Life - This is the obvious one. I have an incredibly busy schedule and I’m just sick of every spare moment of personal time being devoted to reviews. When I started, my schedule was more adaptive to cranking out 200 reviews every morning and another 80 every afternoon. Now that’s hard, so the reviews keep building up and it’s just… a lot right now.
Goals changed - I had a quirky reason for learning Japanese in the first place. I very specifically wanted to read Japanese news and listen to Japanese interviews with Naomi Osaka. Now that she’s less in the spotlight, this is less of a reason. I was also taking karate lessons 3 times a week, but due to reason 1, am not doing that right now either. I frankly don’t know why I’m learning Japanese anymore.
Fun factor is gone - This is the reason I’m putting this in this category. I’ll break this down, because this has a LOT to do with the site changes over the 6 years since I did my first lesson.
The humor: The quirky mnemonics are just way less funny and memorable. I understand that the humor could be offensive, or even worse, not translate to a non-American audience, but damn, I do miss laughing at the mnemonics, or even crying (remember the original friend mnemonic?) Whoever writes them now does not seem to have a funny bone in their body.
This bleeds into the community, which used to bond over a shared odd sense of humor. I just don’t feel that tight-knit in-group stuff as much. It’s more serious now, it seems to me. That’s fine, but I do miss the oddball humor.
The summary page: Oh, even if I couldn’t laugh, I used to at least be able to feel proud. Reviewing my days work with pride, seeing item by item how my vocabulary/kanji were progressing through the levels into finally burns.
The frustration of third party add-ins: So I tried to hack a feeling of pride by at least using the heatmap add in to track overall reviews completed per day. Now this very heat map causes the reviews to lag, so it’s no longer a seamless process to blow through a couple hundred reviews. Have to wait a few seconds for typing to appear… or disable heatmap. Oh, and all my progress… since December 2018… is just “poof”. Even wkstats is nerfed from what it was. Even the ridiculously simple “days per level bar chart” is just no more.
Now the enforced logouts. Just the final straw. I was honestly getting ready to quit anyways, but this just reinforces the sense of this being a job not a game.
Now, I’m not saying anyone else needs to rage quit over this. Obviously Points 1 and 2 are a much bigger reason for unsubscribing than Point 3. But that doesn’t mean that Point 3 doesn’t play a huge role. If I’m going to add something to my busy, stressful life that doesn’t even relate to a direct goal I’m striving for… it had better be fun as hell. This isn’t anymore.
Terrible. I’ve done Pimsleur and this and NHK NewsEasy and Duolingo and Rosetta Stone.
I can make out the general meaning of most NHK NewsEasy articles. That’s about it. I was doing much better when I was reading tennis news every day and creating my own vocab lists on anki/kitsun using vocab I encountered there.
And I stand NO chance with spoken Japanese. If I watch J-Dramas WITH subtitles (English subtitles), I can occasionally go, “oh yeah, I see, yeah she did say ‘juubun des ne’, and that does mean, ‘it’s enough isn’t it’”. But I still need English subs, I am completely 100% lost, even on very common phrases, with only Japanese subs.
Honestly, I just don’t practice enough native material. WaniKani isn’t super useful alone after the first 8 or 9 levels. My level of kanji is just so far ahead of my kana, loan words, grammar, and comprehension that more WaniKani isn’t helping.
“Burning” vocab and kanji, while it feels great, actually hurts because then I’m doing daily reviews on less common words and getting no reinforcement of common words. The fix isn’t “practice your burns using some hack”, the fix is “native content”. And I’m not doing that. And part of the reason I’m not doing that is I’m tied to WaniKani for 90 minutes a day when I really only have 30 minutes a day to practice ANY Japanese. So I’m using 30 minutes as Japanese practice, and 60 minutes as some weird video game entertainment substitute, and the video game part is just way less fun than it used to be. And I really ought to be 30 minutes a day of ANYTHING else other than kanji reviews to make my Japanese better… if I still care enough to try. At this point Duolingo is giving me more useful practice than “Frick, Is this ‘to be sealed’ or ‘to seal something’”?
Yeah, that’s true. The questions are usually in Japanese though, so I was super curious what they were.
Also, she was trying harder to give Japanese interviews before everything fell apart a few years ago. She WAS actively trying, and seeing a video of her studying Japanese in a hallway outside a locker room is the actual moment I decided to learn Japanese myself.
