Although it wasn’t the point of the thread, I just wanted to say it was heartening to see people sharing their experiences and supporting one another, as well as calling out ableism and seeking to educate others @Yoti @HopeWaterfall @tenizey @KJules @HelixApothecari @RebBlue 
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It was at the hearts of hearts of it and every time someone asked WaniKani to implement a skip and an undo button. The fact that if you‘r not an IT person or IT adjacent it all floats in the realm of ableism and that is what WaniKani been missing the entire time - everyone here want to learn Kanji, and vanilla WaniKani has an ableist and judgmental point of view on learning. I don‘t need you to educate me about time management or typos, I just want to learn kanji and if I only have lets say 20 minutes on a train, don‘t exclude me. If I‘m a clumsy typer, or can only use a phone don‘t exclude me. If I don‘t want to use scripts or can‘t and just want to use what I payed for, because you‘re not libeled for it - don‘t exclude me. If I don‘t go on the forum, and have no clue there are scripts that would make my experience smoother - don‘t exclude me. The fact that they did let people use their api and they play this childish game of - this is not our way, it scripts and we are not responsible for it laughable - it is still your app and your api, you‘re just being too proud and too ableist that those requests are about basic usability and not about cheating.
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I feel like that post kinda highlights my exact point. I don’t necessarily believe that OP fully judges their life success by Japanese and I don’t necessarily think they’re lying either. I just don’t know. I personally have feelings that I feel like their post accurately describes, hence the “relatable”.
I see your point though. Overall I think I’m an optimist. If someone tells me that they’re a piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to live and another person tells me they’ve found the love of their life I think I’m going to be equally skeptical of both. But I think I would be more vocal about my skepticism to the person who had a negative take because thats the feeling I would be happiest to see change were it not true. Whereas if someone felt really positively about something I wouldn’t want to rain on their parade unless I felt pretty certain it was for their own benefit for some reason.
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So true! Can we stop with the endless repetitive jokes about @koichi? It was funny the first few times, maybe the first 10, 50, 100 times, but by level 13 it’s become extremely irritating!
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That’s more about you than about the other person, and in the extreme example you gave showing your skepticism is the most unhelpful thing you can do it will just reinforces that person negative feelings about themselves. What would help is asking that person - what happened to you, and that is only if you are capable of being extremely uncomfortable and non judgmental. Most people can’t, that’s why people go to therapy… so I’m not saying it’s your duty. But the fact that you use that example willy-nilly is again ableist, and a more appropriate response would be to educate yourself understand that hey that person might be suffering from some sort of mental health issue and maybe I don’t know enough to say anything and what I do say will only be harmful.
When I read your first comment here I was totally agreeing with you but then I went and read @nikuotoko op again and again, just trying to understand where they come from. Not feeling, relating or anything - just reading comprehension. So yeah it was (sorry @nikuotoko) more of a venting than a concise feedback, but
at first look it seems like the correct idea, however - if that was the absolute truth there would have been only vanilla WaniKani and no one would need any scripts whatsoever. Saying “you’re using it wrong” and putting the onus solely on the user is again touched by ableism and also a weird stance when you want to make money - inclusion makes money…
Having a skip and an undo key can do wonders to accuracy rate, and it is more about time management, if I don’t remember something at first and I skip it I usually remember it when it pops up again later in the same review session (I use Tsurukame so I use those scripts).
It’s a flaw in the app - when you do a test on paper or even online you can jump between questions and answer the easy ones first, you can also erase and correct yourself, it’s better time management than the way vanilla wanikani works. So yeah, while there’s much to say about the learner responsibility, and there is, it doesn’t exempt WaniKani from reassessing their stance and see perhaps they should move further from the ideal and easy costumer to what my costumers really need in order to achieve our shared goal which is learning kanji.
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This is not what I was talking about at all. This all started in response to somebody saying they work 12+ hours days and study at least 2 hours of Japanese on top of that, and therefore anybody can.
That bit in bold is what I was arguing against. Not everyone can study/work to that extent. And implying that they could can be hurtful.
Also, I don’t get your thing about not believing people when they talk about their own brains. I’m not sure you mean what I mean, especially with the example you gave.
To try and make this as clear as I possibly can, examples:
If someone says “I’m a piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to live” then yes, you don’t have to believe that. Help them if you can / know how.
If someone says “Sometimes my brain tells me I’m a piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to live” there is no reason to not believe them. You are not in their brain. They know what their brain is telling them better than you do. Don’t try to convince them their brain isn’t telling them that.
If someone says “I can’t see well without my glasses” there is no reason to not believe them. You are not in their eyes. They know how well they can see better than you do. Don’t try to convince them they could absolutely see well without their glasses if they just tried harder.
