Since wanikani doesn’t teach all Joyo kanji, just the kanjis Koichi found helpful is there a plan to add the missing kanjis? They say if someone know 2500 kanji, it makes him to read very fluently. It’s ok that I can learn from Anki. But i didn’t find a deck for “missing from wanikani kanjis”. Wanikani forces to learn these kanjis, because it has a system that makes it like a role playing game. If you are level 50 in MMORPG it means you increased a number in a fantasy world you can’t do anything with it in real life you wastes your time, if you are level 50 in wanikani it means you actually became more clever in real life, that’s the charm of the program. I really want to learn more kanji than 2000. How can I learn more kanji, how can I force myself like wanikani did. Anki doesn’t force me, it doesn’t have a strict structure like WK and no levels and turtles and such 
idigtech has a nice reference for the missing Kanji. Also has some nice charts about general coverage compared to JLPT and newspapers. So, if you want to start a deck…
There appear to be 173 missing Joyo Kanji:
[quote]G6: 蚕
G9: 挨 曖 宛 畏 萎 彙 壱 咽 淫 韻 畝 謁 怨 艶 旺 翁 臆 虞 苛 箇 瓦 楷 潰 諧 蓋 骸 柿 嚇 顎 葛 褐 釜 棺 玩 毀 畿 臼 嗅 斤 僅 惧 串 窟 薫 詣 憬 稽 桁 繭 舷 股 錮 勾 侯 梗 喉 慌 乞 痕 墾 挫 采 塞 柵 刹 拶 肢 恣 嗣 摯 賜 餌 璽 嫉 爵 腫 儒 袖 羞 愁 蹴 遵 抄 宵 硝 詔 拭 薪 腎 裾 凄 醒 斥 戚 煎 羨 腺 詮 箋 膳 繕 塑 遡 曽 痩 踪 捉 唾 堆 但 綻 緻 逐 嫡 衷 嘲 勅 捗 朕 逓 諦 溺 填 妬 痘 謄 頓 貪 弐 匂 捻 罵 剥 氾 汎 斑 頒 眉 膝 肘 附 訃 賦 丙 蔽 餅 璧 倣 貌 頬 勃 昧 冥 麺 耗 冶 喩 妖 瘍 窯 沃 拉 辣 濫 吏 慄 侶 厘 弄 楼 籠 麓[/quote]
There’s a time you should leave your master and walk your own path. I’m sure you developed some autodiscipline along the way with WaniKani. Now it’s time to learn those kanji by yourself. You don’t need someone to force you do it, do you?
I’ll challenge you to learn 1 kanji every day for the next 173 days and to post to this thread your every day progress so we can control you.
I would also point out that WK never forced you. It just helped you to establish good conditions for yourself to learn. You can do the same thing by yourself with WK, you just need to do your best, be clear and realistic about it, and not doubt yourself. Best of luck.
PS Hinekidori made a WK-style mod of Anki that is pretty out of this world and has tons of material. You should go through the archives and try it…
I never understand why people post things like this/believe this. The same reasoning is used for not continuing to have more advanced textbooks. As an esl teacher, I think that you need to bring in authentic material but it never hurts to continue to review grammar/continue to have more advanced materials. If wanikani works and generally speaking is subscription based, my opinion is that new content -should- continue to come out. If you get to a point when you don’t want to use it anymore or want to change over to something else, great good for you, but if from nothing but a business standpoint, more content should come out to keep high level people paying
I agree. I think 10-15 more levels would make WaniKani really complete since it would flesh out missing N1 kanji and other frequently used kanji.
The current solution would be WKnai, although I tried to create INFINITY by concept of 30-40 kanji per level → vocab → after completing vocab; more 30-40 kanji. Gross out 17 levels.
Then, let’s say it depends. It’s OK to add more levels as well as it is to change over to something else. In other words, it depends on the user.
As for me, I expect to learn (some) advanced, rare or weird kanji as fast as I need them for my own specific purposes. I’m talking about specific words related to my field of work and stuff like that. Also, I have the feeling that this advanced and more specific vocabulary is going to be easier to learn in Japan totally immersed in whatever context I spend time in.
