Maybe it is an unpopular opinion but I like the new kana-only vocab even if I know most of it.
A little tired of people complaining about such a minor thing. They talk about it as if there were 100 new kana-only words per lesson when in reality there are barely anything at all and the time to type in each answer is about 2 seconds.
Eagerly waiting for more vocab!
I wholeheartedly with you, I would also like many more kana words. I hope wanikani covers something like core 6K or even core 10K. Many of these words are already in wanikani, but most of the kana only ones are currently missing. I think a good place to start would be core 2K, and then slowly working the way up to more coverage.
Many of us like the Kana-Only vocab also, but it should have been optional from the start. Why not make it optional??
The āminorā thing is not New Feature vs. No New Feature. Itās New Feature Optional vs. New Feature Mandatory.
Do you have any good reason for why the new feature should be mandatory, even for long time users who have no use for it?
I do agree with this, but I donāt think simply adding these extra vocab to the system as is would be very good. Imo vocab is best learned in context, which at the very minimum is a sentence. WK absolutely has the necessesary example sentences to make one awesome tool for studying vocab in context if they wanted. This site puts the sheer number of sentences on here into perspective (showing all sentences containg only kanji youāve learnt. For me at lv 32, I can just keep scrolling and scrolling!)
http://jptools.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/wksentences.html#
But without using a third-party site like this, WKās context sentences are actually quite inaccessable and very difficult to study from.
iKnow is a comparable site (paid, srs) which already does the core 6k and all in the context of sentences so unless WK does something similar, there will always be at least one superior paid srs site for learning vocab.
https://iknow.jp/home
Maybe it is an unpopular opinion but I like the complaints even if I know most of them.
A little tired of people complaining about such a minor thing. People talk about it as if there were 100 new threads a day when in reality there are barely any at all and the time to mute each one is about 2 seconds.
I agree with you, It really should be optional, but if it isnāt, I donāt think itās a big deal.
And kana-only vocab CAN be mandatory just like first levels are mandatory too, even though a lot of people already know the most basic kanji.
I see a solid argument that WaniKani is a kanji-learning tool, but it could just boil down to the personal vision of Tofugu on their project.
I know Iām just inviting trouble ā and the irony is that I donāt have a horse in this race since I havenāt used the WK SRS even once ā but Iām just sayingā¦ part of why people want to focus on kanji onlyā¦ is because they want to start reading ASAP and learn in context. I do think that itās somewhat wrongheaded to approach Japanese thinking, āFirst Iāll learn all the kanji, then Iāll be able to read.ā I donāt front-load kanji or vocab myself, with the exception of last-minute N1 cramming (was pointless, honestly, though I passed thanks to my kanji and grammar knowledge) and rare words Iām challenging myself to memorise. However, I do see how having a rough idea of what each kanji means before encountering a new kanji-containing word can help with learning it ā Iām essentially doing that by using my Chinese kanji knowledge when I learn a new word containing familiar kanji ā and I think thatās what a lot of people are hoping WK will do for them.
Yes, there arenāt many kana-only words yet, but
If thereās anyone who doesnāt believe me on point #2, just go try Duolingo for a language youāre no longer a beginner in. Being forced to clear items you already know, when youāre anxious to get to new knowledge, is not fun. Obviously though, this depends on your personality and how you approach learning Japanese, but I can definitely see why some people wouldnāt like it, particularly if they donāt have much time for Japanese every day.
The difference here ā which has been raised elsewhere ā is that kanji mnemonics in WK build on each other, so it can be argued that knowing the earlier mnemonics is necessary to use the rest of WK. Itās much harder to argue that for kana-only vocabulary.
Again, the problem here is the fact that itās taking so long to make these words optional when theyāre supposed to be optional (as per what the WK Team has said). Changing the vision of WK is fine, and adding more kana-only words is fine, but there needs to be consideration for what users want and need, along with what theyāve been promised. Even if we acknowledge that kana-only vocabulary can be a good thing ā though Iām still going to tell you as a native Chinese speaker holding an N1 cert that most of my struggles with Japanese have been related to verbs written in kanji with unexpected readings, not kana-only words, onomatopoeia being the only real exception ā the fact that advanced users are getting words like ćć in their queues shows the way theyāve been inserted into the system leaves much to be desired.
Anyhow, I guess this is why I donāt usually bother with SRSes, especially ones I canāt control. Iād rather get a context-rich resource to build my basic knowledge, then sweat it out looking new things up while aiming for maximum understanding so most of it sticks. I make mnemonics if I need to, and then I move on. Eventually I either stop forgetting the word, or I stop encountering it in my textbooks/in the wild. But maybe thatās just me.
In the meantime, guess Iāll be a little more insufferable and suggest this one more time, for the people who donāt want kana-only vocab:
I would do it myself, but like I said, I donāt use the SRS. Current things Iāve heard:
If need be, Iāll go make a separate thread for it so hopefully this discussion will finally go somewhereā¦
Same boat.
