General feedback on WK

WaniKani Feedback
22

If you’re in a situation where you’re only going to be able to log in once per week, I think you should definitely explore alternatives to wanikani. Maybe anki since it seems the SRS intervals may be customizable, but I think a non-SRS system like RTK is going to be better suited to you. It also has the advantage of being paper based.

If physically possible (and it may not be, for something like that internet), I think it will be more effective to study wanikani 10 minutes per day than 1 hour all on one day in a week.

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23

Impossible. Yeah, you’re right. But using the reading on the meaning by mistake, or the oppositte, should have an additional check. i just can’t be focused enough and the background color changes are not helping.

People who are not disciplined to log in every day and do their reviews will be hurt by the SRS system.

Yeah. That’s me. I’m disciplined. But I don’t want to spend every day some 20 minutes on this. Just can’t.

I don’t believe there is an easy answer to this problem, other than vacation mode, which they have implemented

For me every week could be vacation mode. I think there should be a way to be able to fix items. Or put a limit on them. I don’t like the fact that they have 300 items on review. That’s insane. There should be a limit, a maximum of items for review. If you reached 300 for example, the rest should be SRS fixed or something. No new items!! But there’s levels… how does that really work when you are on level 20… you should not be in that level unless you mastered items from the previous levels.

Please share with us a way to adjust the SRS that is slower or faster without negatively impacting learning.

I’ll look into that. There must be a way…

24

What I do is not open the new lessons until I finish the rest of the items. But the system shouldn’t let us level up until the maximum limit is lower. I honestly think people start to be anxious and adding more and more lessons…and end up having 500 reviews to do…

25

There’s nothing wrong with that as long as the person can handle the work load. There’s no reason for the system to throttle you like that. It’s on you to control your workload.

1 Like
26

… that’s so bad. I like WK a lot… but I’m starting to feel really overwhelmed in second level with 90 reviews or maybe 35 everytime I look. Takes 20 minutes, all my transportation time for the day. How will it be in level 5 or 10?.. I don’t really want to be there.

27

The system doesn’t let you level up until you have gotten 90% of your Kanji to Guru. If you’re taking your time with this, then by the time you level up, you will probably have done most of your vocab lessons for the previous level anyway. If you ever end up with more than 200 reviews in one go, either you’re going lightning fast or you’re neglecting your reviews and letting them build up.

28

Are you on a phone? I can only type very slowly on my phone. It takes me a lot longer to do my reviews on my phone than on my computer. Other people here however, are very fast on their phone.

I think anki has the added benefit of just tapping a “i know this” or “I don’t know this” instead of typing in your solution. If I had to learn kanji only on my phone, that might be the way I would do it.

29

It does exist, but it’s not a straight up “did you get one letter off” type thing. It’s more forgiving for longer words. But for shorter words it can be more problematic. A typo script has no way of knowing when you typed “Aids” that you meant to type “Kids” or if you just thought of the wrong meaning. But if you typed “consciosly” it is easier to know you made a typo.

It’s not a perfect system, but it solves the easy to spot errors. However, all can be solved by just taking half a second to look at your answer before hitting the enter button.

If you’re in a class it’s possible to get pretty far without knowing too many Kanji. Especially if you use a book like JSL (Japanese the Spoken Language).

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30

The rest of the not mentioned answers, I think you are right, or no comment :slight_smile:

If you want less reviews, have less items on the lower end of your ladder by doing less lessons.

Yep. That’s a good idea. I think most of the people started like me, opening every lesson very excited. I guess it’s our freedom. But the system should warn about this… “if you learn more, you will have X average reviews per day. Are you ok with it?”. That would have been great before knowing now I have 90 everytime I come back, and I have not enough time for it.

But it’s a great point. I’ll delay the new lessons. It’s a great idea.

As for typo check…there is one. A very good one I would argue. The only time there isnt one is for reading. Not sure if you mixed up the two in your post on accident

I don’t know exactly which typo check… but I’ve had really absurd errors. More than I can remember. Specially writing the reading on the meaning. That’s too common. I write very fast and I don’t have much time to spend on it, so I can’t really stop on each, specially when, like some people will feel here, I’m extremely bored learning the first 200 kanjis all over again. That would help a lot.

You will probably use them eventually and it wont be a total waste of your time.

About the vocab. I hope so, i hope it gets better and better… some of the vocab on the first two levels is so frustrating (the same word combination twice (french and american, for example) ; the same kanji and word with same pronuntiation.
That makes me think this is a “let’s learn japanese together” thing. I don’t need to learn three words using the same kanji with the same reading. That doesn’t help at all. And I don’t need them to teach me japanese. That’s what I think. I guess that will be better, but I really don’t like that if the first 5 levels (next 5 months) is like that, really.

