I wanted to share a major complaint. I used to recommend WaniKani to people both in real life and on Reddit, but unfortunately, I can’t do that anymore. Why?
It’s frustrating that a platform dedicated to providing top-notch content neglects basic add-ons that make daily reviews easier to manage. I’m not sure if the WaniKani team realizes that some of these add-ons are integral to our daily study routines. Yet, every six months, there’s a big update that breaks these essential tools. What’s the point of adding new content and features when the most basic functionalities aren’t supported by default?
I’ve been using WaniKani for over two years, and since the last update in August, everything is broken. I can’t even remember the names of the add-ons I installed back in 2022. It feels like the WaniKani team doesn’t realize that some add-ons aren’t just aesthetic features—they’re essential tools we rely on in our daily study routines. Yet, they still aren’t integrated by default.
So, what can I say about WaniKani now? Try it if you want, but be aware that some basic features (like the dashboard, dark mode, confusion guesser, etc.) are often unavailable, and the more interesting ones (like Jitai, Keisei, Niai, etc.), which make WaniKani an incredible resource, probably won’t work. You might be better off using another platform.
Sorry for the rant, but I’m a bit exasperated with all the broken add-ons.
I mean I don’t disagree but at this point it is what it is. After the scriptocalypse last year they haven’t really done anything to fix this glaring issue, so I think at this point you’re just wasting your time with this post.
Fairly early on I switched most if not all of my wanikani-ing to Smouldering Durtles which has insulated me from this nonsense, so I still mostly enjoyed my time and don’t regret it, but it’s pretty insane that the experience is still so reliant on third party tools for basic functionality. And it’s even crazier that they seem to have no concern for third party breakage given this state of affairs. The API becomes more and more incomplete too.
It may feel that way to you, but I’m pretty sure they’re very aware of most of them.
However, that in no way means they have any sort of obligation to modify their environment to work with them.
It’s very similar to how if a fan was making a mod for a video game. Those mods might be absolutely game changing, figuratively and/or literally. They may even be more popular than the official game. But all of that doesn’t matter to the official dev team, nor should it. It makes no sense to assume that the official devs for the game should make sure that future updates account for what the fan-made mods created, nor could one reasonably infer that the directions the mods’ devs took with their creative design are even acceptable to the official devs. And even if it is acceptable to them, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a priority for them (perhaps that’s the underlying purpose for your post here—to push the incentive—but I digress).
The fact that WaniKani allows (in an official capacity) and somewhat enables third-party apps and scripts is not something that should be taken for granted. The fact that there’s a public API at all? That’s certainly a blessing, but it certainly could have never been a thing, and I would’ve still used WaniKani.
Look, nobody is spending their working hours with the intention to make something worse. Everybody has their own priorities. It’s just that, due to the decoupled nature (among other things) of official devs and the “fan”/“mod” devs, the disconnect ends up looking like a neon sign to us.
You can open Tampermonkey Dashboard, see all installed scripts and update them. Other than that, you can try to instal small fix I wrote, that mitigates the impact of last update on unupdated scripts:
There is a sense to me that the WaniKani team is living off the product as it is, with no vision for how to improve it. This will only take them so far. This has inspired me to build what I believe to be an improved product inspired by WaniKani. That is the nature of capitalism, the customer is always right (yet they seem to always ignore the customer).
They seem to have a “rest on their laurels” attitude, which is a shame because they have an incredible core product, if they had some product vision it really could improve exponentially. The only product release I have seen since I joined is the “interleaving” feature which tells you absolutely everything you need to know about how they view further developing the product.
Me too, but for other people this is different. While WK doesn’t owe us any more than they promise in their marketing materials, that doesn’t really mean they can’t strive to be better, and it doesn’t mean people can’t get annoyed and even chirp up when their study routine gets broken for the fifty sixth time for some reason that’s probably a good reason, but undercommunicated, and communicated late to script authors.
There are ways to reduce script breakage. The WK team does not seem interested in them. That’s fine for me and you. Some people don’t think that’s fine. That’s also okay, and they get to have a say too. Them posting their feedback really is a good thing. A resonable salesperson listens to their buyer.
^This. I’m not even that tech savvy and even I am envisioning spending my spare time making an improved open source kanji learning platform inspired by WK at some point in the future if they don’t improve drastically… (This may or may not happen ) The bulk of the work will lay in finding alternatives to WKs proprietary custom radicals/radical-names and mnemonics.
