Largely unnoticed, but not entirely 
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I can’t honestly say that I agree with the outlooks shown here.
Ten items added a week for six weeks is an extremely low level of additional content to have to learn, especially when you consider that it’s only learning a meaning. This outrage at being given extra content honestly confuses me. I’m also very much against any suggestion of optional learning paths, I won’t lie.
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So when it is implimented and i’m not using reorder scripts i will have a vocab dumb of maybe 60 depending of which level they were and the following weeks each 10 more… So if i don’t hurry inflate my apprentice items to over 100 with lessons i will never reach the radicals and kanji of the level i need to guru to get to the next level?
In general i think it is a good idea to add common kana vocab, but i think for users in higher levels it puts a serious delay on the leveling up if you don’t use a script to get around the “first vocab lessons from earlier levels” lesson order 
Thanks for the info and the effort though 
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I knew you knew… thanks for keeping it quite 
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Again this isn’t the right place for this but I will answer as I don’t want others to get confused
There wont be a dump of 60, the plan is to publish 10 a week (or there abouts). We currently have a total of 60. More definite information will be provided in the general post next week
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I like the idea of adding kana only vocabulary. For example the vocab word for 今すぐ. Where the meaning has the following. The すぐ part, however, is a new word, meaning “soon.” For those of us that have not studied Japanese much elsewhere and ave very early in our journey, having すぐ as a separate vocabulary word would be beneficial.
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Thanks for the warning - it’s great that you give some warning for changes like these, it makes maintaining scripts much easier! I’ll have to have a look through a couple of my personal scripts to see if they’ll be affected…
Also, you’ll obviously never be able to please everyone, but I’m personally super excited for this! Kana-only vocab is the main thing stopping WaniKani being a more-or-less complete vocab learning tool. I can’t wait! And adding them gradually like you’ve mentioned should prevent anyone being overwhelmed with lessons.
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I remember one of the bigger criticisms of Wanikani was that it didn’t teach common vocabulary and had too much “useless” vocabulary.
I think it’s great to add kana vocabulary to the list. Users who begin their Japanese learning journey with Wanikani like I did will have a much easier time without having to juggle multiple SRS.
I’m also looking forward to memorizing a few words I might have been having trouble with.
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I’m not certain about how I feel about kana-only vocab in WaniKani, given I use it specifically to learn how to read kanji. But, my bigger concern at the moment is this:
Need I remind you what happened with the Summary Page update? There were posts regarding its removal in the development topic which were ignored. Then, there was a great uproar. (Not just due to scripts.)
Check with the general user base before releasing the feature this time.
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^^^
For the most part, this.
While I don’t see it as a downgrade, I don’t see why kana-only vocab is really going to be the next thing rolled out. What happened to eto eto? Why are we getting new content that is not particularly useful to long time users and losing functionality?
It’s cool to see WaniKani go in a new direction, but the lack of transparency is frankly ridiculous. Why not say, we’re changing stuff on the back end in order to add kana only vocab? When this news comes out after all the back end has already been changed, it feels like it’s supposed to be some sort of placation instead. WaniKani roadmap please!
Which features? What will be the intention of these features? Very noticeably, the post linked doesn’t ever say that there will be a page that preformed the same function as the summary page or even be like a summary page. Just very vaguely
We’re working on replacing the functions that people are missing, hopefully in a way that makes your post-reviews studying better than it was before.
That’s not very clear. People complained about a lot of stuff. Are the goals of the functions even decided?
This statement is so confusing. Why not say that the purpose of changing the back end stuff was for this then? Again it just leads me to feel like the back end change and kana only vocab are not actually related and this is an attempt to placate users in some way.
19 Likes
I see that this feature may be helpful if adding custom vocabularies / Kanji is possible; so that custom vocabularies don’t need to have Kanji at all.
Nonetheless, addition of Kana-only vocabularies being good or not depends on the implementation. After all, the original use of WaniKani is to teach Kanji, and greatness of the platform was about using Radical / Kanji as building blocks, making remembering vocabularies easier. Vocabularies outside WaniKani too.
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I feel like unless a “right” place is provided, people will probably keep talking about this wherever is convenient, which right now is this thread.
I also think a general roadmap would be beneficial. Starting discussions about features only shortly before they are live leads to a sense of stagnation and/or disappointment.
I personally like the addition of kana-only vocab, because I want to learn it and have not yet started doing so. I do see this leading to frustration for anyone not in both of these categories though, which may be a significant part of the current userbase.
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Many things.
I will hate evey single kana word I get to learn here. Damn
I know that this feature has been requested by many for some time. Thank you for listening to your community
Ths is really not the timing for this update. Damn
Would it be possible to have it has a minigame, or a separate website?
Like: 6 Levels with ten word each, that unock every 10 WK levels? Thank you
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Yeah, that “right place” is after you dump the feature out on users before talking with them about it, so that you can ignore feedback.
Given that leveling up takes a minimum of a week, this is a dump of 60. I am now entirely convinced that WaniKani devs don’t actually understand their own product…
The minigame idea above actually seems like the best option, if you’re deadset on releasing something kana-oriented. Barring that, at least make the kana-only subjects optional for those of us who are using WaniKani specifically for the kanji education.
Look, I want to be excited for new content, and it’s cool that kana-only vocab, which has been requested on the forums a lot, has been considered. But, after the recent fiasco, I just don’t trust updates from WaniKani anymore.
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I think my general feeling towards this is one of excitement. I like new content, but I am surprised to see it! Does WaniKani intend to broaden its scope further eventually? Does this line up with words you’ll want us to know in EtoEto (if it exists) or something? 60 sounds like a reasonable place to start, but are we eventually going to have a tool here that works us through most of the kana-only vocab as well as most of the kanji?
Either way, content updates are exciting to me. Thanks @tofugu-scott , I really hope the roll-out goes well and gets some people other than me excited 
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I don’t actually understand the negative reaction to this, although it seems like every change has a lot of detractors. I’m all for new content. I genuinely haven’t had the bandwidth to learn kana-only vocabulary on the side, so I’m absolutely all for this.
26 Likes
Very cool feature! I like it!
Don’t know if this is the right place to ask them, but I have two questions…
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Does kana-only vocabulary share a purple background with kanji vocabulary, or is it unique?
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Will kanji vocabulary that is already taught and more commonly written as kana-only have an option to turn into kana-only, or will it remain the same?
Thank you!
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People want kana-only vocab on WK and then get mad when WK announces they’ll be rolling it out soon. There’s just no making some people happy.
I, for one, am excited for this. I find Anki to be incredibly user-unfriendly, and any time I tried an SRS with a more WK-like interface, it didn’t last long because it’s difficult to juggle multiple sites/apps. Not even the amount of reviews, just. remembering the other one(s) and getting myself to use them. It’s nice to have everything in fewer places. Even if we can’t manually add words, each one is still one fewer thing to worry about.
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I can totally agree with many of your points.
I think it’s potentially a very good change. I certainly welcome it, but I think that we seriously need “I know this”/“Skip” button on these lessons. There’ll be lots of people who will not want them in SRS queues and they should have the option to go past them right away (and completely). Heck, I suspect I will want to skip a decent amount at this point.
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Yeah, especially once it gets going that could potentially be a lot of knowns to wade through, depending on the user. Getting 10 at a time is practically nothing, and I certainly don’t mind when I get a few known kanji or vocab in lessons since that’s a little less pressure, but much more than that and it can get boring/monotonous/tedious
1 Like