Wanikani puts a ton of focus into teaching transitive and intransitive verbs and is very strict about answers ensuring you know the difference. I know the tricks, I’ve seen the Curedolly video half a dozen times, but some are just memorization. And with Wanikani, it always feels like a coin toss when I answer one.
I’ve been having a lot more success with Bunpro seeing the words in sentences with particles around them. The right word just starts to feel right. I progress a lot faster even for words I didn’t learn in Wanikani.
Am I alone or is uncontextual SRS just not doing the trick for people?
SRS anything alone ain’t gonna teach you the things you wanna learn, imo. the best way to get language use straight is to use the language in reading, listening, writing and speaking. WK and BunPro will help make doing those things easier, but they’re not silver bullets, and they’re not by themselves doing the thing (even though BunPro has you fill in blanks in sentences, which I agree is helpful for grammar points)
The trick is in building user synonyms that reinforce the transitivity of verbs. Take, for example, 外す and 外れる. To answer “to disconnect” for both verbs does not differentiate their transitivity. Instead, you add a little bit to your answer to differentiate. For 外す, I’d answer “to disconnect something” as that suggests that the verb is transitive. Likewise, 外れる is “to be disconnected” to suggest that the verb is intransitive. WK is good at building these in for verbs in early levels, but does not include these nuances in later levels; you’d have to add the synonyms yourself.
I completely agree. Mnemonics can help for sure, but when you actually use the language: 1. The context will make transivity clear the majority of the time, and 2. The real way you’ll learn transivity pairs is by listening and using them and eventually developing a sense for what feels right.
For that reason I was usually somewhat forgiving with myself for marking those answers correct on Wanikani. Not because I knew them in all honesty, but because I knew them about as well as I was going to get with just SRS. SRS is great for vocab and Kanji, but not for this particular thing imo.
I think WaniKani is in a difficult position when it comes to transitivity: they don’t want to teach incorrect meanings so they can’t ignore it, but as you point out teaching transitivity this way is rather clunky and inefficient. Transitivity is also not super important if your objective is to bootstrap your reading ability.
I personally certainly used undo scripts to avoid failing reviews when I just made transitivity mistakes.
it’s worth pointing out that WK and basically every dictionary worth its salt provides example sentences too, in case you’re concerned about quality instead of quantity.
Re: @rentalfish That’s neat! I do a lot of reviews on Smouldering Durtles, so I’d only benefit from it ~half the time. I’m also a little worried that, because it uses only one sentence, I’d start associating the sentence with the word instead of just being able to read the word. I’ll keep it in mind, though.
Re: @izzyfizz96 and @simias I think this is the route I’ll take. I don’t like abusing undo, but if I add them to my Bunpro reviews, there’s no long term risk.
One other idea I had is like what @rentalfish is suggesting, but requires you to request a hint to get the sentence. Maybe I’ll look into userscripting sometime.