Well you never know, she may actually be in the community here and would not be surprised. I think she is young enough to have another run for sure, but it’s such a cut-throat sport. From what I read she had some conversational level with her family but that is a world of difference with profile interviews
Actually, I benefit from the posts of people who quit almost as much as I benefit from the posts of who make it to L60. Insightful first-hand experience on what to do/avoid. And not limited to WaniKani.
My listening is awful as well. To be fair I think the only way you can get better at listening comprehension is to listen more and more. Unfortunately kanji doesn’t help with that. I’m gonna start the Nihongo con Teppei podcast soon. Its super basic and comprehensible (gotta start somewhere)
To be honest, you’ve made it to level 43 so you must know a whole lot of Kanji. If you feel Wanikani has delivered what it needs to for you and you want to unsubscribe, thats cool. But I hope that you keep the Japanese up, keep reading the news and creating your own anki decks.
You’ve done really well to get where you are, just need to keep at it
I am there with you, I have a lifetime subscription but without it I really would not be renewing it. I am specifically furious about the API Armageddon, that is a shame. It feels this is Nokia, they think they are too big to fail but in a few years nobody will care any more. I used to suggest this app to others, but I do not any more.
I have some hope it will get better, but lets see.
sounds like you got into wanikani a bit earlier than you should have and your decision to use your time in other ways makes a lot of sense. I don’t think wanikani is useful until you are very comfortable reading all the kana, you have a solid grasp on grammar and are familiar with at least the basic vocabulary. I personally have used duolingo for around three years now and got to a point where i was incapable of memorizing any of the kanjis in the sentences because they all looked the same to me, but had no trouble writing entire sentences in kana and understanding the actual words. Just understanding the radicals and basic kanji in the first few levels has massively improved my ability to read and memorize any kanji and looking through the overall content of the first twenty levels it seems to me this is a good tool now to build some more vocabulary outside duolingo (which is quite limited in that regard in my opinion)
Not to be blunt, but do you have to go as far as that about someone explaining their point of view, on a forum of all places, which is one of the best place to exactly do that kind of thing.
I think you are the one being ungrateful about having a wide range of opinions from all places reunited in one place. Just because someone doesn’t go your way doesn’t give you the power of feeling greater than that person. You have no right to tell what one should do, and even less right to judge them.
Lastly, you are doing the same here. And, it’s a forum, it’s literally there for that, but don’t do it in this manner, for the respect of all
Elaborate how it’s a childish reason? The site is a tool for Japanese, if the OP doesn’t like the site why use it when it’s obviously not enjoyable or XYZ?
You’re entitled to having your own opinion, however you do need to recognise that another person has sat behind their screen and written their thoughts and feelings out for you to respond in this way. I hope you find the help that you need.
Subjectivity isn’t the same as objectivity. Why is Wanikani objectively the best?
This is funny because you literally did the exact same thing you advocated against the OP doing.
I don’t think you understand the relationship between producers and consumers.
A firm makes a good or service and the consumers well they consume it. In between that interaction there is an exchange between the good/service and money.
Wanikani hasn’t specifically made Wanikani for them. It’s targetted towards a group of people interested in learning kanji. How is the OP ungrateful when they have been giving their money to Wanikani when the individual person isn’t considered when creating a product for consumers? It’s an exchange not a leech.
OP gives their money which is synonymous with time and Wanikani gives their product which they have put time into.
You don’t know about OP circumstances, for all we know OP could be a coal miner making 2$ an hour working 6 hours in the mines to pay for Wanikani yet you’re the one calling them ungrateful? I’m not saying this is what OP does for a living but you do realise you’re just projecting at this point, right?
Oh I do know time and effort are being put into Wanikani, a great deal in fact. But every piece of art in the world can be considered a masterpiece or not regardless of the time spent by the painter on it.
You calling Wanikani a ‘masterpiece’ is a you point of view, that you try to force onto everyone, and everyone not sticking to your line of sight, should feel shame, am I getting that right?
Also, weirdly enough, Novakacさん talks about Wanikani in itself, the product and doesn’t about any person on the team making it. If you don’t like a painting, doesn’t mean you disrespect the painter. Your point doesn’t stand. He talked about the changes of a product, not the people behind. Plus he explained his situation, and reasons 1 and 2 are unlinked to the quality of the website, and fun, humour is a subjective factor, which he stated in his comment.
Don’t belittle someone else that doesn’t go your way and doing yourself comments without any respect for the person posting their feelings as @JUSTadICE さん said