Of course, I understand that there’s lots of people loving the learning system WaniKani is based or built upon. I love it, too. But I’m not interested on relying on that forever because I see WaniKani as a good place to start. Actually, I see it as the best place to start. But I also think that it isn’t a good place to stop. For me it’s an amazing tool to help acquire an unbelievable amount of necessary knowledge in a very effective way. It’s like a train that takes you from zero-knowledge to the level every Japanese is at after High School. And it goes fast!
However, I also feel I should check other tools and go outside to the real world and feel frustrated like a Japanese when a rare kanji or word appears in the wild and be able to search, guess, and learn its meaning like a Japanese.
And this how I feel about WaniKani as a learning tool and my approach as a learner when it comes to learn advanced or rare words. But I totally respect and understand viewpoints and approaches from other learners. I prefer to refer to ourselves as learners but from a bullshit developer plan we’re just “users”.
But from your response I understand you’re more concerned about the other side: the business standpoint. Why? I think it’s quite bold to underestimate business decisions made by Tofugu or the WaniKani development team. Of course, I’m sure they thought about the possibility of including even more additional levels and I’m also sure there’re lots of considerations they had in mind to not do that. I’m not going to guess and list here all the reasons I can think of for not adding additional levels… I just think that all decisions made by Tofugu towards WaniKani are always user-learner-oriented. So If I have to find an explanation for this or that from a business standpoint concerning Tofugu I’m more inclined to think that they build WaniKani with users, learners, people in mind rather than money. And maybe that’s the reason WaniKani is the best tool for learning kanji and with a good work or a good product the benefits are granted.
I decided to download WKnai to see what it was, even though I have hated Anki in the past, and this is not off to a fabulous start. The first two kanji I got are 羞 and 捻, which are not kanji in the top 2500 most frequently used kanji, despite being listed as N1, presumably only for the reason that they’re jouyou kanji. That does probably lead to the question of why they’re jouyou kanji, but whatever.
My biggest thing is I hate having to hit the god damn buttons after I submit an answer. If I get it wrong, that should default to the “Again” button and if I get it right that should default to the “good” button. How do I make it do that, because if I can make it do that it will make me stop wanting to throw Anki across the room, maybe.
Oh, and the other thing is, why am I being shown the kanji like it’s my first review and I should already know them. Shouldn’t the first thing I see be like the WK lesson?
Indeed, odd thing about Anki is, there is no ‘lesson’.
So, I treat the first review as a lesson, and even if I have finished the review, I might do “Custom Study Session” to drill even more.
Furthermore, I hate the concept of 20 new cards per day in Anki.
To me, Anki default settings aren’t that good.
Well, I’m glad we agree that there’s plenty to complain about, but seriously about the buttons. Can’t I do something about that.
You do not need to have 20 new cards in anki.You can change that amunt in settings
I agree with you for the first part.
Regarding the business half:
Given that Koichi has no background in pedagogy that I know of, I find it interesting that you think that this decision was pedagogical. In fact, if anything, I would say that Koichi has failed pedagogically, because an educator (which I am) always can add more content or create more materials for their students. I am grateful for wanikani, but it should continue to expand. If you’ve got your own interests great, there should be decks related to typical advanced student kanji interests. If your interest is Japanese business - a set of levels of kanji and vocab going that way for people above Level 60. Or you know, if your interest is learning basic Japanese names (which he’s already created lists for that you can buy separately) you could go into that. Having more choice after level 60 is fine rather than a single stream - something like what Memrise kind of does, but there are a lot of ways to continue to build content that would help advanced kanji learners who like the tool.
