Hello WaniKani’ers,
Firstly I love WaniKani, never seriously thought I would learn how to read Japanese, and even though I know I have a LONG path ahead of me before I can say that I can do so well, I have already blown away all of my original expectations all thanks to this app. Huge kudos to all of you, and thanks!
I’m nitpicking here… Forgive me I’m a nitpicker.
I really like the decent sense of progression at the start of every level, (the radicals and kanji bars fill up as you GURU more and more of them), but I feel there is a HUGE gap when you finish a level as you’re working through it’s remaining vocabulary, and potentially whatever Kanji ends up getting unlocked late. When you level up, if you still have lots of vocab to work through, depending on your speed you may not get any sense of progression at all for a week or more.
My first thought is a third bar before the Radicals bar (or maybe just a counter?) that indicates the number of “lesson” (as opposed to review) items available (unlocked) that are NOT in your “current” level. I feel this will give you the sense of whittling away on the orphanned lessons of the previous level rather than feeling like it’s a black hole of neverending vocabs.
My other thought is probably more difficult to implement within WaniKani as it’s built right now. I would LOVE to be able to stop a review at any point without messing up SRS timings, or having what I call “half-open” subjects (subjects where I answered either the reading or the meaning but not both, regardless of if I answered it correctly). I try to use the little button that limits you to ten more subjects, but even this may fail to really allow me to just leave when it’s absolutely necessary.
My suggestion would be to maybe create a user setting where a user can switch from a disconnected meaning/reading review mode to one where it is connected. Essentially in this new mode I imagine it could most easily be done as whenever I see a meaning or reading review I will see the other review IMMEDIATELY afterwords. Normally if I’m really stumped I’ll spend up to 30 seconds on a review item, so this means that I can shut it down within 30 seconds of knowing I have to go.
I’m not sure if this has any strange implications for your WaniKani’s underlying SRS philosophy and how it might affect our ability to memorize subjects? But I feel like that’s not really an issue. Would love to hear more though.
Thanks again for WaniKani. You are all amazing and if you implement nothing from this task WaniKani is still far and away the best learning tool I have ever used bar none.