically, the closer it is to WK the more I’d be willing to pay. (Of course, if WK themselves ever decided to add a ton more vocab, I’d just stick with WK, but I know that’s not their primary focus.)

I’m chugging along through WK but I do worry that I’ll finish it and then hit a brick wall of being unable to pick up new vocabulary beyond what I learned here. My experience thus far when reading manga is that if I see a word I’ve not learned on WK and don’t know from elsewhere, I simply will not remember it, even if I end up looking it up half a dozen times over the course of a volume. Words almost never stick unless I’ve learned them through SRS. And so knowing that there are many many useful words I’ll not learn though WK has been a little scary.

I tried Anki and the first hour was such a fundamentally bad and confusing user experience that I’ve never gone back. I’ve mostly been crossing my fingers that WK adds a “vocab pack” or something like that in the future. But if someone else does it first (like Bunpro for grammar which I swear I’ll get to eventually), I will gladly give it a shot.

Don’t know if this has been stated already, but as you said there are already a lot of SRS vocab learning tools out there. You mention making it closer to WK, but isnt WK only structured this way so that we learn the structure and mnmonics before we get more complicated kanji?

Whats the benefit of gating yourself on vocab words in a similar fashion?

For me, at least, it applies structure to my learning. I don’t have to think about what I’m going to learn next, I just need to work at the tasks I’ve been given. I never would have started seriously learning Japanese without that assistance.

Right, but you can already do that with any SRS method, be it memrise, iknow, or anki!

They just feed you new cards (as many as you want) each day, but I can see how motivation might be an issue there.

WK has historically added vocab from time to time. However, it’s not really enough to just wait around for.

At first I was never a fan of Anki. But once I got some help and started using a good deck, it became much better.

I’m interested. Keep us updated, please!

:ok_man:

There’s plenty of options available for vocab. What we need is an SRS for sentences. One that forces you to type in a decent translation.

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Which would be pretty much impossible since the variety of acceptable ways to translate any given sentence is generally pretty high.

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A website which should work well on mobile as well :slight_smile: perhaps later I might also create some mobile apps but for now it is not included in the scope.

To further clarify in what we might differ:
I don’t plan on creating things like levels like WK has (mostly because I am not 100% sure who made the (i.e) “core 10k deck” and don’t want to charge people for content I didnt curate myself if that is the only option to content they have).

I want people to have the freedom of how they currently use/edit anki. However, it should be very easy for people to get started by having default templates/layouts, community deck sharing and a better general UI/UX.

Edit2:
That said, I’d love to make a website like WK which has own curated content (the vocab). But that would require more people to help me with that part.

Oh and just curious, with what tech/lang do you want to create it? :smiley:

Sure, but if the hypothetical tool in this thread had a slick enough UI and enough WK-like features, I’d be interested. It’s more than just the SRS (important as that is for me) that makes WK useful, it’s how nice it feels to use. Well, that and scripts. Scripts are huge huge huge for making WK work for me, which is why a big vocab expansion to WK would be my ideal.

I haven’t tried memrise or iknow, mostly because WK keeps me busy, but they may be something I have to see about falling back on when I exhaust WK.

thats totally understandable! WK does have a very nice and easy to use UI and most vocab SRS tools do not. (Unless you are an Anki Guru :wink:)

I guess I just dont see what other WK-like features would benefit vocab acquisition! Sorry to keep hounding you, but what scripts are you thinking of?

Scripts in this case being the user scripts - reorder, ignore, dashboard, the stats site, etc. All the neat stuff people have created to make using WK easier and the UI more powerful, which in turn makes it easier to track my progress and learn more in the way I want to learn it. As for native WK features, stuff like its typo leniency is very nice, or the searchability of its database and ability to jump between related radicals/kanji/vocab in a nice UI. And the mnemonics, though admittedly I use them less for vocab than I do for kanji.

I’m sure there are other apps that have some of this, and it wouldn’t be impossible for me to learn more vocab outside of WK. But I’m guessing there isn’t one that has all of it, or has it as easily configurable as WK scripts. And since I’m already invested in this site it’d just be nice to have any future vocab I learn be in one place. Especially one that’s been tracking all my progress (and knows which vocab I’ve already learned).

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Yes! So don’t you think that somehow melding WK and BunPro would do that. Although LingoDeer just added some pretty cool stuff including verbal and reading practice of sentences.

I couldn’t get this to work for some reason. It broke my Anki and forced me to make a new user because of an error or something. It wouldn’t let me back on my first user name. I ended up having to delete it off my computer. I still have it on my phone where I normally use it anyway and that seems unaffected so far.

I would like an easy way for me to learn the core 10k. Something that picks the words for me, and doesn’t let me cheat or use multiple choice. I just honestly don’t have enough motivation to make my own Anki decks and I have a hard time getting some premade ones to work. I like WK because its the easiest way, whether or not I could learn kanji equally or better another way that might even be free doesn’t matter.

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