I just received an email about future updates of wanikani including
A new “Wanikani Updates” tab in the help menu
Mistake forgiveness
Kana only vocab
It was quite pleasant to read about this update for several reasons and I wanted to express my gratitude.
Ever since last update, it wasn’t received well and the forms acted like the sky was falling and the devs don’t know what they are doing. This email is proof that they are not only listening, but acting. It’s not everything we want, but they have expressed to me a few things that I appreciate.
Actually sending an email notifying me of changes instead of pushing a massive backend update with seemingly no warning (expecting us to dig in the beta forms).
Adding new ways for me to see upcoming updates clearly in base UI
Considering to add a way to skip Kana vocab if we don’t care about them or are far enough in our journey to not need them.
They started adding new vocab in the early levels a while back and I remember being quite turned off about it because they dumped trivial vocab while I was in my lv40s increasing my workload. There are a few onomatopoeia vocab that I wouldn’t mind learning, but please spare me from こんにちは and コーヒー.
It’s good that kana will be skippable since some people come to wanikani already conversationally fluent, just wanting to learn kanji. Personally I still lack some kana only vocab so I’m looking forward to it as well:) If it’s 15-20 words at most per level and they release them gradually then I don’t think it will impact the workload too much while still covering a lot:)
They’ve already rearranged the context sentences in earlier levels to only include kanji from that level or below and so they could do the same with kana-only words which would give people a fighting chance to work out the grammar themselves.
I don’t remember opting out of emails. I usually don’t opt out for a program I subscribe to. I will opt out later if i feel that I am getting to many unrelated emails. I will opt out on emails from 3rd parties if given the choice.
It was nice to get an email! I find the new update center suspicious though. Why not make a guidelines style post without comments allowed, use that to host links to updates where people can comment as they’ve been commenting on vocab additions and movement threads? Why not have these things more out in the public forum?
This
I know it doesn’t seem like it, but there are Japanese words out there that don’t primarily (or ever) use kanji. They’re common, they’re useful, they’re written in hiragana or katakana, and you need to learn them to reach fluency in Japanese.
felt patronizing. No duh, but who in the right mind is going to wait weeks to learn basic greetings after having to learn hiragana (and/or katakana) first? If WK/Tofugu want to be a one stop shop to Japanese fluency, they need a lot more than just vocab.
After finding out that Tofugu did make an online textbook but it was never finished and they never bothered to give meaningful updates for years and let it die with the (paying!) userbase bitter and angry, my trust in Tofugu as a company is lost. It’s nice to see a semblance of a roadmap and a hint that they might even make it monthly, but it’s too little and too late. By the time trust might be built up, I’ll probably be only on here for the book clubs and to say hello to POLLs occasionally.
Not doing it would be incomprehensible if they mean to add as much kana vocab as they seem to be implying. They didn’t explicitly state that they’d certainly do it, but I don’t believe they’re so tone deaf that they won’t (recent events notwithstanding)
I think you overestimate how the “community” is representative of the population of Wanikani users. I suspect the vast majority don’t have such a negative take, in fact I would be surprised if they were anything other than appreciative.
