“that” works for あれ, I was pleased to discover.
What about それ? Just curious.
THIS. THIS. THIS.
This is how I feel also. I have sent new customers to Wanikani by singing the praises of the crabigator. Now, I have to add caveats like “but there is also all of this very trivial kana included now…and some of that kana is for grammar points so you might make mistakes when you type the meaning…yeah it is going to clog up your reviews and take a lot of time…”
In fact, this happened just recently! I have a friend that has been studying Japanese for a long time but has issues (like most people) remembering some readings etc and asked what I used. Said friend was SUPER frustrated by the meaning choices assigned to some of the kana words (as well as some of the already existing issues wanikani has always had) and all I could do was shrug in embarrassment for even sending them here. Not likely that person will become a paying customer. They may be bringing in total beginners (I still question whether that is true. There are a lot of user unfriendly things that I think could scare away beginners) but they are definitely pushing away people like me who already knew some Japanese and came to wanikani to learn kanji.
Oh look someone with good ideas! This all sounds totally reasonable to me. What they ARE doing is very perplexing, both from a linguistic and business perspective.
Perhaps this is the real problem.
If you look at the original post where they announced this change, it seems like this is pretty much the case: Kana-Only Vocabulary is coming. It’s rather baffling.
And from a digital product management perspective. User research seems to be a totally alien concept to them but instead the developers develop what they like and we have to use it whether we like it or not. As they confirm in the thread linked above, they do this because they’re a private company and can therefore do what they like.
If I wasn’t a lifer, I’d have left already with the first update several months ago. Definitely won’t be recommending WK to anyone anymore after this show that’s gone down this year.
I read through Scott’s announcement again and to be fair, his post is a good one. He tried to cover all bases when it comes to user scripts and 3rdparty apps. However, one thing that got me is the fact that he’s been involved in the Kana-Only track for a couple of months and I’m not sure whether the plans for that feature were communicated before, because then users would have had a chance to provide feedback so the update does not end up dead on arrival as it did now. The post mentions this
Right, but what changed since then? The request for opt-out / opt-in was one of the first that people voiced. I think they would’ve voiced that exact same request a year ago.
Works too I think.
I like 'em. Not like they are asking for a reading, just adds some speed to reviews and some nice easy example sentences to lessons.
I could see thinking having to type ‘that one over there’ or whatever in it’s entirety would be frustrating, but ‘that’ is a default synonym so it’s totally fine.
Only change I would like atm is leaving the listening shortcut enabled at all times instead of only for half the review. If I want to hear the word, I want to hear the word. Don’t make me click. Oh and a shortcut for the male voice maybe.
Yeah it really breaks my flow. I study 10 cards a day since it keeps thingsngoing at a good pace. But starting my days learning with a hunch of blue cards is vexxing. And theyre not even useful one. Ill accept most but taxi hotel apple? Not so much. はい いえ する ect are useful to beginners i think so i would have been able to stand them but useless words I have less patience for since it break my flow and clogs my study, and has little value to a new learner.
Totally agree - them adding all these kana only words to the queue at a point where I can no longer track my progress on WK history because they shut down the API, and I have hit the wall where all my vocab are sliding from master to guru to apprentice, it’s gotten unsustainable and I don’t recognize things anymore and am ready to just stop.
I was more optimistic at the beginning but now I find kana-only vocab frustrating. I’ve already learned these such a basic words from very first chapters of Genki 1. I think that learning words like これ、それ, etc without visualisation and exercises like in Genki would be very painful for a beginner. I also don’t understand why adding word キロ. It’s so obvious! I usually don’t add this type of word to SRS because it’s very easy to learn. One or two times encountering it in a wild is enough. Using all guru, master etc stages for it is total overkill.
I was happy with the update. I thought “Oh thats actually really considerate that we get to learn words that aren’t kanji.” But this is where I draw the line. BROS these vocabs are repeats or worthless. This update also being pushed on me at level 41 when I am just trying to finish this program. Like I am gonna run into 100% of these kana words in the wild or any beginner grammar book. The worst part is my progress is getting stalled for words I never needed to review in the first place. Please remove this update. This is terrible.
Welcome to the resistance, Mr. Strife
All I can recommend at this point is to use Reorder Omega during lessons to filter out the Kana-only ones and hope it won’t be patched out.
Unfortunately scripts don’t play well on Firefox ATM. So I guess I’ll have settle that weekends I might have kana.
I haven’t noticed any particular issue on Firefox with Tampermonkey, what issues are you having?
Pretty much any script outside of pitch accent add-ons not working. I ordered everything properly. I suspect it’s because I’m running firefox portably off a USB. But it’s fine. I have brave portable too and it works there.
I haven’t tried on my desktop yet though. Maybe I’ll try in the morning.
I would really like to see words like サクサク added, whatever those are called.
There’s a bunch and I don’t know any. May be a better choice than ko-so-a-do words
They should teach it by frequency. with the 250 most frequent kanji covers around 60% of the written language. the first 1000 is roughly 90% 1500 is 95% and so on. frequency makes the most sense if they want to make it about reading. which i think would be the correct thing to do