I will quit WK because of the new update

WaniKani Feedback
223

actually it is not. by European privacy law users are entitled to get a complete copy of all personal data from companies they use upon request. the result must either be completely human readable or presented in a standard format accompanied by a tool that displays it human readable.
This most likely does not extend to mnemonics, audio-records, example sentences and alike as they are not SRS related. In that case there is european copyright law: as long as you have the right to use these data (i.e. being a customer to wk) you are entitled to make backup media of all data that you have a usage right to for the duration that you have this right as long as doing do does not require you to circumvent any DRM measure (wk has none)
Tldr: european laws makes these TOS terms VOID

i am not a lawyer, this does not make me your lawyer, and this is not legal advice. cheers

sorry wk team, i had to set this right, its a matter of european pride

224

I did consider that, it was the first thing I noticed about this baby throwing their toys about. They are making the same complaints that are being made by people across various levels - they have offered no level based criticism whatsoever.

225

In uni and has poor reading comprehension.
Never said I did not have a problem.
But you are throwing a tantrum because things changed and publicly threatening to leave because of it rather than attempting to adjust.

226

There is a difference between providing critical feedback and acting like a child and publicly threating to leave because of a change. The core functionality of the site is still here. Some of the features Barsky is used to has broken (I am also in the same boat) but I am also understanding of the fact that these thing happen. Barsky’s excuse of “I am busy with uni” is a poor excuse for not wanting to adjust.

227

Hi @palefile Would you mind emailing about this on hello@wanikani.com about this, if you haven’t already, so that we can debug?

228

There’s really no particular reason for them to adjust if they don’t have to. Wanikani worked best for them before the update. Wanikani is no longer the best option for them now and Anki is. As such, they’re switching to what works best for them and providing feedback on why they’re leaving that the site admins may or may not take into account. That’s perfectly fine and certainly more logical than sticking to something that isn’t optimal for no real reason. The wording used in providing feedback was hyperbolic but this isn’t particularly a situation where showing annoyance will have any negative effects so there’s no reason for them not to. And it’s far from what I would consider a tantrum.

229

I don’t know if sharing my own experience with this very same disappointment and frustration will help you, but I hope it does, even if only a little bit. This is something I wrote when I was first starting to burn items:

My first failure to burn an item was when I messed up the spelling for the reading of 小 (it’s しょう and I put しょ). Another time I mistook 氷 (ice) for 泳 (swim). I still get a little discouraged when I make spelling mistakes, responding with the kanji meaning for a radical (like when I keep answering “round” for the “circle” radical or “wings” for the “feathers” radical), or responding with a semantically similar word (like when I put “assist” for the “help” kanji). Perhaps the most frustrating mistake I make is mistaking one kanji for another. With there being SO MANY kanji that look almost identical at first glance continuing to mistake them for one another is probably inevitable.

And so, I keep telling myself that mistakes are part of the learning process and making a mistake on an item just means I get to practice it more. Despite knowing that, I still felt like such a failure that day I got 18 wrong—or really any day my accuracy dips below 90%. But this is NOT an easy language to learn and I will keep making mistakes like these and I will keep learning from them.

Like you, I already had a large Japanese vocabulary that I was trying to match kanji to a lot of the time, and I too had a different understanding of some of the words than what WaniKani presents. In the first 20 levels I’d get 100% in reviews every day. At level 60 my daily accuracy now sits in the 68-80 range simply because at this point I’m stuck with all 300 or so items that just refuse to sink in. I don’t always get it right when I practice my burned items—sometimes I don’t even recognize a particular kanji at all. I’m not a computer and I’m not a dictionary: I’m going to have days where I make plenty of silly mistakes. I will forget things and I will remember them again. And that’s okay with me.

Most (if not all) of us came here with the goal of learning kanji and learning to read. You showed up day after day. You came to learn. And you’re doing that! While burning items feels really good and can definitely be confirmation of what you have learned and how much progress you’ve made, it’s not the only confirmation. At the end of the day, regardless of what the computer/SRS says, when you feel like you know a kanji cold, when you see it out in the wild and can read it without a second thought…you’ve learned it. When you know your answer is correct despite what’s in WaniKani’s exception database…you’ve learned it.

So while you definitely will feel motivated burning items here on WaniKani, there are so many other yardsticks by which to measure your progress, and that will make you feel good about where you are in your learning journey. In the end, those burns will pile up before you know it. 頑張って！

230

I have a lifetime sub.

I am on level 54, nearing 55.

I got so used to how things worked that I was discombobulated with the new update. I readjusted my process until Double Check is fixed.

I was annoyed they changed the way to get to the full level of information when I hit enter during reviews. It’s more WASD first person shooter on PC navigation; my brain broke a few times, I picked up the pieces and off I went. I still f up but quickly correct myself and in another day or 2, I will be fine.

Having used the tool now for… checks wkstats…991 days out of the last 991 days, I have been surprised at how infrequent changes actually are with WK. It was basically the same tool a week ago as it was almost 3 years ago when I started. In the Internet age, 3 years is a long time without a freshening up.

For people who start fresh, this will be second nature and no problem. For us old timers, it’s disruptive and annoying.

You have to decide for yourself if the tool is worth the effort you will need to make to get back into the groove.

For the folks who don’t come to the forums, it would have been nice to be given an email heads up or some notification about the change with a banner a month or 2 ago that required some acknowledgment that old timers knew this change was coming and to prepare. For those that don’t come to the forums, it was go to bed Day 324, on day 325 they ripped the carpet out from under you while you slept, repainted the house, and broke your bidet.

