I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention it yet, but starting October 1st, iKnow won’t offer the Lifetime subscription anymore. Nothing will change for current lifetime members, so if you were thinking about getting a lifetime plan there, now would probably be a good time.
They will also increase the prices of monthly and yearly subscriptions following the consumption tax increase in Japan. However if you have a subscription already (or subscribe before Oct 1), you will continue to pay the current price if you don’t cancel your plan.
omg thank you for this. i was planning to get the lifetime next january when my yearly subscription ends, but if they’re removing it then I’ll get it now.
This made remember I wanted to try out iKnow so I just did. I didn’t realize it has such a steep monthly cost, though. It seems pretty nice. I don’t really want to add even more SRS/reviewing stuff to my studies, but I love the listening/sentence producing feature. I doubt it’s worth it just for that feature alone. I wish there was something similar for free/cheaper. =/
I don’t know iKnow, so I’m not sure what the “sentence producing feature” is, but Torii is free and has fully voiced example sentences for each item. Also a WK mode so that it doesn’t go over any items already covered in WK.
Could well be that it lacks features that you’d have in iKnow, but I thought I’d throw it out there.
You listen to Japanese sentences and have to type what you hear. Sometimes the whole sentence or single words. They also give you a Japanese sentence and you have to put the words in order. And the third thing I’ve seen during the short trial was an English sentence you had to translate. I’m not sure if there’s more, but I can imagine that these sentences are bound to repeat themselves quite quickly.
Though, now that I think about it… The first part can be covered with supernative.tv, the puzzle thing is, well, I’d rather type it on my own than drag & drop stuff in order.
For those who haven’t used iKnow, one of my favorite features is the variety of approaches to viewing/answering a card.
Example front of cards:
Word with kanji only.
English translation and part of speech.
Sentence in Japanese with one word missing.
Example back of cards:
From a list of five words in kanji, select the correct one.
From a list of five words in English, select the correct one.
Key in the reading of the kanji.
Key in the missing word in the sentence.
For the keying backs, in some cases, a hint button can be used to fill in the first Japanese letter.
There is an option for this (as well as sharing decks, so long as they don’t contain copyrighted material). I haven’t used it, either for creating (I’d rather create decks on a more open service, such as Anki; don’t know if iKnow has import/export support) or consuming decks (I’m sticking with iKnow’s vocab).
Here is a list of the 6000 iKnow vocab separated by WK level. It makes learning on iKnow much much easier: iKnow sorted by WK level
My mini-review: I think iKnow is a well-made, focused, distraction-free tool for learning vocab, that doesn’t require any work on your part to just do it. Recommend the mobile app for studying on your lunch breaks, before bed, on the toilet etc.
Hmmm I wonder if WK will remove this option (lifetime subscription) in the future?
It’s great for a company that’s just starting because you can accumulate capital pretty quickly (i.e. money). But at a certain point they could probably earn more money in the long run if everybody keeps paying every month/year.
More or less the same reason why Apple is now putting more emphasis on their services than their hardware. After all, if people on average buy a new iPhone every 2 years, that’s not as much money as if they buy a new iPhone every 2 years plus pay Apple every month for various subscriptions (iCloud, iTunes, App Store, Apple TV, Apple Arcade, etc.)
I do like to support Japanese learning sites if they offer lifetime. Even when I don’t use my account that much, I figure it’s a way to show my appreciation of fellow Japanese language fans. In the case of WK and iKnow, I’m even using the service on a regular basis.
When I saw that thread before, I didn’t realize these lists are based on kanji learned in WaniKani, not on vocabulary learned. So, for example, the “iKnow-WaniKani Core 6000 Level 1” deck has words like:
一人一人
大げさ
上がる (get nervous)
女らしい
This actually makes the decks extremely interesting for me. I thought they just had WaniKani vocab in them, so I wasn’t too interested (as I get to cover that vocab here). But now that I see it also includes vocabulary that WaniKani doesn’t cover, but using the kanji WaniKani teaches, and organized by level, I’m definitely going to look into these lists. When I want to add more words to review in iKnow, I’ll use these rather than adding the latest core 3000 words (where I just started on iKnow). Many core 3000 words use kanji I don’t know yet, so learning them takes forever. And these WK decks will help me remember on-readings. Win and win.