Hmm, I think it’s correct to say that it’s not something that can be taken for granted — they may very well revoke it completely at some point. But your game-dev analogy seems a bit off: Wanikani is selling a tool for self-studying a language and I think we ought to be able to take for granted a willingness on the WK team’s side to accommodate (at the very least through support for scripts, ideally in the main app) modifications to suit different learners’ needs – just given the nature of what they’re selling^^;
But yeah, they technically don’t have to, and maybe they won’t. As someone trying to learn a language though, it makes sense to complain when they don’t, right?
Yes.
I definitely wasn’t trying to imply “you can’t/shouldn’t complain about it”. After all, proper discourse is one avenue for potential constructive change. I just want to make sure that people are thinking rationally and are being reasonable.
I completely understand this sentiment. I personally would still recommend WaniKani, even if I was to find was a better designed kanji tool, something about WaniKani’s design specifically lead to me finishing. The community and the level up celebrations with friends and the customization. There are things they could do better but those wouldn’t really have been the things that would have kept me coming back to finish to level 60.
I totally understand the frustration that as I was in my last few levels they repeatedly broke my scripts that I was using for quality of life. If you are going to allow scripts and then break them, you are setting up yourself for natural backlash from disgruntled users. If you have community forums alerting you to the things your users are needing and wanting why not start implementing those things instead of break them.
I’ve paid for the lifetime membership just before the first major update (when all of my userscripts crashed). Now I’m a sad puppet mind controlled by sunk cost fallacy (I hate it). All of my routine was ruined I have not progressed a single level forward and had to revert to a couple levels back.
Tsurukame is a third-party app that has many of the functions of desktop userscripts built-in. So, it may seem like userscripts don’t matter to you, but you actually use a form of one! Tsurukame allows skipping, undo, back-to-back, and various other manipulations that make the Wanikani experience more intuitive but are not provided by the inherent product itself.
I’m new and naive, and haven’t experienced any of these issues (I just joined recently and am only on level 4).
I definitely agree that if you think you can make a better product, you should. That’s how the market works.
But otherwise, if WaniKani wants to “rest on their laurels” and have a good (even if not as perfect as you wish) product, isn’t that their prerogative?
The people who run WK do have a responsibility to provide a product that does what it says it will do, but they certainly don’t have a responsibility to cater to third-party add-ons, even if said add-ons are popular.
Is it foolish of them to not better engage with the community about these popular add-ons? Perhaps. But at the end of the day, it’s up to them if they just want to have a solid “passive income” product.
I can imagine being more frustrated if I had become attached to certain add-ons, and it sounds like lots of people are frustrated — so while I cannot relate, the frustration sounds justified.
I can also imagine being frustrated if I had bought a lifetime subscription. In that case, I might feel entitled to request some sort of refund (if part of the appeal was the add-ons).
But at the end of the day, if you want a better product, create it (it’s not so easy, though sounds like some people are working on some)!
Something that I think fuels a lot of resentment is that multiple programs/services based on Wanikani have already been made, and all of them have implemented these fixes and more – Bunpro and ToriiSRS are two big ones that come to mind. Torii implemented the major quality-of-life userscripts into their service from the very start, which is obviously something Wanikani cannot go back and redo. On the other hand, despite Bunpro’s very small team, they are constantly making these changes with quick turnaround because it makes their product more accessible to current users and more appealing to potential users. I’ve been consistently active on Wanikani for a year and a half now and not one change has been made in that time to address user concerns.
I’ve paid my money for lifetime, there’s nothing really that I can do, so I simply take the massive website-breaking changes as they happen (which is fairly often, these days). However, there is very much a sense that maybe they “took the money and ran” now that hundreds and hundreds of users have paid in a ton of money, and WK’s reputation[1] brings in new users’ cashflows fairly frequently.
As a final piece of context, I’ve noted that users who have been around for a while have already witnessed Tofugu abandon two major Japanese-learning projects after lots of people showed interest and paid in bundles of money. Implementing even one feature that is constantly begged for, like an “undo” button, would show in good faith that Wanikani doesn’t plan to suddenly disappear like its predecessors.
I would say prior reputation, personally. Its current reputation is not high ↩︎
) The bulk of the work will lay in finding alternatives to WKs proprietary custom radicals/radical-names and mnemonics.
