I love WaniKani and the japanese language. If it wasn’t for this site/application and the design, I’d never have gone from being illiterate in Japanese to reading Japanese literature.
That being said, here comes the critique in the feedback-sandwich:
So I know threads have been written, questions have been answered, about why the pink card is sometimes onyomi and sometimes kunyomi.
It is supposed to be easier for beginners. But. Why can’t users choose if they want it what way, or not? I mean, for people who want to learn methodically or have advanced far enough, so they can make their own choices, why not enabling those to choose to separate onyomi and kunyomi by color and not by arbitrarily having it chosen for them? Just making it available would be nice.
The second point of this double-decker-complaint-burger:
For people who reset WaniKani, have reached a certain level, etc., what are good reasons against letting them add their own reading alternatives?
There may be “scripts” to do that, as there are scripts for everything. I do not care. I want the developers to pour ther congeniality in to a full-blown feature, to enable choice for advanced (or all?) learners.
While I can understand the complaints, I kinda Wanikani for what it is and the way it is.
Honestly, I feel like at that point you’ve outgrown something like WK.
Good luck with that. And I meant that seriously. It would be an interesting thing to add, but I don’t think it’s going to be something they’ll devote resources too especially given the extended functionality of scripts.
I think the stated “point” of the way it’s set up here is so that you have the one (or occasionally a couple) most common reading(s) associated in your mind with that kanji, for the purposes of guessing at new words. Not to know everything about each kanji.
Anything beyond that, like less-commonly-encountered readings, you pick up through vocab and whatever other business you get up to.
I would love this. There are kanji that I know from outside of WK that I know one reading for, which is not the WK chosen one. I know them so strongly that I consistently, every. single. time. enter the “wrong” reading first.
At least WK tells you it’s looking for a different reading rather than just marking it wrong, but it’s still immensely frustrating, because it breaks the flow badly. And sometimes I can’t remember the reading that WK wants because to me it’s the “context based reading that I have no trouble remembering in specific vocabulary, but can’t remember in isolation”. The other reading is the ‘main’ one.
And I have to ask, why? I mean, if the reading that WK is using is the ‘most common’, then I’ve got it covered in the vocabulary with that kanji. It seems pretty arbitrary at the end of a review session.
I’m happy learning as many readings as WK will give me. I like how WK teaches the readings in context with specific vocabulary (even if some of the vocab is … odd), but I’d dearly love to be able to use all/any of them when testing the kanji itself.
Not all vocab are kun’yomi, of course. But I wouldn’t have minded seeing some more readings along the way. Looking the rare one up is no big deal, I think, though.
To help you predict how a kanji will be read in an unknow word. For example let’s say you encounter the word 自律神経性運動失調. Except for the “運動” part, none of the other vocab (自律+神経性+失調) are taught in WK, but just by applying WK “most common reading” one by one we can actually read the entire thing ! Of course it doesn’t always work, but it’s nice to have a “most common” reading already hand-picked.
So, for instance, a kanji item for 付 with the answer of つ and a vocab item for 付ける with the answer of つける would both be the same color because they both are kunyomi items?
To help you predict how a kanji will be read in an unknow word. [/quote]
Thanks. Yeah, I didn’t express myself well, there. I do understand why. The line was rhetorical and represented the frustration I feel at those moments, not a real query.
I just find testing the reading with the kanji a little redundant. Since the particular reading is the most common, it shows up way more often in the vocabulary itself, so that aspect is kind of already taught in a better, more effective way, ie, in context. The frustration I feel seems frivolous and arbitrary.
