Why did you break the keyboard shortcuts when on the lessons? Enter used to advance, now it doesn’t. Why?
Checks back in on WK
Looks around
Leaves
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But how do I make the next review not get spaced further out?!? That’s the frustration of the “Guru I ↑ Guru II ↑ Master ↓ Guru I ↑ Guru II ↑ Master ↓, rinse, repeat” cycle, and what the userscript’s ability to mark it wrong when I get it wrong fixed for me. You’re not saying I can do that, right?
You’re kinda saying I should just get over it, and have faith that after three or four months of cycling like that it’ll stop cycling because I’ll just learn it eventually?
tl;dr: I don’t think that’s right. Here are other examples outside WaniKani specifically that might help explain why not.
The “botch it next time”—surely you’re not saying I should keep a running list in a spreadsheet or something to consult which verb pairs or otherwise troublesome words I messed up last time so I should “botch next time”?
But if I don’t keep a list and could just remember so I’d know to botch it—if I could, for the verb pairs at least, I’d already know which one it is! (Because it only will accept the wrong choice in one direction, and I type “to X something” or “to be X’d/X’ing” rather than “to X” when I know that’s the one it is!) Like the “hot thing”/“hot weather” example: when it’s possible, I do it!
This feels like that old TV sitcom joke where the kid says “I found a foolproof way to cheat—I memorize the answer before the test!”
Okay—maybe you’ll understand if I use a non-WaniKani example. So, the thing I hate, hate, hate about Skritter is, for instance, if I see “soon”, what to try writing before getting a hint. Should I do 近日? 早く? 近々? 間もなく? Well, if it’s 4 boxes, I know it’s 間もなく, but otherwise—which should I choose? Impossible. (For their own word lists, they just avoid synonyms, simple. But I’m using the WaniKani list, and it has exact synonyms.)
So after first unlocking each of these words, I’ve had to edit every single one of these sets of words, to make sure the way it displays when it asks me to write it is always a way that will give me a hint of what it isn’t, without a hint of what it is.
But if I don’t realize there’s a synonym coming later when I unlock the first, I don’t find out until I’m in a review and write 近 then “日” enough times that it says “no, you dummy, it’s 々”. And then i have go back and come up with a way to distinguish them.
And it suuuuucks, coming up with these perfect snowflake words or phrases that will mean 近日 “soon” to me a month from now but won’t mean 近々 “soon” to me a month from now without giving me a giveaway hint. You can see that, right?
And I’m saying the same thing exists with WaniKani, in verb pairs especially. And that I don’t want to do the Skritter thing of coming up with a user synonym to say “be moved” that can only mean emotionally and not physically, and then another that can only mean physically and not emotionally and remember not just the special snowflake word/phrase I came up with to distinguish them, but also to remember to not just type “to be moved” in the future. I need to remember, “oh—this is the one I always forget!”
Still no? Maybe this: I go to an annual convention where there’s this person I never interact with in any other setting at any other time who likes to randomly sit down wherever I’m at and chat—and whose name I could never remember. I always promised myself next year I’d remember. I tried to come up with a mnemonic. I tried writing it down 10 times when I get back to my hotel room. This went on for 8 years—until I finally set a repeating reminder with his name at 1-month intervals so I didn’t have to wait a whole year to practice; now I get his name, even after a 3-year Covid break. It seems like you’re saying, “that’s not what did it—it would’ve just taken 8 times to get it right, whatever you did—you just think it’s because you manually reminded yourself early.” Maybe? But I don’t think so.
I think I need more frequent reinforcement than I’m getting with a 50/50 guess in the default spacing. Is this really so impossible to believe?
Addendum: I just realized there’s no randomness in when something comes back up at the Guru or Master level, so I can just calculate when that will be and remind myself to botch it then. Is that what you meant? If so, is there a tool for calculating these, or do I just need to use the equation on the knowledgebase page on SRS to figure it out?
What?
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Trust me, even if it’s been several months since you saw it last (because you were wrongly marked “correct” the last time you saw it) you’ll either get it wrong and it will move back a couple levels, or you’ll remember the last time you saw it (wrongly getting marked correct may be enough to make it stick in your memory). Worst case, it cost you a few months.
But even when marked correct, you can see what SRS stage it moves to. If it moves to master or enlightened, you may want to spend some time with the extra study feature (or the self-study script).
In my experience, with enough repeats anything will get memorized eventually, even with incorrectly scored reviews. Here’s my worst offender currently: 114 review sessions so far (should burn on the next review):
I flat out guarantee there were was all sorts of incorrect scoring with that one, wrongly marked correct and wrongly marked incorrect!
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+1, either make a toggle to go back to old UI or something, this new update feels like hot garbage
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Could be worse, could be Duolingo 
Mind, I never actually paid any money for Duolingo though so…
So, just now I had this, which gave me an opportunity to explain exactly what I’m talking about, since it seems so confusing to you in the abstract:
This was just for demo purposes, I know as a 〜がす ending verb it’s transitive. But do you see i typed just “to roll”? I didn’t put the word “something” there? That’s what I would have done normally—if I thought it was intransitive. Seeing “something” there would have surprised me.
