Hi all,
When doing reviews, I sometimes forget to place a u or o in the answer. ie. ko instead of kou and vice versa. I wish the answer was not listed as completely wrong but a ‘Your answer was a little off’ or a reminder for the spelling. What do others think? I know I need to completely get it right for correctness but feel it a little harsh as the answer comes back red even though I was close but just off with the spelling.
While I understand the frustration at red screens, I personally wouldn’t want WK to let errors like that slide. I wouldn’t want to run the risk of having objectively incorrect readings be reinforced by a pricey service.
In the past, I used anki mode during a hectic time and told myself about “small” stuff “oh, I’ll remember that correctly when the time comes.” Spoiler: no, I didn’t. Letting incorrect recollection slide did me no favours.
Not remembering the correct spelling means it cannot be reproduced in an IME. And correct pronunciation plays a big part in being understood a lot better in conversation, so reinforcing only the correct reading from day 1 is very important, imo.
Edit: oh, and I know I struggled a lot with this in the beginning, so I do honestly believe it will get easier with time to memorise the right version of the sound. 
While I’m all in favor of using something like Double-Check to not have one’s efforts thwarted by genuine typos, I think it’s important to treat the sort of misses you’re talking about here as actual errors.
I suspect you wouldn’t want to give yourself a pass if you misremembered the word for person as “hita”, and you should probably hold yourself to the same standard even when the difference is “just” between using a long or short vowel, not least because the duration of a single vowel can completely change the meaning of an utterance (cf. “obasan” [aunt] and “obāsan” [grandmother]).
No doubt it’s super-annoying to miss when you “pretty much” knew the answer, but close doesn’t get you the cigar (unless you want it to, in which case you can abuse Double-Check).
I think if speaking Japanese is at all part of your plan, you should take these mistakes seriously and realize they indicate that your pronunciation of the problematic words is probably a little off.
It is SUPER frustrating in the beginning, but the difference between long and short vowels is also SUPER important. It feels like only a small mistake in the beginning, but the more japanese I learned the more I realized it’s actually a really big mistake. I’m quite glad wanikani doesn’t let it slide with a “you were close, wanna try again” cause it’s not close at all and wanikani is doing quite well here for drilling this into our brains. It’s not about a spelling mistake, if you’d really knew the word, you wouldn’t do this mistake. There are already lots of words with the same hiragana spelling, if I would ignore the difference between a long and a short vowel I’d probably be totally lost.
I recommend saying the word in question pronouncing it very slowly, syllable for syllable. Like in the above example “o ba sa n” vs “o ba a sa n”. Some people even use a metronome to get a better feel for long vowels vs short vowels. If you are into haiku (you know, those poems with a set count of syllables) “o ba sa n” would have a count of 4 syllables, but “ o ba a sa n” would have a count of 5.
I get it, it’s difficult to see how important it is in the beginning, but it will settle for you with time and experience.
Wrong is wrong. You’ll get used to the patterns and before long it won’t be confusing anymore. English has them too. I already used a pair on accident.
“To” and “Too”
Are they close, yes… but to mix them up is objectively incorrect. You don’t want your brain remembering things that are wrong. It’s better to just struggle with it now, than have it come back and bite you later.
The difficulty with “not quite right” hints for getting vowel length wrong is that for most words there are only two possibilities, so if you get the hint for your first answer you can guarantee to answer correctly by trying the other option. That lets you pass the card without ever actually remembering whether the vowel length is long or short.
Most people find vowel length tricky to start with, because English doesn’t generally distinguish between words on the length of the vowel alone, so our brains tend to discard that length information as unimportant. That means you need to pay extra attention to it, perhaps like listening carefully to the audio and sounding out the difference in your head. Eventually your brain will realise that the difference is important and start tracking it better. The first step is to stop thinking of these mistakes as “I just got the spelling wrong”
Luckily for us, the short/long vowel distinction is much easier to pick up than the English L/R distinction seems to be for Japanese speakers.
Thanks for everyone’s reply.
Am aware that I really need to distinguish and learn
I also get frustrated when people get the to, too and two mixed up.
So I should be more tolerant. Thanks all.
No different to correcting you for typing lose when you meant loose
Some people even use a metronome to get a better feel for long vowels vs short vowels.
A very good idea! (or clapping your hands on rhythm if you don’t have one).
That will definitely solve the proble if OP.
Not sure what you first language is, but if English would you say that in an English language test “bot” instead of “boot” or vice versa should be OK? Or “red” vs. “reed”. Or “lot” vs. “loot”. Etc?
For your example of “ko” vs “kou”, they are very different. ここ and こうこう are both valid words and not anywhere close being the same.
I’m no english native, so maybe I’m not really getting it, but I think it’s different. Maybe just because english spelling is all over the place, but it doesn’t produce a reliable sound difference. The difference between o and oo in eglish is not the same everytime. But in japanese it is! So it’s more like writing shool instead of school. It’s just one letter missing, but the sound is reliable different and very noticeable.
Other languages get this often, too. Like a bunch of German learners mixing up u and ü, but it’s a very noticeable difference for any native and we surely wouldn’t mix those up.
My first language is indeed English and I have a good command of it thank you.
I have had certain words where I screwed up worse than a u or o missing or added but completely spelled incorrectly but was given a warning to check on my spelling of the word.
I thank you for commenting but starting off if my first Language is English is a little insulting.
I am aware that I am learning a new language and am almost a child considering Japanese is a very hard language. My question was very valid I believe but you were assuming something about me that I didn’t appreciate. I am sure there are a few things that you think would be acceptable but for an expert would not be.
Though in English these are different vowel sounds, not just the same vowel sound held for different lengths of time. (The only minimal pair for vowel length that I know of in English is “shed” vs “shared”; this requires an accent like southern British English which is non-rhotic, i.e. doesn’t pronounce the “r” in “shared”.)
