[Feature Request] Unlock any item

WaniKani would lose a lot of its magic if you could just unlock whatever you wanted.

  • It would become just another SRS tool and you would always be thinking about how much to unlock (maybe just go crazy and unlock all 60 levels? why not!) and playing around with it; I already have Anki to worry about and it is always stressing me out and I never do it as consistently as WaniKani.
  • If you could unlock whatever you wanted, the whole gamification aspect would be completely lost and with it much of the fun and motivation that keeps users coming back
  • Having to work for new kanji and vocab is part of what keeps you motivated. I can add as many Anki cards as I want per day and there is nothing exciting about that.

The WK team does of course know and understand this since they intentionally designed it that way. So they are (I guess) never going to change it and I think that is a good thing.

There are a lot of alternatives out there, even free ones. But for some reason we are all here anyway.

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please

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Don’t worry, you will surely get the Karkland.

It’s allegedly called “etoeto” and some people claim they have beta access and all of those people are liars who can’t be trusted.

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Well.

I do have beta access to a thing called Etoeto, but it is definitely not a textbook that works with Wanikani as it stands currently.

If you want the kind of content you can find on Etoeto but you want it right now, you might want to have a look at Satori Reader: https://www.satorireader.com/

In my opinion, as it stands now, SR is a better alternative to Etoeto. (Sorry koichi, I’m sure your book will be super cool when it launches, but I want to learn Japanese right now).

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isn’t EtoEto still in development? if so, yeah, it’d make sense it’s not as good as a finished product, it’s not finished XD

The version of Etoeto that is in beta is not really “in development” any more than Satori Reader is.

Satori Reader fits in pretty nicely with my current level of grammar, but I don’t feel like I’m actually learning new things from it the way I would with a textbook, rather that it’s helping to solidify and correct things I already know or kind of grasp, but don’t fully understand.

Something like its fully annotated articles/stories, but where select new grammar concepts are called out before each chapter in a story, like a one-line “the next passage introduces より and ほう, frequently used to contrast options; see [link to details]” thing, even if the new rules are more complex than what is expected of the reader in terms of JLPT level, would make it a much better learning resource for me. I’d be primed to look for and study that structure, and then the same preface might show up in another article later and I’d decide then if I remember it well enough (still reinforcing it as a long-term memory) or if it should be studied further in the new context.

Bonus points if the grammar-rule page opens with a tl;dr section on repeated visits, with its more in-depth explanation below.

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I totally agree with your sentiment and would love it if it was the case and if they would make their content more “graded”, introducing grammar points as you go.

If I may suggest, A Dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar might help you. They certainly help me. (My only problem for now is that I am looking up SO many new things every day, it becomes overwhelming.) After I click the explanation in SR, I check if the item is in ADOJG, and add the grammar point (ie: its example sentences) to my Anki.

You may have reached a point where you can do all your learning in Japanese. In that case, I have heard good things about 日本語文型辞典 as a JP alternative to ADOJG.

I’m basically doing that with Bunpro right now: encounter an unfamiliar rule, keep it in mind; see it again before I forget, jot it down on a notepad; take the notepad at the end of each day and see if I can find the points in Bunpro’s lessons list.

It’d be so much nicer to have a complete grammar-point-in-context system, though. And I’d throw money at it, too, if you’re still reading this thread, Koichi.

(Satori Reader’s study interface is very confusing and feels cumbersome each time I try to work with it, which is why a “hey, keep an eye out for these interesting things” heads-up would be way more welcome than trying to integrate an SRS into arbitrary sentences)

I don’t see why you cannot do both, they’re not mutually exclusive. You can learn most of your content through the usual structured order and add a few of the kanji/words you encounter in the wild. It does not have to be one extreme or the other.

However, I agree that given the way WK is currently designed it would be a poorly integrated feature. Stil,l I feel like we have no satisfactory course of action when facing an unknown word/kanji in immersion situations.

You seem to misunderstand the concept, the objective is to be able to add items you’ve encountered while immersing in native material to make sure you are going to remember them. The rest of the words you would unlock as you always did.

Nevertheless, like I said above this is a feature that should probably have been planned right from the start. Now it would only probably create more problems than it would solve.

In the end though, the main question is which course of action to take when you face items that are above your level in the wild. It’s an issue that WK does not address and it would be nice if a solution was found, whether with an early-unlock feature or something better designed.

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Memrise Genki Decks are your best option. I’ve used them while learning with the book and they were a life saver.

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No, I believe you are not understanding what I said :wink:

OP requested:

The logical consequence would be that WaniKani would have to offer you the ability to unlock any item that you want to unlock. No matter what the intention behind the feature was: it would mean that you could unlock every item up to level 60 at once just because you thought it was a good idea. You could also go ahead and unlock any kanji that you ever saw in any text you ever read. And that’s just a load of kanji. Even with the best intentions at first, you could easily overdo it and add too much.

