I feel like this comes up every few months or years, so I felt I should keep the tradition going.
A few times, I’ve felt like the system has given me a good answer, even though I don’t feel like that was the case. An example is “Determination” which accepts “Decision”, even though this is definitely not the same thing. Conversely, I’m kind of tired of failing on the radical names which aren’t actually japanese, they’re just made up by the WaniKani team and while they’re sometimes helpful early on, weeks after learning the relevant words, their arbitrary names aren’t really valuable and failing is just a needless roadblock. I end up putting a ton of synonyms to prevent that, (Plate for blood, Gun for Weapon), but it feels like after getting those to guru, I’d be fine never seeing them again and just focusing on the actual words.
I’m on windows by the way so a phone app wouldn’t be a good answer for me in this case.
I’ma stop you right there. Plate 皿 and Blood 血 are different radicals. Yeah, WaniKani can sometimes be a bit arbitrary. This instance, however, is surprisingly not one of those times.
Thankfully, we have Userscripts for this! They are basically third-party additions/modifications created by users to improve their experience on Wanikani and are quite simple to set up. I am personally using Wanikani Double-Check to fix the issue you’re having!
I appreciate that they’re different, but that’s honestly irrelevant for radicals. For words sure, I’ve learned both the kanji and the word, they’re different, I’m fine with that. It’s just the radical specifically which at that point, I just don’t see the point. I’m not learning anything meaningful, I’m not retaining anything meaningful.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ve now installed it, should be very helpful. Also, seems like a cool little system where I might make my own scripts, thanks
By the way, you can also find a lot more in the API and Third-Party Apps subcategory. The pinned post “The New And Improved List Of API and Third Party Apps” has a summarized list of a bunch of them. You can always check it out and see if something catches your eye!
Definitely will do, hopefully there’s something in there that can help me finally memorize “to be lowered” as opposed to “to lower something” and all of the other variations which don’t have universal rules.
Unfortunately, Tofugu has a very, very hard stance against manually marking items yourself, as stated in their article about spaced repetition systems.
Even though Anki has you recall information (which is good), grading yourself requires you to be strict, and I don’t like it. YOU WILL CHEAT, EVEN IF YOU’RE SAYING TO YOURSELF RIGHT NOW THAT YOU WON’T CHEAT .
I kind of really hate this point of view. Expecting the worst of people as a basis. Though me taking the time to write everything I got wrong in a notebook and repeatedly write it out to both practice writing and aid memory had me get talked down by a staff member for “Not really doing SRS properly.” Even though I haven’t had problems learning at all, learning mostly through this site? Within the timings of spaced repetition set up here? It really didn’t sit well with me.
Alongside feeling I learned a few things “wrong” due to false positives from this site.
But with those radicals the meanings are actually the meanings of words!
皿 is plate and 血 is blood.
血圧 is not “plate pressure” (let alone “plate manor” (圧 is not 庄)) – it’s blood pressure!
I understand your position, but for me that article is true – if I’m allowed to grade myself, I would end up cheating
That is what ends up happening when you use scripts that allow you to mark an answer as correct (or even the slightly better option of unmarking it and putting it back into the review queue—unless you already looked at the answer, in which case it’s just as bad). Unless you only do your reviews when you’re overflowing with willpower and patience, you will cheat. And even if you are that person, after enough time, you’ll probably still end up accidentally cheating. I say “accidentally” because it’s a slippery slope.
Maybe at first you only mark an answer correct if it’s a literal typo that wasn’t caught by the system. For example, maybe you had your fingers of one hand on the wrong column and typed “frvidion” instead of “decision”.
Well, after some time, you get used to that being your new normal. Perhaps the next thing you override is when you make an error by using a synonym of the answer instead of the answer. To further emphasize my point, I’ll exacerbate the error here. Let’s say you misunderstand the definition of “reason” used for 理由 and so you think that “logic” would’ve worked, and so that’s what you remember during one of your review sessions. If you mark that correct, now you’ve started to associate that meaning with the word, contorting your understanding of it, and ultimately worsening your understanding of the language. Furthermore, when you eventually learn 論理 and 理屈, you’re going to have a terrible time distinguishing them from 理由.
Then, you eventually make a mistake like what you’re talking about. However, you’ve already skipped the earlier steps in this scenario. By creating these synonyms, you’re essentially already doing what a correction override would do, it’s just that you’ve been doing it the hard way.
This is fundamentally unhelpful for your learning. It’s like making a fire out of only firestarters instead of using any wood because they catch fire easier.
To start with, only a small number of the radicals overall are simply made up. Many of them may have meanings that the WaniKani team made up, sure, but they’re certainly doing that for a reason. And the reason is (my guess at least) normally going to be because it better represents the theme behind many of the kanji that use it or because it otherwise better facilitates some mnemonics they’ll use later.
Lastly, like others have mentioned, it’s not that they’re basically the same. They are different. And this is one of those situations where those radicals are kanji, and those kanji already have meanings that WaniKani played no part in making but instead simply brought over verbatim. One would look 5illy in Engli5h if they 5tarted replacing the letter “s” with the number “5” ju5t becau5e they 5orta look the 5ame.
It feels like everyone is being stopped by my comparing “plate” and “blood”, fine, they’re different, I misspoke when comparing the two, I understand that they’re different kanji. What I should have said was that once in a while in those cases, I’ll type the japanese name instead of the english name, and because they’re radicals rather than kanji, I do get penalized.
Furthermore, I stand by my point was that there’s ton of radicals which aren’t their kanji, like Pope, Squid, Helicopter, Gladiator, Tent, Weapon, suit, Cage, Cape, Sickle, Net, and those are just from levels 8 and 9. Distinguishing them is good, forcing to learn an arbitrary name for them and making you lose progress isn’t.
With that in mind, I’ve gotten what I needed, thank you for Szystedt for being constructive and providing good resources, but I don’t need this Internet toxicity in my life so I’m bailing from this conversation.
I’m sorry, but with all due respect, I don’t see what “toxicity” you are talking about… People just express their opinions, some of which differ from yours…
Anyway,
In that case, maybe, it would be best if @mods close this thread then? It served its purpose…
Perhaps they were mainly talking about my response?
I did have a statement in there that could be construed as an indirect attack on their character (now edited to remove that assumption). And besides that, using the generic you probably makes the majority of it come across condescending, depending on the tone in which it is read.
Pretty sure we can all continue being civil here even while expressing differing opinions.