My apologies. The context of my comment was only to preface that the example/analogy I was going to use was from English, so it would make sense from that point of view. It was not a comment on the post itself. Although most all the posts in these forums are in English I have learned that a large number of folks here do not speak English as their first language and have been taken to task in the past for presuming that they did. In the past when using English as a point of comparison I have been called out by the original poster as to why I am presuming their first language is English, so I thought I would cover that base. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t I guess.
When you are entering the English translation for words there is a fair amount of flexibility for typos. I do not recall the exact details, nor the formal name, of the specific algorithm used (there are details covering that elsewhere in the forums). Basically for any words more than 4 characters long you can have typos of a couple or so characters. As I recall the number of typos allowed increases with the length of the word. The purpose of WK is not to teach us exact/correct English spelling, so it is flexible in this regard. This is especially nice for all those WK users for whom English is not their native language but are being “forced” to learn Japanese via English.. When entering the Japanese spelling for items there is no flexibility for typos. The purpose of WK going in this direction is to teach us the exact/correct spelling. You will get the “not what we were looking for” response if you enter an alternate spelling but not the common one being taught. There are a few of those sprinkled throughout. There are even a few that will accept multiple spellings when both are common. You will also be blocked from entering a response if when providing the Japanese spelling it includes any invalid characters (including roman characters). It will just do nothing when you press Enter.
I will end by saying that I totally get where you are coming from, I had exactly the same frustration, and even a “why does it even really matter and who cares” point of view when I started off learning Japanese. Having lived in Japan for a quite long time now I can say that it does very much matter and it is one (of several) things I get corrected on all the time by family, friends and coworkers. Especially when it comes to spoken Japanese. I still remember the nice old lady at the restaurant schooling me (at length) on my ここ vs. こうこう and why I needed to learn it properly and get it right if I wanted to be understood. Which of course, is my main goal, being understood.
Does not the holding of the sound for a longer period of time make it a different sound? Perhaps not as audibly distinct as short e vs long e in English (bet vs. beet as an example), but still audibly different. People know whether one said ここ or こうこう because those two words sound different. Hearing that difference is still incredibly difficult for me (and probably not something I will ever be good at) but in all conversations asking about this (in my efforts to improve) I have had with the Japanese folks I live and work with they tell me that they hear each as distinctly different and have no issues with telling which one it was.
The point is that the difference in Japanese between こ and こう is solely that the latter is held for a longer time than the former: if you took a recording of a speaker saying こう and truncated it you’d get a こ. The difference between what are commonly called “long vs short” vowels in English is that they have genuinely different sounds (the formant frequencies are different): if you take “beet” or another “long” vowel word and cut a chunk out of the middle you do not get “bit”. (“long” vs “short” for English is traditional but not very helpful labelling for the difference: I think that before the Great Vowel Shift at least some of these were length disctinctions, but they aren’t now.)
I might end up stirring the pot here a little bit but in my opinion it depends on how much this mistake is slowing down your overall progress.
Ofcourse, like others have said, it is important to know the difference and words do have different meanings if you don’t extend the vowels or shorten them. But, at the same time, there are so many other things to learn and practice and worry about that if a short/long vowel is genuinely gatekeeping you from learning anything else new, I’d say move on because you will have hundreds of more opportunities to ingrain those vowels into your head through everything else you will end up studying/encountering anyways.
The SRS stage of learning in my opinion is mainly there to equip you with as many little pieces as possible to make your immersion and exposure to native material as efficient and smooth as possible. At some point, that immersion is where you will spend the bulk of your time on and everything will be hammered out and put into place there.
This might be a silly example, but even in the case of something like to vs too, an English learner could become a fluent speaker and reader while still confusing to and too regularly. Also, a native English speaker can still understand someone who accidently writes to instead of too. That’s ofcourse not to say it’s ok to never figure out to vs too, but if someone is genuinely stuck on this for whatever reason and can’t move on to other material, it’s not the end of the world to do so.
I personally feel like getting stuck in the weeds on kanji and vocabulary in isolation and splitting hairs on pronounciation, pitch, every reading, stroke order, and other technical details for months, especially if you have limited time for study, just holds you back from much greater progress in the language.
If you feel like you are genuinely being held back from learning more vocabulary and seeing more kanji because of something like this, I’d say either refresh the web page or use an undo script to just try to correct the mistake again and move on at your own discretion.
Maybe this is all terrible and controversial advice, but it’s also just another way of looking at things and approaching the language learning process.
Yes. I thought that was what I said The difference in sound between long and short vowels between the to languages manifests differently audibly. But in both languages, the are different and sound different. If they did not then in either language there were be no way to distinguish them when speaking and listening. Japanese has short and long vowels as well. 短母音 and 長母音. I have annoyed some family members by not properly pronouncing distinctly and differently おばさん and おばあさん 
I have limited experience with native Japanese people, but my impression is that with long vowels (and っ, too) the important thing is to make the attempt. If the sound length isn’t quite right, they seem to understand you so long as you tried. But if you just skip the sound, then… 
I’ve seen it in anime and on the street interviews in Japan where the speaker pronounces something and I think to myself, I’m not so sure about that…
My understanding of Japanese is that the listener is largely predicting what you’re trying to say. If you say it wrong, then it’s up to them to try and parse what you really meant. So if you mix up ここ and こうこう, grammar nazis aside, they will probably understand you. Kind of like how an English listener will understand to and too even if you mix them up. But you’re making them “work” to understand you, and you don’t want to do that.
You still want to aim for perfection. You want to make it as easy as possible for the listener to understand you, because there’s going to be many more tiny barriers than just double vowel pronunciation.
I see what you did there 