Similarly, as I articulated, it is a subscription based service, which in nature implies that more is coming out. The other subscription service, the grammar one has additional content that comes out, you could make the same argument that at a certain point you don’t need that and yet, it seems to continue to get more. I should mention that I am a lifetime member of wanikani, so I don’t really care whether more comes out or not, but if I was a subscription user, it would be possible to get way more money out of me. Even as a lifer, if more content came at a price, I’d pay it.
if you don’t buy that argument, then I’d use Eto Eto as an example of Koichi failing to understand applied linguistics/pedagogy as it relates to advanced students. It is an almost 3 year long disaster in planning or recognition of just how complicated developing materials for advanced learners is…
To be honest, this comes as no surprise, given that scholars dedicate their whole careers to applied linguistics. For someone who has no background in that and given what a small team he has, he and his team have done a fantastic job and managed to create one of the most popular tools (and I would argue one of the best), but I have an advanced degree in applied linguistics and am an expert in Language Learning and Technology. There are many places it is evident that wanikani was not created by someone with a background in applied linguistics and it is evident that wanikani has ways it could grow.
it is naive to say that there is no way to add more kanji/vocab in a manner that would be beneficial to advanced students and their varied interests.
Software as a Service is a business model. This is different from a magazine subscription. Subscription in this case provides access to the product (60 levels of kanji and vocab). I prefer to buy a product but this is the “in” thing now. Microsoft Office works this way as does the Adobe Photoshop software, for example.
Maybe. Or maybe it’s taking so long for other reasons. Or more likely: for multiple, varied reasons.
People also dedicate their whole careers to mastering how to cook. That doesn’t mean one can’t make delicious food if they don’t have an advanced degree in culinary science or 20 years working as a chef.
But I’m all for new content and features on wanikani. 
[EDIT: And we did just get the nice, shiny forums!]
Yeah… it’s like… just because you have to pay a monthly fee to the gym doesn’t mean they’re going to keep adding new machines and programs.
That being said, they’ve said they’re going to add more names at some point (they already have the nanori reading section on the kanji item pages). They do have other modifications planned as well, like the coming overhaul to radicals.
Forever is a long time.
I find interesting what you say but I would not dare to analyse or even to give my opinion on possible improvements concerning product engineering, management for business or whatever decisions, right or wrong, a group of talented people made when creating and building a learning tool or developing a product. It has nothing to do with my level of expertise in that specific field; the thing is that I respect too much the time an energy that The Magnificient Seven and many other collaborators put along many years to invent, plan, develop, build and continuously improve WaniKani. In other words, if I find myself thinking that some functionality isn’t good or doesn’t make sense, first I think if it doesn’t make sense to me, and second I think if it’s even possible that I found a problem that the talented people committed to build WaniKani didn’t think about before me. Of course, I’m talking about changes and improvements concerning WaniKani core specifications or even the business model. I’m too cautious not to be thoughtless. It’s like thinking “Why Amazon has this sidebar on the top-right corner in its front-page?”. Well, even if it’s an annoying sidebar and I don’t get the reason for that the thing is that it’s f***ing Amazon and I’m sure that 30 people on a round table discussed this right-corner sidebar thing for 8 hours to finally decide it’s the best thing to do for some reason I don’t know.
As for the team building WaniKani and Tofugu, I know nothing or very little. As a company, or collective, or group of people building a learning tool all I can talk about is about my own experience on their products and their online presence. As for Koichi, I don’t know and I don’t care about his background but I’m quite sure that WaniKani, Eto Eto and everything Tofugu are built by an obsessive and perfectionist nerd clever person with excellence in mind. I feel that Koichi isn’t comfortable with mediocrity and that’s enough for me. I kind of understand many functionalities or experiences in WaniKani built based on this approach but that’s pretty much all. I don’t know exactly what are the reasons behind WaniKani ending on level 60 but I’m quite sure that WaniKani team discussed long about that. Maybe they find inconvenient to add more kanji, or maybe it’s because they don’t have the financial resources to write more lessons, or maybe it’s because they’re too lazy. Seriously, I don’t care. But I’m confident to say that it’s not a failure whatsoever but part of the plan or at least a decision made by a group of people who did some research, discuss about that and finally decided to stop WaniKani at level 60. My 5-min product development and how-to run a business analysis as a individual has nothing to add to hours of test and failure and discussion of a whole committed team of talented people.
