Hi! So I’ve been trying to tailor KaniWani so as to be helpful and not overwhelming by only reviewing things that are Master and above, but I’m tripping up on something that pretty much detonates my motivation after a single review session, and that’s frickin synonyms. When it asks me what the word for sun/day is, do I write ひ or にち? When it asks for mother, do I write はは or おかあさん? There are TONS of these.
Some of them are more obvious than others, but where it’s not obvious I always seem to get it wrong, and it tanks my accuracy leaving me pretty deflated. Does anyone know of a surefire way to figure out which it is asking of me? Are there userscripts that give context sentences perhaps? I know there are little clues under the word it wants me to translate but I see hints like “adverbial noun” and my brain turns to soup. The only one’s I can remember right now are the i adjectives.
Any insight on how you make KaniWani work for you would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Yeah I’ve also struggled with that… I think there’s an “add synonym” button? It’s been awhile since I used kaniwani. The other one I’ve tried is KameSame - they don’t mark you wrong if it’s a synonym, but they tell you they were looking for the other one and give you a (heavily blurred) hint.
TBH I don’t really use it for WK English–>Japanese practice; I just like the interface more. You can also add words that aren’t in Wanikani with definitions straight from JMDict.
In terms of English–>Japanese practice, it’s a little different, because KameSame looks for the correct kanji, not necessarily the correct reading, whereas KaniWani only accepts the hiragana reading. So if you could mess yourself up in that aspect if you know and enter the kanji without being able to input the reading. I think it could definitely help for OPs specific problem, though. If you answer with the wrong word, it tells you that you got the meaning correct but it was just looking for another word (so it doesn’t mark it incorrect), and then when the flashcard comes up next it leaves incorrect word up on the screen so you know to not try it again.
All in all, though, I’d just give it a shot and choose which one works for you better.
There are some words where the entire card is exactly the same (the cards include a little more information than the word like if it’s a suffix). I switched to kamesame when I realized that.
If you get an answer wrong in KaniWani, as long as you don’t advance to the next item you can undo your answer by clicking on the button to the left of where you write down your answer. You can use this in combination of the “add synonyms” function to prevent accidental mistakes.
In order to prevent accidentally advancing to the next item, I’ve activated the “auto-advance on right answer” setting. KaniWani won’t advance on a wrong answer, so you’re free to correct as much you’d like.
oops. but yeah i don’t.)