I have plenty of Anki decks that I added with the best intentions. Among those vocabulary added via Yomichan, with screenshots, context and everything; screenshots and translation of comic pages, interesting, real world content but it is just too much and I stopped reviewing them.

You can already burn out with WaniKani just fine as it is if you go too fast. Being able to add even more items wuld only increase that risk. And part of the beauty of WaniKani is 1.) that you don’t have to choose which content to add; this inability to choose also gives you the freedom of not having to worry too much about it and 2.) the gamification and wanting to reach new levels (which would be completely useless if you could just unlock anything as you please just because you randomly came across it somewhere).

For most textbooks there are Anki decks available. I just use a pretty nice Genki deck with native speaker Audio and things are ok for me.

(But adding kanji that WaniKani doesn’t support, like Syphus suggested would make much more sense. I’m torn about that one. Koichi should “just” add 10 more levels :wink: ).

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Fair enough, I agree with you that an unrestrained ability to unlock every material could be terribly abused. Moreover, like you say not having a choice in the matter can be quite liberating sometimes.

But at the same I believe the problems you describe are not unsolvable.

Imagine for example that you would only have limited number of early-unlocks per day, this would prevent you from being overwhelmed. This mechanic could even be gamified by giving those unlocks only after you’ve done X reviews this day. This would ensure your review queue does not inflate to unmanageable proportions and provides an additional motivation for reviewing.

Another way of solving the issues you mention is also to give the ability to do early-unlocking only after you reach a certain level. When the proportion of unknown kanji that you encounter in the wild is smaller than those you know for example. This would provide an additional incentive for levelling up.

We could even take this to its logical conclusion and design a system where you would get more early-unlocks the higher you went in level and you would be able to use these early-unlocks not only for adding words already registered in WK but also community curated ones. This would reflect the fact that the higher your level, the more words you encounter that are not present in WK during your immersion sessions.

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I agree, such a limited unlocking feature (limited amounts and maybe only after a certain level) would be a nice thing to have. Don’t think it will ever happen but I could completely get behind that.

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Sure, you can overdo it… but isn’t being able to control that urge what makes someone an 大人? In my apartment I have a very well-stocked Tiki bar with dozens of bottles of liquor, but I never drink to the point of intoxication - moderation is key, and we’re all capable of using our judgement.

No, if this feature existed, I wouldn’t unlock thousands of items… just the stuff that I’d have to learn this week anyway for my class, maybe thirty items with kanji per chapter (we’re on a 3-week cycle for textbook chapters, so that’s thirty unlocks desired each 3 weeks).

Those are words that I have to devote time to study - I don’t have a choice, the only alternative to knowing them is looking ignorant when they come up in class. Being able to use the best tool for the job would save time, even though it means I’d be spending a lot more time in Wanikani.

As a recent example, a few months back I had to learn 電気 and 電車, simply by rote repetition, as I read through the vocabulary lists. I didn’t even notice then that the first character in each word was the same (I concentrated more on the furigana); I didn’t realise that both of them starting with the “den” sound was more than a coincidence, it was because of a shared kanji. If I could have unlocked those words here - or unlocked the words and also the 電 character - that learning would have gone quicker. More time in WK, yes, but less time with the textbook, and I’d have learned some good mnemonics to help with the word.

Those words are still in my future here, I’ll be unlocking that level in a few days. I’m effectively guru level on words I haven’t unlocked yet, so going through the apprentice cycles on them will be kind of annoying.

But what if someone - or a rogue user script - unlocks 5,000 future items, and the review queue becomes unmanageable? We have a tool for that already - you can Reset Your Account to lower levels, wiping away all unlocks of higher levels, all review queue items from higher levels. I used this tool myself recently, resetting from level 7 to level 4 when I took a 8-month break from studying. (I’m a landscape photographer, so when it’s warm enough to go outside, I go outside - language study is a winter activity!). The tool worked flawlessly, every character from the higher levels disappeared.

So, the level-7 student who finds too much Level 24 and Level 47 stuff cluttering up his queue can simply reset back to the level he’s on (preferably doing it immediately after leveling up, so you don’t lose work in progress), and all those future items will go away.

I had thought of limiting the number of early unlocks - but that would require additional programming, keeping track of when a user has “earned” a bonus unlocking, or just tracking how many used each day. It would be far simpler to implement the feature if its uses were untracked and unlimited, so I initially suggested it without mention of limits. I know this is outside the scope of what WaniKani was designed for, so I’m hoping to not have it lead to tons of additional work.

And in the spirit of trying to keep the workload small, I’m asking for just an API call or a Javascript function to unlock an item - if this is provided I’ll write and release a user script myself to provide the UI.

Yeah, I’d say a feature that allows people to add words would be more likely. With the things we have to work on now, it wouldn’t happen anytime soon, but definitely somewhat possible in the future.

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This would be amazing!

Don’t worry! EA is developing their own kanji-learning application complete with loot boxes. You can unlock any kanji, but it’ll cost you.

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