If someone says “I cannot walk more than a couple meters without falling” there is no reason to not believe them. You are not in their body. They know whether or not they can walk better than you do. Don’t try to convince them they could absolutely walk fine if they just stopped being lazy.
If someone says “I can’t study kanji for two hours everyday because I get headaches” there is no reason to not believe them. You are not in their head. They know what the headache feels like better than you. Don’t try to convince them it’s just because they prioritise watching YouTube more than studying.
If someone says “I can’t study kanji because it’s too hard” there is potentially room for discussion and encouragement. But it may also be the previous case so don’t be dismissive.
Also, people are not required to disclose their issues. You don’t always get to know the reason why a person says they can’t do something, you just have to respect that they know their limits better than you do. It comes across as extremely arrogant to say you won’t believe people when they talk about themselves until you’ve gotten to know them “well enough” to decide whether or not they are right.
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It also indicates that they are someone I will never allow to get to know me well enough where they feel comfortable passing the judgement on me. 
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Right, so it sounds like what you’re saying is that I should learn more about the person. I mean, generally speaking I totally agree. It’s hard to always know when there are some deeper mental health issues lurking behind peoples decisions, thoughts, etc. but when I get a hint that that may be the case I agree that learning about them is the first step. Whether or not I’ve always done this perfectly (or have done a good job understanding even when I try) is up in the air, but I agree its the most sound approach.
I think this is kinda making the same leap that @GrumpyPanda made that suggests that just because something is “suboptimal” does not mean that any level of poor performance is going to be entirely the fault of that one suboptimal aspect. Its possible for multiple things to be bad. In the case of a 50% accuracy on WK I think we’re ignoring the elephant in the room of the users study routine to point fingers at a potentially suboptimal srs interval. Its possible to make the claim that suboptimal intervals can reduce your accuracy and suboptimal intervals cant be the majority reason why you have 50% accuracy.
I didn’t say it was. Sorry if it wasn’t clear but none of my messages were actually directed at you or anything you said.
Right, I’m saying I would believe them in that case.
I know, that’s exactly what I was getting at.
Yeah, I mean thats really got nothing to do with their perceptions of their capabilities and pretty objective in measure so I don’t think I would.
Look man, I’m sorry if I said something that upset you. I’m really sensing a lot of hostility and argumentation that doesn’t feel like its actually opposing any beliefs I have. I think maybe I just worded some stuff poorly and its making you think we disagree, but it seems like we agree for the most part.
This feels like you just rewording my post more negatively and slapping a negative label on it. I was genuinely looking for some constructive insight (which I think @2tea gave a pretty good perspective to think about) but this post feels like you’re just trying to put me down for my opinion rather than addressing why you disagree with it.
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If this was true then there would be no need for therapists and psychologists.
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When you’re constantly bombarded with hostility toward the platform in these forums, it’s easy to overlook the legit issues some folks might have with the vanilla experience. But the “vanilla WK is unusable” crowd don’t often strike me as advocates for those with real accessibility challenges. They just want it to work more like Anki and are very vocal about it… despite buying a lifetime membership to a service that didn’t bill itself as Anki.
I’m leaning toward “giving up” my vanilla run, but without any issues or complaints or malice. Just feels like I’m reaching a point where wading through queues is not the best use of my time (undo or no undo).
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What experience have you had of therapists and psychologists claiming to know your internal experiences better than you? I think you’re misunderstanding what those people do. Their whole body of work is based upon the reported experiences of their clients/patients; they can’t crawl inside their brains to witness it first hand.
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It’s funny because this discussion is very reminiscent of what used to be a source of tension between my girlfriend and me: it’s very easy for me to pick up habits and build a routine. If I decide that I want to do 10 lessons every day then I do it. If I decide that I want to read every day, then I do it. If I decide that I want to go to the gym thrice a week, then I do it. That makes it fairly easy for me to study languages in the long term.
My girlfriend is not like that. She just can’t build a routine that way. Every action is a conscious decision, not something she does because “that’s just the way it is”. I couldn’t understand that. For me that’s just laziness and lack of discipline. But at the same time I know she’s not lazy, she in fact works more than I do overall most days. So why can’t she just, you know, just do it? Decide that you want to do X every day, and then do it.
I still don’t understand, but I now understand that I don’t understand and I should just respect that other people work differently. Understanding and respect are two different things but I think most of us tend to equate them in our judgements and actions.
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No, what I’m saying is that you need to learn more about the world and yourself in it. That in a world of 8 billion humans and going, there are many ways of life, many ways of thinking, many ways of operation and many different needs. What you know and familiar with is not an absolute truth for every human, it’s true for you and many others like you but not all humans. You don’t have to know or deeply understand everyone you interact with, it is however helpful to have a mind set where you acknowledge that some people have different needs and different ways to achieve their goals, and my way or the highway is so anti learning and anti education.
