I wholeheartedly agree.
There were times when the site was so broken that my brain was so focused on dealing with that problem that it wasn’t able to really concentrate on studying anymore. Who would recommend a studying tool that distracts you from studying?
And how are some of those features not implemented from the beginning? For example… Learning what a word in a foreign language means ideally is NOT connecting it to a word in your own language. It’s more of getting an idea of of well… what idea it represents. It can be a cloud of words or - at least for me - a cloud of ideas. It sometimes happens to me that I know what a word in a foreign language means (as in what idea it represents) but can’t find the right word in my own language. Now when I use a word that is correct regarding to jisho.org but Wanikani doesn’t have it in their list, it counts as wrong and there is nothing I can do about it. On the other hand when I type “pillow” instead of “willow” it is correct for Wanikani and I have no possibility to correct that silliness. How is that going to help?
But there are two other major things that make me not recommend Wanikani. One is that you so often run into a “you should know that” wall. I can’t give an example right now but I am sure most of you know this. You can’t remember a kanji in a word. So you look it up. But instead of giving you all the info you need, you just get “it’s the same as the radical so you should know it” and then there is no link to the radical. Or you check a radical because you don’t remember it and the info you get is “it’s the same meaning as the kanji”. If I knew the meaning of the kanji would I even look up the meaning of the radical. That’s just lazy! I asked the Wanikani team to do something about this years ago. But it really looks like they are just happy to live off a half-assed product.
Same for the mnemonics: Some of them are so incredibly lazy. It’s just building a sentence with the words that we learned for the radicals. Those are not mnemonics. They are just sentences including certain words - and they do not really help.
Wanikani is nothing but a basic structure that in many cases you have to fill with meaning yourself. If for you this is worth the money they ask, go for it. If you want a polished product that really cares about you and supports your kanji studies, run!
When I bought the Wanikani “lifetime” I bought it to support the creators.
I sometimes question myself if I shouldn’t have kept yearly subscription and finish that way.
I don’t know their budget and Wanikani probably isn’t a full-time job for all the staff.
But these goals are reasonable in my opinion:
- integrating opt-in features from 3rd party scripts
- polishing lazy content
- levels 61-70
- an update to dashboard
- writing an article every now and then (what happened to Tofugu website?)
This aspect hits hard for me. Before I hit level 10, I figured out the basic idea with mnemonics for myself and figured out how to make ones that work for me. Meanwhile the actual ones I was coming across rapidly deteriorated in quality and memorability.
Like, you don’t need an involved narrative with ongoing characters that weight down what you can do with them. Mnemonics are really just about spreading a wider net for your thoughts to generally go to when trying to remember something, making it easier to find your way back to the central word/meaning/idea. Which gets hard when they feel like the official one has very little bearing on the actual concept or word.
For me the thing that really killed it was the context sentences. Love or hate them, a lot of the time they are memorable… For the first 20 levels. The first 20 levels you’re guaranteed 3 example sentences, giving good reading practice with the word in use.
Past 20, you might get one context sentence and it’ll be “I hope you find a good freezer.” (They did at least update this one.) Just, utterly unhelpful. Often not great at detailing the nuance between different similar sounding words a lot of the time either, even though I feel good context sentences could help detail nuance further.
A lot of the time I’m not sure if they were written in English first with the Japanese text being an afterthought? But then other times, it’s like someone else translated the English sentence with no clue what the original writer intended.
Like the weird one that did also get fixed a while ago concerning the かルーテル検査, carouter test. The only thing you’ll find googling “carouter test” is people trying to figure out what Wanikani meant with this. They meant “catheterization.”
After hitting level 30, I moved on to an Anki deck and went much deeper into immersion. I have zero regrets. I’m happy Wanikani got me to where I am now in the short time it did, and it did help me figure out what works and doesn’t for me in the early days of language study… But I can’t really recommend it either. There’s better options, especially these days.
