So… I’m a new user, so as suggested I read the new user guide. And I have some feedback on it.
First, the guide still has the old subscription prices ($10/m, $100/y) instead of the current ones:
Premium accounts are US$10/month or US$100/year. When you choose a yearly membership, you basically get two months of kanji learning goodness for free.
Second, when suggesting a textbook for further study, the guide recommends EtoEto:
Most likely, you’ll have enough kanji knowledge to comfortably start any Japanese textbook (we recommend EtoEto, as it works well with WaniKani) and not have to worry about kanji for a little while.
While it’s understandable to want to promote your own project, the fact that the link just leads to a page with “COMING SOON” on it in large (albeit friendly) letters is rather off-putting and not a good new user experience. Please at least provide a recommendation that works for new users at the time when they read the guide instead of some unspecified time in the future?
And finally:
Words like K-A-N-J-I or C-R-A-B-I-G-A-T-O-R can be read only because you know the letters that constitute them.
I would argue that knowing the letters in C-R-A-B-I-G-A-T-O-R does not enable one to read that… thing… because IT’S NOT A WORD!
There, I feel better now.
Seriously, though, happy to be here, WaniKani looks like a great tool.
Not sure how you can argue that crabigator isn’t a word when there’s a dedicated emote.
I would actually email the WK team with this feedback (hello@wanikani.com - they’re very helpful!) as I think they’d really want to know that their prices and so on are out of date and it’s quite likely they’ll miss this feedback in the forum.
I was just joking about the crabigator, but this is very true. English is so much harder than it needs to be just because of the insane orthography. Something like Spanish is a breath of fresh air in comparison, and Japanese is also reasonably consistent once you have the right reading sorted out.
Reminds me of the old fish spelling joke:
How do you spell the one-syllable word that describes the underwater swimmy animals like salmon and herring? You think it’s “fish”? No, no, no, it’s “ghoti”.
