Hey keep me out of this
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Well, they could pick up the pace on adding more kana vocabulary
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That sounds great. Everyone would be happy with that solution.
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Just rename the website Wanikana. Get rid of those annoying kanji.
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On a long enough timeline everyone will come to see it is best. Or they will die
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Given a long enough timeline, everyone will die. Or are you saying that accepting kana grants immortality?
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To play devil’s advocate for a moment, why?
Wk does (did) one thing well. The number of non Japanese in the world learning kanji at any given time is not huge. Maybe they judge that they have tapped out the market. Let it generate passive income and move on to something more interesting.
If I were wk and wanted to make more money, I would create Spanish, or whatever the next most widely spoken language is, versions of the site, and increase my potential audience. Maybe they are doing this, I am not sure that we would know.
When a competitor arises that threatens market share, then they decide whether to fold, or compete. Until then, why do anything?
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I, for one, accept our new kana overlords.
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The other big trigger of all this was the promise that they were making these big changes. So it seemed like they were actively working to make the site better but recently it feels like they just gave up and gave us a level up banner as a consolidation prize.
I understand the code base was “slowing them down” but unless it was written in COBOL (the language the entire banking system runs on that only 3 old geezers know) I don’t see how it could be so bloated or obscure replacing the Forum panel, summary page, and an opt out feature could be this difficult of a problem to solve. I wanna see WK succeed as a product. I’m not just shitting on the staff. But it is a giant WTF that every site they’re in competition with are able to put in these QoL changes in much less time and WK keeps taking things out for this big update but not updating us (outside of “it’s coming”).
Like at this point, why even make it a surprise? Just tell us what’s happening. Also remote from work for these projects don’t work. I think Microsoft even did internal evaluations and said remote work only works for maintenance but creative needs to be in person. Unless WK/Tofugu have always been running from home.
Imo, the site is in a state where the product is suffering and needs serious work. It was fine the way it was a year ago. But we are approaching threat level: midnight.
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By the time you notice there’s a competitor arising to threaten your market share it’s too late. This is because, as I previously mentioned, it’s much faster to write code when free of tech debt. This is why you need to constantly be improving you content, features, and user experience. If you don’t you’ll become stagnant and get overtaken by faster startups.
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They were, and everyone complained about them till they stopped
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Technically Wanikani has 100% Spanish kanji coverage. They just have to update the marketing material and they’re good to go!
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(Jokes aside, I suppose if WK wanted to cater to other languages they could probably extend to Chinese with a bit of work)
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No, once they are counted in column one they are not counted in column two
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They shot themselves heavily in the foot by having so many people rely on scripts for basic functionality. That seriously limits what they can do without inciting a full on revolt every time they break the undo and reorder scripts that are central to many users’ routine.
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Seeing the direction it’s headed in, I wouldn’t be surprised if jpdb.io became a very serious competitor one day
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Yeah, jpdb and MaruMori will both probably overtake WaniKani the rate things are going.
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As one of those older geezers I would just point out it is COBOL, not Cobalt.
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Ah yeah I forgot about marumori too. Haven’t looked into it really but I’ve heard a bit about it.
As someone in the Japanese learning community it’s nice to know that resources are improving and new people will have access to all sorts of great things that I wish I would have had. And here’s to wishing people make similar resources for the next language I learn.
On the other hand, it would be kinda sad to see wanikani fall by the wayside just because it never improved.
Will be interesting to see how things go either way.
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COBOL (old geezer here)
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