I was happy with the product when I bought a lifetime subscription and would have been perfectly content had WaniKani just stopped, but they’ve done nothing but make the website actively worse. Constant shuffling of kanji and vocab around, rewriting half the mnemonics because the staff is ridiculously political, and breaking add-ons at the same time they’re removing basic features from the site like “how many questions you got wrong.” Give me my money back, you cretins.
I regret my purchase and steer friends away. Bunpro is focused on grammar, but they actually give a shit about their customers.
I know about textfugu, but what’s the other one?
Probably EtoEto which was supposed to be an improvement on Textfugu IIRC
Yeah, from what I’ve gathered, TextFugu (“The textbook that keeps being updated!”) had its development unofficially halted in order to work on EtoEto, meant to be its highly-improved successor. But TextFugu continued collecting subscriptions and allowing new subscribers long after the team had left it. The TextFugu forums show users lingering for years afterward, wondering when the next update was due to come out, when EtoEto was going to open, or what was happening with their subscription money. TextFugu was eventually officially closed, but its lessons apparently left a positive legacy, so lots of previous users were still very hopeful for EtoEto… until that, too, was fully abandoned after many promises. It all certainly puts the future of Wanikani on shaky ground.
Personally, I use Tsurukame, and as long as that works, I’m happy. But I totally get your frustration. Because the improvement I got from the additional features is so huge.
In the first levels, I had so many mistakes just because I caught the wrong letter with my thumbs – it slows you down and is so frustrating when you actually knew the answer. If I want to do 120 reviews in a row I will end up with typos and accumulate mistakes for no good reason. In addition, English is just not my first language. I’ve seen an undo button requested so many times now, but apparently it is more important to cater to people who are afraid they’ll cheat on themselves, which is one of the weirdest things I can think of for a self-study tool for adults.
As Tofugu hasn’t published any articles forever, I’m also wondering how many people are even still working on this project. I don’t know how to properly explain it, but while there are still updates coming to WaniKani, it feels a bit “dead”, like a cash cow ready to be abandoned once there is some actual competition. It is somehow maintained, but as someone already mentioned, there seem to be no future goals. I recently tried out BunPro and was surprised with how active the feedback communication with the developers looked there.
I don’t know. I’m actually worried I’ll be half through at some point and they’ll shut it down completely or something. Because I really like the concept of WaniKani and I would like to continue my journey with it (and the features necessary to make it work well for me).
Spending energy talking about what the staff has a “responsibility” to do or what anyone is “taking for granted” is a bit strange. It definitely serves to imply, even if it this is unintended, that we’re just dealing with uppity, ungrateful users here. Let’s not lose sight of other side of that coin, which gets this back on point: users have no “responsibility” to give them money or recommend their product to others, and those things shouldn’t be “taken for granted” by staff either.
Let’s also not forget that all the people writing these amazing third-party scripts are doing it for free, out of nothing but the goodness of their hearts, whereas when the staff does things that make their life more difficult… they’re getting paid to do it. That’s troubling enough as is, but when the value of the product itself depends so heavily for so many people on those third-party additions? We should be grateful they were given the chance to try at all, really? I would think it’s Tofugu who should be grateful so many people have done so much free work for them.
Personally I’m still content because Smouldering Durtles has most of the features I want, but if anything ever were to hit the mobile implementations, I think it’s clear that these complaints would get much louder, fast. The main thing that would make me go from 
to 
is expansion to more levels… the main thing keeping me here at all is that I actually like WaniKani’s algorithm, as simple as it is, more than Anki’s even with FSRS minimizing my time spent and optimizing to my personal forgetting curve down to the decimal - most of the value of WK is just basic public source stuff (kanji and words, arranged somewhat rationally), but there’s no easy way to get lots of items into this sort of algorithm and have it sync from PC to mobile. Of course, the algorithm is public knowledge too, and would be extremely easy to figure out even if it weren’t.