Oh, my understanding was that because of the change to the underlying storage model it was impossible to check an answer before it got written to the server now, so short of a userscript downloading the whole database to do its own checking (including its own autocorrection/blocklist etc.) it won’t be possible to have undo/mark-wrong anymore. So maybe possible in an app, but never a userscript. Did you hear differently?
What I noticed back in the day, learning English: some leeches won’t go away with simple vocab cramming. They are resistant to systematic learning for some inexplicable reason. The only way I managed to get rid of them was actual exposure to native content outside of the “I’m learning English now!” mindset… and time.
Just wish I could actually read JP material but Kanji are such a major hurdle to that. >.<
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Ah, I was unaware of that nasty wrinkle. Hmm. Well, perhaps you (and I’m sure there are many people who would agree/support) could petition the WK team to add in some sorts of ‘hooks’ so that userscripts could get a chance to intervene before writing to the server. It’s software. (I happen to be a former software developer.) Such things can be done, given the motivation and perseverance.
I may be sacrificed to the gods for this suggestion (although maybe this is the perfect thread for it) but if you already know/understand Japanese beyond an absolute beginner level (2k+ words and grammar beyond Genki 2) and you just want to get your reading ability up then I’d suggest doing a pure vocab Anki deck or something and then just reading as much as possible. Maybe speedrun a kanji recognition deck if you are so inclined (I am not, personally).
Wanikani is what I suggest to people who know absolutely nothing and need their hand to be held at the start (it seems to be extremely good at “on boarding” people to the world of kanji without scaring them). I also suggest it to people who become paralysed when deciding what to study as it is pretty much on rails and makes all the decisions for you. I live in Japan and, when I’m out drinking with gaijin friends, I am always always telling them to study more Japanese. Wanikani seems to be the thing that most people are willing to try and it is a step up from Duolingo or whatever they were doing before (staring at their karaage and hoping it will tell them the secret of how to become fluent in 3 months…). As such, I’m not sure it is the best tool for your situation, especially given all your gripes in this thread.
Having said that, if you like the mnemonics and everything about Wanikani then you should use Wanikani. Or possibly look at the extremely similar public Anki decks that exist (can I say that here?).
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For the record, I haven’t consciously engaged in the catastrophist talk that started this thread—I read the title ironically and was surprised when the posts weren’t ironic.
This specific change really peeves me because it messes with my workflow so much, and getting a new deck up to speed is much easier said than done. If I were willing to say “I can consider the kanji and vocab in lessons 1–X burned” then I could reasonably pick up and just go elsewhere, but I can’t.
You weren’t familiar with it, so I’ll explain: Skritter is a handwriting-recognition system with spaced repetition and selectable decks, among them the WaniKana set, but you can think of it as Anki more or less. (It sounds like Kani-Wani if Kani-Wani had stroke-by-stroke character recognition that could critique your penmanship without being overly insistent on perfection—but it doesn’t, right?)
I started it when I hit level 9 on WaniKani and felt like I was frequently melding similar kanji in my head and thought learning to write would help with that (and it very much has). But I spent 5+ hours a day, every day, for three weeks, just to catch up that deck to WaniKani. Starting a deck with hundreds let alone thousands of entries over again is hard, and I don’t have any easy way to batch up the process faster than “do I know this one or not? How about that one?” Rinse, repeat.
Since I don’t live in Japan and I’m mostly homebound and am hard of hearing my opportunities for not using a course and “just soaking it in” are kind of hard to identify. I watch Japanese TV and I rewatch old favorite English-language TV with Japanese dubs and subs. I read manga and easy news sites—I’d hoped that systematically learning kanji would expand my abilities more than aimlessly trying to pick it up—as a computational linguist, I’d say there’s no such thing as “immersion” in written material (or, honestly, in anything but human-to-human interaction). But if you have suggestions as to better ways than a systematic review (whatever program i use), I’d be interested to hear them.
Have you tried the Cure Dolly video on this topic. Really helped me get at least some grip on it:
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The border is just sad : (
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I use this to write kanji: https://kaniwani.com/
It’s not automated or electronic but KaniWani is synched to WaniKani Progress and it has stroke order animations to teach writing.