And onomatopoeia-like adverbs, Iām guessing? At least thatās the case for me.
And funny enough, in one of the early threads someone from WaniKani (Scott, I think?) mentioned that the early reception of the kana-only feature was negative and thatās why they held back from releasing it even earlier. Wondering if people complained about extremely simple words being shoved into the review queues of advanced users. This came up so many times among the current complaints that I would be surprised it hadnāt been the case before.
To be fair, WaniKani for the most part works, precisely because itās a ready package. But itās also extremely opinionated and makes a lot of strange and unnecessary concessions which make using it at later levels difficult. Anki doesnāt have these sort of problems.
For instance, one of the things people typically complain about is review caps. Pretty sure no oneās too happy about taking a 1-day break and then getting slammed with 300-500 reviews. This is a fairly easy thing to implement, yet WaniKani is missing QoL features like this.
The addition of kana vocabulary just makes it worse, because these words will inflate the review queue despite being simple, making it even more difficult to manage oneās review schedule.
And we are tired of people who have differing opinions complaining that the problems we are experiencing because of the of the kana-only vocab are a minor thing. It feels very much as if we are being told to shut up and learn to like it.
For those of you arguing that those of us complaining about the addition of kana only vocabulary are blowing things out of proportion I offer the following point:
Yes, currently the time required to learn/review/burn this first small set of kana only vocab is relatively short. The reason, however, that I find it to be such a tedious and irksome task is that it completely disrupts my flow when I am doing my reviews or lessons. Going from kanji to elementary kana only words that I learned long ago is jarring and causes me to have to pause and regain my focus when I come back to a kanji review/lesson. This in itself is a reason that the developers should give us an opt out or instant burn for kana only vocab. They should have rolled out the kana only additions with an opt out/burn option to start with. Iām glad that you are enjoying these additions but others who have equally valid experiences with them are not.
I think you summarised very effectively what some other people here think, and why some of these threads end up the way they do: some of you āare tired of people who have different opinionsā.
Wow this entire forum is full of misanthropes! 
One can tell weāre hitting some pretty low lowsā¦
At some point eliminating the kana threads has to become a seriously strong point in favor of the team hurrying towards making them optional.
Then you can all go back to talking about summary pages!
To be honest, I recently came to the realization that none of these things might happen. WaniKani entered this Skyrim-like sweetspot that script and third-party app writers did all of the heavy-lifting and already solved all of WaniKaniās shortcomings, but you still need to buy a subscription to have access.
So what you end up with is a still working backend and a quickly corroding front-end.
Wanikani now for xbox, playstation, switch and samsung smart fridge
I mean yeah; I havenāt said it but thatās been my honest expectation too. Iām really sympathetic to the frustrations because while people can go āthey said theyāre working on it!ā a little vague promise that itāll happen eventually really does just feel like buying time.
I canāt know whatās going on behind the scenes, and I at least will say sometimes when people complain about this stuff the way they go about it is overly presumptuous and aggressive. Easy to say that because I have no reason to have any emotional investment at this stage, though. I usually surround these comments in talking about how much WK helped me with kanji because while I probably couldāve learned them another way, it really truly did.
But when it comes down to it, in its exact state ā Iāve managed to get decently far in learning Japanese I guess, so Iāve actually had quite a few friends ask me what I used. It happened again with a few today, but increasingly when it comes to Wanikani I feel like I spend half the time going āwellā¦ recently itās gotten worse for all of these reasonsā¦ā
Iām happy for the people who love the kana additions. Iāve made my case elsewhere that I donāt think it will ever be as good as keeping WK purely kanji-focused, and that especially in this protracted middle ground period itās absolutely worthless, but there are people getting what they want and thatās cool. Genuinely, happy they have what they want, or will eventually when more actually come.
Itās just, when looking into these various kanji options, there are some criticisms about WK that are essentially fair but that I thought the good outweighed and I was willing to pay. But every change seems to embody the spirit of those problems even more. Itās even more rigid, even more feature-lacking (come on, tell people what they got right and wrong) than free alternatives, on and on.
Iām increasingly leaning towards looking further into the other options to give my friends better methods and just recommending the forums for the book clubs and helpful people. If anyone reads these threads anymore beyond checking out the flags when people started insulting each other again, would just like them to know that.
No, you donāt understand.
All these threads complaining about the newly added kana vocabulary break my 5 year old routine of checking WaniKani memes, insulting other peopleās study routines and clicking on poll threads instead of actually learning Japanese.
Why can I not opt out of stupidity? I canāt understand why the Flying Spaghetti Monster couldnāt implement such a simple feature. Maybe the codebase of humanity is just too messy. I wonder if I should rewrite everything in Rust.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster has no power here. The Crabigator made sure of that.