Oh I didn’t ignore it I yes and it which is totally different (go and read my entire answer again, there are two instances where I acknowledge your point) I agree with you that in many cases this is the solution or part of the solution, in my case it was both.
The thing is, when it comes to crowd that uses wanikani it’s very diverse, the idea that people that learn Japanese are all the same is just an internet judgmental meme, and people have different amount of time they can afford to put into learning a foreign language, it’s just a fact, and yet some people put moral judgment on who deserves to learn a foreign language based on their free time… five minutes less thanks to skip and undo button can make a huge difference for those people. Why exclude busy people from WaniKani? Again that’s very anti learning and anti education.
I do hope it did help you understand my point a little better. At the end of the day changing the way you phrase from
In my opinion / in my experience when 50% accuracy exists it is usually a learning method problem.
Makes it less abrasive and gives a little more respect to the op, even if you don’t have it, fake it, it’s after all an educational adjacent forum and people try to do their best the way they could.
You can also read what @simias wrote it might give you a different perspective.
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Here’s my two cents on skip and undo. Skip seems pretty reasonable. I suppose you can use it to look up the answer, but you’re only cheating yourself. The problem with a huge review queue is that say you have time for 20 reviews, but you have 100. You can just skip a few. The issue is that usually you have to answer each question twice, so if you only want to do 20 reviews, you may very well up answering 60 questions first.
An alternative to skip is a way to select how many reviews you want. So a separate “select amount” button and then you type in 20. Maybe in the settings you can set how it prioritizes what it gives you. (Most overdue sounds like the best default)
With undo, I am not convinced. A mistake is a mistake. A typo is a typo. It’s just as wrong in a review as it is anywhere else, and if a spell check fixed it for you, you might not even realize it happened. Plus, it really wasn’t a typo, because you have to actually enter the answer. You have as much time as you want to read over what you’re entering. If these typos often happen, perhaps you are trying to move too quickly.
(When I’m answering those apprentice → guru questions, I make super sure there are no typos, because I know it’s going to set me back 3 days otherwise! It’s happened to me. I’ve learned my lesson.)
I can’t imagine taking an important test, being graded on it, then afterwards the teacher says, you can undo any of the answers you got wrong, for whatever reason you can internally justify. I mean… okay, I guess. You’re just cheating yourself.
…since I just said “you’re just cheating yourself” twice, I suppose that means I support it even though I really don’t agree. Make it an option in the settings that defaults to off, with perhaps a message about why it should stay off.
This reminds me of accessibility options in Celeste. It says the game is supposed to be hard, and this is how the creators thinks it should be played, but here’s some options anyway, in case they help you.
It takes a lot of guts to create something and then give the people tools to use it in a way you do not agree with, because they think it’ll be better for them that way.
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I used to think this way about the undo button, but I changed my mind. Ultimately this isn’t school, and who cares how people use it. It may be that it won’t help them learn if they can undo mistakes, but then again this isn’t school and people can make their own decisions based on their own circumstances without the crowd telling them what’s right and wrong. Maybe that’s actually what this whole thread comes down to: people can’t really dictate other people’s learning methods, because learning is always a very individual thing. We can only share what works for us, and people can listen or not listen.
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Couldn’t have put it better meowself! 
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In response to complaint #2: I like the app “TsuruKami”. It usually knows when it’s just a typo, has an oops button, (and even works offline). After doing my reviews, I hop over to the WaniKani site and do my recent mistakes twice. This has really helped get my %right go up instead of down. TsuruKami also shows everything when I get it wrong, which for some of us, is more convenient.
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But somehow you can imagine taking an important test, being graded on it, choosing the 20 questions out of the 100 questions that you want to answer, skipping the 80 you don’t want to answer, and the teacher says, you can answer the 80 you skipped some other day. If you think this is school (which it is not), at least be consistent.
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I mean, on tests, if the teacher grading it is human, they’d probably not count a typo or a synonym of the meaning of a word as a wrong answer anyway. As for typos for readings, if it was a written test then the typos wouldn’t happen as much in the first place. After all, it’s a lot harder to accidentally write the wrong letter (although it does happen, ie in dyslexic people) than it is to accidentally type the one next to the one you meant (or, you know, just not realize that you switched your keyboard from azerty to qwerty or smth like that).
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I never said it was like school, it was just an example. You should have quoted the part where I said you were just cheating yourself. You also didn’t quote the part where I said a better solution would be to just have a selection option where you could just say give me 20 questions without skips.
You really can’t say anything here without people finding an excuse to attack you, can you.