My workflow: while doing my EN → JP Kaniwani Reviews: I simply write down the words on an old fashioned piece of paper before I type in the answer. :'D
I too learn through writing and KW worked wonders for me w/o much administrative hassle on my part.
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If I’m not mistaken that will make you go through the entire vocab of the previous level before getting to the new radicals, so for my use case it’s not good enough. I don’t want to start dozens of new vocab entries at once just to get to the radicals.
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If anyone wants to remove the outline it is a pretty simple fix.
install stylus or some other user-style extension and you can one-line it out with:
input:focus {outline: none}
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Oh agreed, like definitely everything will be fine eventually; scripts will be updated (at least some of them, anyways) and most everyone will be able to do things how they were doing before. That said, it’s going to take weeks if not months of catch-up that could have been avoided entirely by them just doing what I described above.
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I hate this new update, it slows me down so much. I’ve been really enjoying WK for the past few months and this update is ruining the experience. I think I will quit it, if not resolved.
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I also don’t use that setting, for the same reason. But, I did say: “there is actually a native setting that does address this specific concern you mentioned”. The specific concern you mentioned was getting Radicals first, so you’re not gated for content later. And that setting does address that specific concern. 
Personally, I use the setting “Ascending level then shuffled” because I’m personally not concerned with leveling as fast as humanly possible, only at my ‘natural pace’, which is currently about 3 weeks per level or so. This setting addresses the “I don’t want to start dozens of new vocab entries at once”, since you will be getting vocab shuffled in randomly as you go through your lessons, so that by the end of the level, you’ve usually already done many of the Vocab lessons you’ve had available.
Of course, it’s not a perfect compromise, but it’s good enough for me. And, as I also said: “Granted, the options for this setting are not nearly as flexible as the various reorder scripts”. But they do exist in the native app, and one of them does address the specific concern of getting Radicals first, whereas you had said, “I also need reorder in order to do radicals first”. Well, you don’t actually need a reorder script to serve that specific function. The native solution isn’t perfect, and the reorder scripts are more flexible, as I said. But there is a native solution to that issue.
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Yeah that’s reasonable, I just remembered being slightly frustrated when I saw that lesson order was configurable yet none of the settings was the one anybody who’s trying to go fast is going to need.
Early on before I used scripts I would just keep doing lessons until I got all the radicals done but it was a bit miserable to deal with the big bundle of reviews coming at once after that.
What are these scripts everyone is talking about?
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The duality of a programmer. Seeing as you are in University, you should probably not act so childish and grow up a little.
I work 40 hours a week, have a kid to take care of, and a multitude of other responsibilities and I am able to adjust just fine.
Are there issues with the update, yes, several. Some bugs, some quality of life. However, throwing a tantrum due to change is not how you get though things in life.
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Maybe try to remember - Japan is the land of the rising sun.
This is the kanji for Japan:
日本
3rd party scripts are made by community members and graciously shared on here, and depending on the script can make changes to your Dashboard Layout, add new features and information like heatmaps, reorder your lessons (like e.g. if you level up, instead of having to go through 80 vocab cards first, you can reorder to Radicals and Kanji first to speed up the leveling process), and change many things for reviews like being able to double check and fix typos or mistakes or implement an Anki mode where you don’t have to type answers anymore.
Scripts can be very versatile and improve your WK experience based on what kind of learner you are.
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meanwhile the website is a mess, at least flaming durtles is fine and I can use anki mode.
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Some things annoy me, what is the difference between a discussion and a conversation exactly
it’s so funny to see this comment - the other day after getting converse/discuss confused consistently I finally looked up the word roots. Discuss = something more serious, formalized; Converse = casual. Consider someone saying “I had a discussion with them” vs “I had a conversation with them”, definitely a different implication. Also, the origin of “discuss” is like “to strike asunder” (??? lmao) and the origin of “converse” is “to associate with”. It’s helped me to tell the difference in my reviews so far 
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