As for Eto Eto, I’m not familiar with the story. I once read some apologies for not realising on the date promised or for taking so long or for changing the course of the product and go back to the beginning. Whatever, from my point of view the failure here is about user expectations or client expectations or promising something you couldn’t deliver on time. Personally, I’m looking forward to try Eto Eto even more after this delay thing because from that letter by Koichi apologising I get that they simply reconsider the whole tool and the whole plan to build a significant tool way better than any tool currently available. Instead of continue with the old plan and fulfil expectations or hype they preferred to reconsider the whole thing and go for the best tool they can build. That’s awesome. Also, I’m not a backer or didn’t contribute financially to this tool so I’ve no reason to be angry, and I’m not in a hurry, too. Personally, I will encourage Tofugu to take their time to continue building an amazing tool and to re-plan again if they feel they’re not working on a innovative and competitive learning tool.
As I said - he’s made the most popular and probably the best tool, so, I’m not sure what you want me to say? Do you blindly follow every company or idea that you like? Or do you recognize that there may be some issues and -that is okay-? you can’t make everyone happy or a perfect tool for everyone. I’m lucky to go a day without an email telling me “you should try doing X” and – I welcome it. There is always room for improvement. There are always going to be people who disagree with the way you do things. Think about writing a paper and asking your friend to read it. Your friend gives you three suggestions. You take two and ignore the third. Nbd.
On top of this – My office does a satisfaction survey every 3 months. There is some feedback we ignore and others that we would never know about if people didn’t tell us. It doesn’t hurt us as a company (or amazon for that matter) to ignore feedback we’ve made an active decision on. Failing to consider changing and growing is a failure though. So, every cycle when I get certain feedback I take a quick sec and think if anything has changed that might back that same feedback we’ve always gotten more compelling than it has ever been. So far no. Maybe no one has ever pointed out a certain idea related to adding more content? Maybe it’s all the same. Either way, it never hurts to be in contact with your consumer.
Regarding eto eto- he promised something too early. He did apologize, but my point was, he would have known, as an expert, not to make the promise he made. The minute I read the announcement of the eto eto timeline, I called it being late because there was simply no way that someone could create enough advanced materials to work satisfactorily in the time frame he gave himself. It’s now been years and counting. it is way harder to make materials for advanced students. This is a simple fact. I am excited about it too. Again, I can like something and constructively criticize it. It’s okay. I told the person in charge a pretty big translation team for Wikipedia (who herself is world reknowned) that she needed to consider X thing in her language work product during a workshop that she was leading in front of a room of people, and she admitted no one on her team had looked at that, and I was right - they did need to do that before releasing their beta. She may have taken that advice she may not have, but either way, no harm done. And I love Wikipedia.
They picked the Kanji based on JOYO (which is decided by the Japanese government) and frequency list, theory is by the time you learn the most frequently used Kanji you will know how to learn Kanji when you find one you don’t know.
This entire site is based off of “Remembering the Kanji” (1985) and Spaced Repetition Software (Anki 2006, the theory goes back to 1967). Wanikani is like an Apple product (and most other successful companies), it took proven learning methods and wrapped it into an easy to use (and pretty) package, it by itself is not original. The amount of effort required to continue development outside of the proven sources isn’t going to be worth it. You make it to level 60? Congrats, but there is a very small chance this tool is going to continue being developed with new (rare) Kanji, for the 1-2% of users that ever even make it there. You run a service to make money, the money is made by growing your user base, the content is already large enough.
Yeah… what percentage of users who have ever signed up for WaniKani have reached level 60? How many of them did so while being monthly subscribers? It’s easy to say that the effort to add 1500 more mnemonics or whatever is worth it, but is it actually going to earn them that much more money?
Even if it was for several years in the future, though, it’d be nice to know they’re considering it. Or adding it as additional content you have to pay for separately (perhaps depending on how much money you’ve already spent getting a discount?)… that would guarantee money, right? Sorta?
Idk. It’d just be nice to hear “yes we’re considering it, but not for the time being” “no, we’re absolutely done” “We haven’t made a definitive decision on expansion at this time.” Type of answer…