Yeah, I agree with the other folks here as someone who used to happily recommend WaniKani to people all the time, who now feels hesitant to do so. It was very helpful to getting me where I’m at today, but I think adding kana-only vocab as a mandatory part of the package is just going to dilute what’s so effective about WaniKani and make it an overall worse tool to learn kanji.
I think making this change is just going to make WK’s competitors, like jpdb, seem more appealing to people because they do the all-in-one tool thing more efficiently and in a way that is better tailored to an individual person’s interests. I like WK because it taught me how to learn kanji.
There are things that WK can do that jpdb (and other programs) can’t do as well, like teaching phonetic-semantic composition of kanji (assuming you have the keisei script installed, at least). This script is almost universally recommended here and is backed up by a lot of actual research, and dovetails quite nicely with WK’s established methodology. Why not work to incorporate that into WK instead? That would add a lot of value to the existing product and give people a reason to choose WK over other tools.
With that script, you are learning not only 2,000 kanji + 6,000 or so vocab, but you are also learning how to recognize the components that make up a vast number of other kanji, which you can carry with you once you leave WK and have to learn new kanji on your own. That’s what’s most important, I think. Giving users enough of a boost that they can go forth into the world and learn on their own.
As others have mentioned, fluency in reading what? Different mediums and different genres have different sets of most frequent words. The more you try to cover, the more words you’ll need to add, and the more bloated the program will get. It took me just over 2 years to reach level 60 with the current content. That is a pretty large clump of time!
I wouldn’t want to go any faster than I did because it was a lot of work every day as it is, and even so, I definitely started feeling the fatigue by the end of it. If you add thousands more words, that would extend the time it would have taken me by another year or two. Would I have made it to the finish line if I had to keep going like this for another year? I don’t know. Especially if by level 60, the kana words that are showing up are less and less frequent ones, which might not appear in the kind of media I read and watch.
Some people really like the idea of an all-in-one type of program, and I know that Kitsun has a pretty popular 10k deck, and programs like Torii exist to supplement WK’s vocab, so there clearly is interest in this sort of thing, but for many of us, we chose WK for learning kanji.
We have other methods for learning kana-only vocab which are better suited to our individual study plans, whether that’s learning that vocab through a specific textbook (which all teach things in a different order anyway), or learning it through immersion (which will also teach things in a different order than WK). WK’s implementation of teaching kana-only vocab directly clashes with both of those other methods.
If you make kana-only vocab opt-out, I’ll probably still recommend WK, but if it’s mandatory, I don’t know. I might recommend people give jpdb a try instead because I know that many people have used it successfully, whereas my own path through WK, which was successful, is no longer even an option anymore. How can I recommend a tool if all of my advice for getting through it no longer applies?
I dunno. I was going to leave a pretty glowing recommendation for WK in my level 60 post, but this recent update has got me unsure if the product going forward is even the same product I used to get here, and so I don’t know if I can recommend it anymore, because this is unknown territory, and everything I had to say about it doesn’t apply in the same way that it once did.
face from most of us. Language learning requires multiple resources. This is the one that teaches kanji (and well!) so just be the one that teaches kanji.
; and sometimes I’m noticing it while looking at vocabulary, and then it is suddenly a lot of clicks or searches I have to do to find the right kanji to see if they were in each other’s similar kanji row… (unless the summery page was back, because then I could compare them right there).