juu for ăă
ă ⊠not jiyuu (which gives ăăă) 
Thank you , I understand now.
Donât worry, itâs a very common mistake
I wonder if this should be put in the FAQ, or on the pinned welcoming topic. I think Iâve seen a post asking for help with this exact mistake 3 or 4 times just in the past month or so
OK i just looked it up and it is in the FAQ but itâs very out of the way and itâs titled âSmall vs big charactersâ rather than âmy answers keep getting marked wrongâ. Oh well, I just wish there was an slightly easier way for people to find the answer to this.
I think the bigger question, no offense to OP, is why do people keep trying to learn kanji before having a basic grasp of kana?
Should be a question at startup â âDo you know kana? No? Go do that then come back laterâ
I interpreted it as a reading mistake rather than a conceptual lack of ă vs ă. Itâs been a while since Iâve had trouble reading kana, but I believe I made that error quite a bit in my first week or 2, even though I had a full conception of small vs big.
Completely possible. OP was genuinely nice about it. Asking what she did wrong, not whatâs wrong with WK, like others do.
Weâve had many attack WK as being busted, get defensive when you offer help, and complain that WK doesnât do a better job teaching kana.
To be fair, in some situations I also still have issues differentiating between ă and ă (and co), depending on font, size, and also the fact that in some furigana styles apparently only the big ă etc are used for both cases. I donât want to imagine how dyslexia âworksâ with the size difference. ><
I also wouldnât be surprised if some kana guides skip those rows, because the students already learnt the small y-row as their big versions.
I did the same thing at first so donât feel to badly. I still have issues seeing the size difference unless there next to each other, sure itâs smaller, but barely. it is getting easier to notice.
as a side note, as someone with dyslexia I can say the mini kana sizing is int really a problem. at least for me. in fact so far Iâve found hiragana to be generally easy to read, the more irregular shapes make it easier to orientate them somehow. some of the kanji and katakana however have been more problematic but nothing to bad so far.
though that may have more to do with me being a lot older then when I learned English, so Iâve already learned to compensate for bdpq cases which are arguably worse.
I had this same issue, this isnât really in resources online when youâre learning kana. So, I donât think itâs right to say people should have a âbasic graspâ. I never knew this was a thing before I started this.
I still think itâs fair. You canât really write anything without the combinations, so it is very very basic. Thatâs more of an issue with your kana resources, than with WK.
I think the first occurence of small characters in WK should have a warning about them in the lesson, with a link to the FAQ.
Now that I think about it, the app I used to practice kana never mentioned them. I picked them up from my grammar book.
But of course when you first start out trying to learn kana, you might not necessarily know what a good resource should include. You donât know what you donât know.
When I hit level 7⊠I couldnât, for the life of me, figure out how to write ă„ïŒI know my kana. I tried every combination I could think of and failed. I almost decided that I would never be able to type it (and as a consequence fail WK. lol) when I asked my Japanese partner (who laughed a bit) and told me that itâs typed DU. I would have never in a million years have figured that out.
I think typing those things should be in the FAQ too. Lol.
I had that same problem. I found out how to type ă„ this way:
- Go to the Announcements category of the forum.
- Click on New Wanikani Knowledge Base (i.e. the new user guide).
- In the search box, type âtyping in Japaneseâ.
- Click on the link âguide to typing in Japaneseâ. This will take you to a great article written by Kristen Dexter (May 10, 2016) on Tofugu.
- Scroll down to the chart on âDakutenâ and there it is.
Kristenâs article is a great resource for typing Japanese. I agree that it would have been easier to find it in the new user guide.
I use my phone, not the computer to access WK and the forums⊠Itâs a bit confusing. Or perhaps Iâm a just bit of a dork!! Iâm certainly not as savvy at navigating around as you are @bati ⊠You did well to find that information!!
I really think it would be easier if typing information like ă„ were in the new user guide, rather than hunting aroundâŠ
Thank you for your reply!! 
@CyrusS Is it possible to make a suggestion the the WK team to add ă„ and ăą to the âhow do I typeâ section in the FAQ? (I didnât know I could do that!!) I think it would be very useful to new comers⊠I couldnât find it anywhere⊠It would be nice to help other people avoid this confusion I had when I first came cross those items.