Does Wanikani listen to feedback

Yes, I’ll tell you what will cause a 3000-post whine thread. It’s complaints that don’t get any responses from the WK team.

Unless, that is, they close the thread, which will happen to this one any second now.

You bring up a good point. I am bringing this up internally and we’ll have it addressed.

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At least the undo-button has a kind of response, WK feels it’s dangerous to start get you fooling yourself and unnecessary in the long run.

I love my undo-button, so I think WK is too conservative there, but the teacher should be allowed to choose in the end how they will do the teaching. Sometimes the wisdom of something becomes clear later. [Or maybe there will be an undo-button anyway, Apple also didn’t have a right click for ages but caved anyway :smile:]

Hopefully, if they add an undo button, they’ll also add a setting to disable it so I won’t be tempted by it.

Honestly the team seems involved enough to me. To the user angrily using their N5 status against the system just stick with it a little longer and if you don’t enjoy it then maybe it isn’t for you and that is okay not every study tool is useful for everyone. N5 is still infancy levels of knowledge in Japanese so if you want to get good at it stay humble and know that you still have a long journey ahead, I even saw a post on Reddit by someone who studied for 12 days from zero and passed it. Just keep grinding for now and never get cocky

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Totally agree! There’s a lot of salt in this thread

Dealing with forums is much more complicated than with email. The Bugs and Errors forums seems to exist only so people don’t open threads in other sections. At least that’s what the forum description says.

Everything takes time and costs money. I’d much rather have that money spend on more important things like better audio recordings and mnemonics. Or maybe even stories for each level that use the new Kanji in context. That would be awesome :heart:

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I’m not specifically talking about the undo button. But there are some features that should be in WK proper and not a userscript.

A good example is the timeline feature, which shows you how many reviews you have at what time.

For a beginner, this helps with their understanding of how SRS works and prevents the thousands of threads asking why they don’t get new lessons or why the system is so slow.

For advanced users, it helps them plan their learning schedule more effectively, knowing how much time they have to spend reviewing every morning/evening if they can’t review while working, when they can expect to level-up, etc.

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I think I can agree to this. The timeline is much more useful than what they currently have. But at the same time with the scripts available, I don’t really see it as a necessary thing for them to implement. It’s a shame that people who join aren’t more exploratory before posting questions. A lot of what I learned has mostly been found by seeing how the forums work at all or what people were saying. This community is one of the most helpful I’ve seen and I love it :crabigator::heartpulse:

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I’ve had quite a few interactions with the WaniKani team whilst I’ve made payments over PayPal and they’ve always gone above and beyond for me, responding always within 5 minutes to emails, giving me personalised/custom subscription plans and also giving me a discount when I didn’t even ask for one.
WaniKani’s customer service is impeccable.
And that’s coming from a grumpy cynical Brit.

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It is getting better now that I am finally moving up and getting more lessons.

Personally I would rather focus on mistakes and kanji that I do not know rather than repeat simple kanji that I do know.

What I am doing now is going through every single kanji after a new lesson and adding synonyms that I have already been taught or know they are if they are different. That is making a major difference. I am also doing that for radicals which is helping a lot as well.

The only gripe I have ever had is relatively simple kanji come back for reviews that were subject to an innocent typo or incomplete list of synonyms.

I don’t mind being marked wrong for what I call dyslexic type errors where you mistake a kanji for something similar. That is an error I would rather wear as it will help with the JLPT.

They claim to want to focus on learning and I and obviously many others feel (particularly the people who use scriprs or the fact one was created) proves the system is not 100% perfect.

I do think an undo button would be useful though. That will not change. Perhaps peer review it with other members if the moderators do not have the time. That is all I have to say on that.

Obviously the system isn’t perfect, but everyone also has a different idea of what is perfect. Scripts let users customize the system (to a certain extent) to work best for them individually.

If you really wanted, you could still get a script with an undo button. It would take 10 minutes if you cared to try.

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Mate I think you’re really stuck on the “paid subscription” idea which you translate to “my demands should be met”, but that’s not really the case at all. No system is perfect, and the perfect WK for many people is extremely subjective, hence the existence of scripts. As someone mentioned, it would make your life a lot easier and save you lots of typing if you check out the scripts! If you still feel the service isn’t right for you, don’t subscribe to it again.

I understand your frustrations; I was just internally complaining about these typo setbacks (I make a lot because I type fast or use my phone and my keyboard isn’t as responsive), but I’d never think of wanting an undo button, because I can easily imagine abusing it if i want to cut corners, which won’t be beneficial for me on the long run.

“Disgraceful” is really such a strong and negative word, and I don’t personally think it applies in this situation just because they refused one of your suggestions (Remember, just because you paid doesn’t mean you have absolute influence on the platform; they made it and they get to judge what fits their platform best, because it’s THEIR vision)

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Script writers should get commission! I am sure many of us stick with the program because of the unpaid work they do!

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Agree with this. As good as WK may be, it has problems which scripts fix.

The timeline is a fix for the problem that users don’t know when their next important reviews will be. The ignore/undo button is a heavy handed fix for the problem where the user can make a minor mistake or typo and accidentally send an item they know back to apprentice level - I think that’s excessive punishment for forgeting rendaku, for example. The Self-Study Quiz is a fix for non-configurable SRS intervals, where one size does not fit all.

If you forget the rendaku you don’t know the item. :expressionless:

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I would actually like an undo button too, but for the opposite reason. Sometimes something wrong gets accepted like “to be cut” instead of “to cut”. If I got the meaning first, I put in the wrong reading intentionally, but that’s not always the case and screws up my statistics.

I also don’t want to install a plugin that can run arbitrary scripts. That’s a huge security risk.

The point of WK is to take you by the hand to learn to read Kanji. If you want more freedom, there’s plenty of alternatives out there.

Also, development is expensive, so just because someone pays a little money doesn’t mean they can demand endless work. A decent developer costs at least $60 an hour if not much more. I paid $200 for my lifetime account. That’s maybe three hours of work for a developer. So I’m happy to get the service as is and even happier if it gets an upgrade.

The people who develop scripts do this on their own time and hopefully for fun. If you want to pay them a commission, please feel free to donate. I don’t think WK has it in its budget. They were nice enough to make the API public, which makes development more difficult since it has to remain stable and now they have to maintain two versions. That’s not fun.

So please, appreciate what you get. I think the people here are doing a great job and it’s really worth the money that I pay. If you want perfect control, you can always hire a company to make your own version. You’ll just have to pay a lot more.

That being said, there’s always room for improvement, and we got a nice update recently. I look forward to what’s coming next.

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It’s not as bad as you think. Assuming you’re using Chrome, you can set Tampermonkey to only run on WaniKani and no other website. It was a relatively recent enhancement that you can restrict extensions to arbitrary websites instead of letting them run on any website desired by the extension (which for Tampermonkey is of course every website by default).

In addition, you then have the choice to run only scripts you add to Tampermonkey, meaning you can review them yourself if you’re concerned that they’ll do shady stuff. In that sense, userscripts are actually safer than browser extensions since you can’t verify those. And I believe you can also set the scripts to not auto update, so you can manually verify new versions yourself before updating them.

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How do you restrict Tampermonkey like this. I looked at the settings but couldn’t find that feature. Thanks.

It’s in the browser setting.

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