My take on it is, they need to keep things looking and feeling fresh to get new subscriptions and it is at the expense of us who have built our studies within the confines of the old version. Communication is key in all things, and in this case, over communicating would have been the key.

Having only 2-3 months left of using the tool every day (I ****ing HOPE it’s only 3 more months), I am fine readjusting because WK kicked me in the ass and got me actually learning Kanji after 20 years of indolence.

For those at level 15, built a process they depend on, and now need to readjust for the next 45 levels? Not so nice.

231

Wanikani changing the keybinds instead of making the keybinds adjustable in settings is dumb.

232

Two things about me

  1. I’m heavily dyslexic, so bad that there are family members of mine who can not read. I’ve spent an extremely long time trying to get to the reading level of a middle schooler. I decided not to go to college becuse I’d haft to take esl classes, as a native speaker.
    Even after seeing the English word for 局 (bureau) I could not type it 1 second later. Every time I had to hit redo and copy-paste it in.

  2. I’ve done the entirety of Heisig’s RTK. I don’t care about WaniKani’s mnemonics. I use this website as a refresher from Anki and to learn readings/obscure words.
    I “cheat” on every single radical because I already have my own meanings for them.

I can not use WaniKani without a double check script. I know that it’s easy to abuse for a lot of people and I actually don’t think it should be a default feature, but I can’t study without it.
You decided to roll out an update that broke my habit of studying (and many others) and actively made learning harder for me with the only promise is more changes in the “coming months”.
I know you don’t want users cheating with scripts. I know you want everything to look better and to clean up spaghetti code. I know you guys care.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I don’t want to quit WaniKani… It’s clear that there’s not going to be a rollback and the team is focused on fixing bugs and trying to make this update work based on @TofuguJenny 's responses.

I feel scammed.

233

if you decide to quit I made a wanikani to anki exporter.

as for scripts, people don’t cheat wanikani. they cheat themselves. I don’t think wanikani made these changes with the intent of getting rid of scripts, I think they just didn’t consider that people would care.

234

At the very least, a check box to keep navigation as it was.

I got used to it. Not happy about re-programming my brain but I need the tool to keep some of my motivation so I have to make it work for me.

235

“I can not use WaniKani without a double check script.”

Some of the blame lies on script creators. If someone creates a script, they should be keeping up on the changes. The problem there is, these creators have to be engaged with WK in some way, otherwise the scripts rot. Some script writers have hit level 60 and moved on, found a different tool, different process, etc and don’t come to the forums (an email in this case would have maybe helped script authors know a change was coming).

In this case, the author of the most used Double Check script has already stated they are working on fixing that script and it should be updated to a working (not perfect) state later today if it works out for them.

Kudos to the Override script I use for being updated the day the change went live.

As for the other scripts, I can wait or I can move on.

That’s just my opinion though and not telling anyone how to feel or react.

236

No way dude, I have a script published(granted it’s not popular like some others) and because I’m lvl 60 I don’t want to update it. But that’s not my fault, I don’t work for wanikani, I’m a busy uni student. I’m sure most other script creators are in similar situations. Wanikani should have stuck more strongly to the open-closed principle because it’s such a long-established application.

237

WK is looking for profit and bill paying and didn’t communicate effectively.

I assume they did the update to appeal to new users and fix the mobile Achilles heel (while maybe making it cheaper to run for them).

There is a level of expectation on maintenance of a script, which is why I said some of it lies on the authors. API bugs, exploits (not sure that’s even possible), etc could always require some script changes because of a backend update requirement and would be unplanned.

This is different in that WK knew it was coming but didn’t communicate broadly enough.

My guess is, had WK communicated better, you would have updated the script and staged it to hit when the update to WK took place or not long after.

Instead, it’s 4 alarm fire level :poop: during exams, graduation, crunch time at work, etc. They took away any ability to plan for the script changes for those that aren’t community devotees.

As a user who stopped visiting the community, I was blind-sided by the change and if I were a script author, I’d be angry too.

238

To be honest, considering distinguishing between similar kanji is already challenging, I don’t think a nitpicky approach to synonyms (round vs circle) is a good idea in general. I understand the core logic is specific radical/kanji names + mnemonics, but that’s too restrictive from a real-life perspective.

One logical take on this would be cutting down on radical reviews to reduce review load. Another, being less restrictive on radical/kanji names and instead of focusing on specific words, to focus on their approximate meanings.

239

Nonsense, script creators are not paid for their scripts and do this voluntarily. The onus is not on them to closely monitor the WK forums to figure out when a breaking change will happen, and then rush to fix it in advance.

The blame lies 100% on WK’s shoulders, they’ve fostered this third party ecosystem by refusing to implement simple quality of life improvements in-house and implicitly endorsing the scripting community, yet they released an update that broke almost every single script out there and didn’t give any workaround, disrupting the well established routine of hundreds of paid customers.

It would have been so easy to avoid too, they should just have allowed a temporary opt-out of the redesign so that scripts users and writers would have been notified of the breakage and given the time to update or migrate before pulling the plug on the old version.

240

I still have a long way to go so maybe my approach won’t work when I start getting in the very high levels, but for me taking the time to learn how to write the kanji and practicing kanji drawing in isolation really helped with that.

If you know how to draw the kanji it means that you’re intimately familiar with all its components, and even subtle component variations. In my experience so far that makes it virtually impossible to visually confuse kanji you already know.

Kanji with similar meanings are of course a different issue…

241

Bye Felicia

242

I just wanna add my two cents here and say that since the update I get kinda nauseous when I try to look at the meanings and readings after I got a review wrong.
(When you press F and then E)

It scrolls down for you and I am not sure if this was the case before.