Not sure what you mean by most of the people started WK after years of study. There is literally no way you could know that and are just projecting your own experience.

Because most of the people start learning, learn those easy 80 kanjis, and after that start learning more confusing kanjis and see that it’s starting to be really hard. Then they search for an app to help here. Nobody needs help for the first 80 kanjis if you go to class. If you are self-taught then maybe you do. I know nobody who needed an app to learn the first 80 kanjis. And there’s very basic kanji uses in the vocabulary here.
Just saying. But this one is not important, really. Don’t feel offended by it!

31

How many hours per week do you plan to invest? You will need a few hundred hours total in any case, for 1 level per week you probably need (random number) 3–4 hours per week at least. If you want to learn the 8000+ items over the 9 SRS levels, two answers (meaning/reading) each, you can do the math on your own.

32

Thanks :slight_smile:
Yep. I use Anki, but … you have to create the lists yourself. That’s way too much time. I prefere using WK and criticize it. … hehe. Joking. I love WK, that’s why I’m asking for more freedom and some small fixes… it would be awesome. Why do it myself if they already have everything set up and get money out of it?. That’s perfect.

About the phone thing. I use both. In my phone, it’s too slow, too many typos. And I’m spanish, which doesn’t really help.
In my pc, I just type extremely fast (meaning → more typos, some of them just one letter) because I just want to skip the first 120 to 200 kanjis that I already know to get to the hard part. If only I could select which kanjis or words I already know and I don’t need to see anymore… is there any script for that? :frowning:

33

They should warn us before then. I can’t spend 4 hours a week. if I did that, I’d be already speaking 100% fluent japanese by now.

I can’t spend that much time. I don’t think anybody wants to spend all that time everyweek in japanese kanjis unless you want to live there or learn extremely fast. For people like me who take this as a serious hobby, then… we shouldn’t be using WK because the SRS can’t be modified?..

34

When you have 300 reviews it’s very unlikely you 'll have two words which are only one letter off… and who cares! It’s you who are learning. hehe. They can give you the option to choose if you want that on or off if your concern is to think a word is Kids, not Aids…

35

Good point… yeah. Good one. And if you have still 200 items still waiting, you shouldn’t be opening any new lesson for your own mental health. But as I said before, the system should warn you before opening new lessons if the queue is getting too big! :slight_smile:

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36

Yep. That’s what I see, indeed… and that’s really frustrating. Thinking that every level will be like this is starting to make me feel really discouraged to continue here. I want to learn useful vocabulary, or they should give me a choice, or let me add my own or burn the vocab I like. It’s me who is learning, and this is not an exam, it’s an app. I should have the freedom to make my choices…

37

The kanji don’t learn themselves, you should start with the time you can invest and then do the lessons accordingly. Let’s say you need 15 minutes for a kanji overall (initial leaning, reviews, looking it up in the dict, maybe its vocab) you still need 500 hours. You think you can do it faster … probably not.

I don’t know how you define “serious hobby”, but 4 hours is not that extraordinary.

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38

I actually don’t agree, I think having a separate vocabulary resource is fine. A lot of common words are kana only or use really difficult kanji when written with kanji (or aren’t usually written with kanji). Sure, WK could theoretically teach you these too, but there’s a thing such as feature creep and the company behind WK has decided that they’d rather avoid overwhelming the user with non-kanji related content. I personally think it’s the correct choice, especially having gone through all 60 levels.

There are Anki decks for vocabulary that replicate the WK experience, though, if you’d like to try them. You even have to type in the answers.

It’s true that this is an app (a web app, specifically, the mobile apps aren’t official), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a curriculum or plan behind it, or that they just dump a bunch of content on the users and say “be free!”. :slight_smile:

1 Like
39

That’s fair enough, yeh. I think a warning would be reasonable, but at the end of the day, it’s the user’s responsibility to know whether they’re biting off more than they can chew. Maybe just a warning message at the start, so users know that reviews can get out of hand if they aren’t careful.

1 Like
40

This is also why the ultimate timeline is so useful. There are days when I only have 30 or 40 items, but then with the ultimate timeline I can see that a few days down the road, I’m going to get slammed with 200 reviews in a 24 hour period and that even though today might be a slow day, now is not the time to do some lessons.

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41

I think if you can’t check in daily, then WK is going to be problematic. The whole point of the SRS is to catch the reviews while they’re still in your short term memory, a hard to pin down amount of time, but certainly less than a few days.

I actually think that once you get done with all the content you know, you might have trouble learning new content on WK like that.

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