What could have happened…
And if I had been surprised, and thought it was just intransitive “to roll”, yesterday, I would have manually marked it wrong, so it would get demoted, from Master to Guru I. Then it would come back in 1 week (April 5); if I got it correct (“to roll something”) then, it would come back on April 18, ready to try to Enlighten it again. That’s my understanding of how SRS is supposed to work—if I get it wrong, I should see it again soon.
But now, because I couldn’t mark it wrong manually, it got promoted, and it won’t come back now until August to be Burned. If I had really gotten it wrong but marked right, rather than it being a demo of what I’m talking about, I’d have a 50/50 chance to Burn it then—unless I marked it on my calendar to intentionally botch it or something.
Meanwhile, I’d have 4 months before seeing it again—during which it I wouldn’t think about it unless I happened across it in other reading. (The whole theory behind SRS is that I won’t rewire my mental understanding of it unless I have to demonstrate I know it it, right?) That’s why I’ve made this new Anki deck—so that I’ll see words I really got wrong, but WK marked right like this, sooner than 4 months from now.
I get what you’re saying—I can just wait until August, botch it then intentionally or unintentionally, and if I “wrongly get it ‘right’” with plain “to roll” by chance, unburn it and start over. I’m not concerned about the mechanics, though—I’m concerned about the 4 months in the meantime when my brain thinks this word means something it doesn’t. I’d read it fine, but if I tried to use it myself, I’d use it wrong or choose the wrong one.
If this still isn’t making any sense to you with this specific example, I’m not sure how else to explain it (except, maybe, waiting until I really, truly make an actual error instead of a demo error)—I think your brain just works different from mine.
And you’ll have to trust me that I don’t believe after bopping around getting a word right and wrong, right and wrong but slowly getting better, that suddenly, just by not seeing it for 4 months instead of frequently, I’ll get a better grasp of what it really is, just because I noticed it just now. I mean, didn’t I notice all the other times, when I used the userscript to manually mark it wrong, too?
Or are you thinking marking it wrong was a crutch, and it would stick in my brain better if I tried to remember “late in the summer, you’re going to see this word, and when you see it you need to botch it”? I don’t really get it—I don’t think that’s how my brain works.
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There’s another word which does mean to roll (or tumble IIRC, ends with bu I think but that may be to fall over) though, so it should (rightly in my opinion) disallow synonyms which differ in transitive/intransitive case.
Transitive/intransitive stuff is annoying but it’s clearly part of what you need to learn to know the language properly
EDIT: Agree with not liking the workaround nonsense, just have an option for “no, I got that wrong”.
Worst one for me was sunlight/moonlight both being allowed for moonlight IIRC, lol.
I’m saying it’s one subject out of 9000 (that you clearly know, as well).
I’m less concerned about efficiency than many, though.
In your example, it would have dropped back to guru in four months time because you didn’t review it in the interim and forgot it. You’ll be learning other subjects in those four months, though, trust me.
Lighten up and trust the SRS. It works.
Gotta admit that this is the first time I’ve argued with someone about the scoring being too lax, though.
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German was worse… you know what reflexive verbs can do, they can go F*** themselves
“I watch myself some television” for example
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That’s my whole point, though! I trust the SRS because SRS makes things space shorter when you get them wrong, and longer when you get them right. There’s no “except for transitive verbs—then any of the four possibilities (right/wrong × longer/shorter), they all work just the same” loophole!
That’s not SRS—that’s 100% an artifact of WaniKani choosing to make the word “something” disallowed for intransitive verbs but optional for transitive verbs. They could’ve, like, required “to roll something” and “for something to roll”, or whatever. But instead they gave an option—“to roll”—that you can answer for both, but is “the” answer for just one of them.
Curious about what you are thinking of. AFAIK they are different words in both languages (日光／月光 in Japanese) but technically, moonlight is just reflected sunlight. 
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I was going too fast and noticed the same thing a couple months ago. You can answer “sunlight” to 月光 and it accepts it. I don’t know why. Maybe “moo” and “su” autocorrect?
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I think (long time ago, and beer o’clock now) that I typed “sunlight” when it wanted “moonlight” and it was accepted. That may have been fixed I guess by now. Probably because it thought 6 letters in a row at the end was OK?
It also does not mind collect for connect (for the one which is REN anyway on level 19 or so) which is bad.
I do know moonlight is just reflected sunlight Fun fact: the moon is about as reflective and about the same colour as asphalt IIRC.
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I’ve figured out that you can just use CTRL + to zoom in the screen, and it’s more visible, as before. It’s almost as good as before, but the extra box they’ve drawn around the typing space is distracting.
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I confuse sun and moon quite a lot because obvs the sun should have little legs since it moves faster (or does it? HMM)
English is imprecise. “I already rolled!” said during a board game is a transitive usage (“the dice” is implied).
Transitivity is hard to enforce with the primary meanings. WK continually updates the content to better enforce transitivity memorization. It’s much, much better than it was even a few years ago.
If you’ve a specific request that they not accept “to roll” as an acceptable meaning for 転がす, please submit a request to help@wanikani.com. But I flat guarantee that there are a large number of users who will argue strongly that it should be accepted.
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Another fun fact: photographic exposure settings for photos of the full moon are the same as settings for daylight.
They probably need more mnemonic stuff to help with transitive/intransitive stuff (e.g. to copy vs. to be photographed, I think they say if you photograph someone without their consent you may be SUed [may have got that wrong way round as usual] and also point out the exceptions when ERU endings vs. SURU endings break the rules).