I’ve been using kamesame for a bit, mainly for it’s kana vocab and whatnot, and it’s incredibly helpful. However, the app needs a lot of work. Besides the uncountable amount of glitches, and needing to reload the page every few answers because the words are stacking or disappearing completely, they offer absolutely no distinction between similar words. For example, 大きな and 大きい both mean big, and the only thing they’ll offer is “big”, so theres no way to know whether they want 大きな or 大きい. There are tons of other similar examples that are equally frustrating.
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should this not go in the kamesame thread?
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You might want to try KaniWani instead. It’s exactly the same concept, but maybe a little better executed. I haven’t encountered annoying bugs, but the problem of synonyms mostly remains.
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also this is technically untrue? each vocab word is labelled with its part in speech, so for those two examples, 大きい is labelled as an い-adjective and 大きな is labelled as a rentaishi adjective, so you can tell the difference.
link to kamesame thread here if you wanna bring it up with the guy who runs it.
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When I was using KameSame I found it to be very forgiving.
When they ask for “Big (rentaishi adjective)” and you type “大きい” it doesn’t mark it as wrong and instead allows you to try again, even showing a list of other answers you’ve already tried. At least, that’s how it was working when I last used it. This is the reason I preferred it over KaniWani.
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Sorry to hear about your frustrations! For what it’s worth, reports of bugs/glitches are very rare, so if you can take a screencast or screenshots of anything you’re encountering, that’d be a tremendous help for me to get them fixed.
As for the word similarity, it’s important to know that you can add custom english (“Definitions”) and Japanese (“Spellings”) for every word and kanji in the system. That way, if you wanted 大きなto prompt for a different english word (like “Big (na)” or something). Once you’ve created an alternate definition or spelling, you can configure the item to prompt you however you like, so that your custom one is what will appear up top during quizzes.
The underlying reason for this frustration is that WaniKani has a lot of words and phrases that aren’t separate dictionary words (大きいand 大きな are two conjugations of the same 形容詞), but because it’s two WK entries and KS includes all WK entries (including JMDict and KanjiDic), both are present. Don’t study them both if you don’t want to.
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Yes, it’s recommended to reach out to the creator directly if you have issues with a user-created tool or site. There’s almost always a dedicated thread.
Also, I would say it’s important to remember that the person who made this did so out of their own interest and isn’t getting anything in return for it, so the tone of the thread is a little harsh.
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