Mistakes... like "shikken" (shiken), or "a recent day" (for konomae, which is the other day/recently)

WaniKani API And Third-Party Apps
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So I’m a level 10. But I have leeches that stick around forever from much earlier levels. When I make a mistake on them but I feel like it’s very close and essentially the same, I’ll sometimes rage quit wanikani, reopen it, and redo the card. I know many or most mistakes are real mistakes and I don’t do that. But… well anyway, I’m curious. For the two examples in my subject heading, would you say it’s OK to eventually cheat past them somehow and move on? Like, yeah I know shikken is not shiken, but I pronounce it the same way and I just want to move on from some of these things I never remember, and use the time and energy on new material and other forms of study besides wanikani. And same with my other example “a recent day” that combine elements of correct answers but aren’t accepted. Anyway, my questions are:

  1. Is this terrible, to “cheat” them through, and should I just allow through them and let these leeches recycle forever?

  2. If it’s not that terrible, then can you advise me about a better way to handle it then what I’m doing, the page refresh? For reviews, I use the wanikani site (this) in chrome, the wanikani page in safari browser, and also Tsurukame app when I have no internet connection. And also, I have no computer skills, I wouldnt know how to use a script. (I already have “allow cheating” turned on in Tsurukame. I see there’s an option for “allow synonym”. So maybe I could use that to enter close-answers as acceptable?) Anyway, thank you for reading this long winded post.

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How about trying to pronounce shikken correctly? It is shik.ken with a doubling of the k sound as opposed to shiken where the k sound is not doubled. This will destroy the feeling that shiken is the same as shikken which seems to be the root of your problem.

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If your goal is to be able to speak Japanese, then you might want to pay attention to this aspect. If you are pronouncing them both the same then one of the other is being pronounced incorrectly. There is a difference.

I know you mentioned not having used any add-on user scripts, but it is quite straight forward to do. There is an a thread here on the forums that provides a pretty detailed step-by-step guide and questions in that thread will usually be answered by someone pretty quickly.

For the cases of the English translation, adding a custom synonym is simple and easy way to handle things. Of course, it is up to you as to what is “close enough” and also your end goal may influence your decision. I.e. do you want or need to produce Japanese (write or speak) and want to do so properly/correctly and ensure you are clearly understood.

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Thanks a lot, Ill look into that thread. And I’m not interested in writing Japanese, but I am interested in and do speak it to some degree. When I speak I’m understood but tapping out the romaji for certain words can be troublesome, just cant remember it even if my pronunciation is OK. Thanks.

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I do actually pronounce it correctly, as confirmed by the Japanese person sitting next to me. But I still forget how to type it, along with a few other words. Thanks.

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Please don’t take our responses the wrong way, it’s human nature to react to someone trying to be helpful as though it’s criticism.

You said originally that you pronounce shikken (しっけん) and shiken (しけん) the same way, but your friend says that you are pronouncing “it” (presumably 試験?) correctly?

The problem is that 試験 (しけん, test) is utterly different than, say 執権 (しっけん, regent to the shogunate), an admittedly less common word that’s pronounced very differently.

This is extremely common in Japanese, and natives don’t even think of these types of words as similar. A more common example is 来て (きて, come) vs. 切手 (きって, stamp).

Even thinking that shiken and shikken are similar is very much like a Japanese native thinking that “law” and “raw” are similar.

Re: cheating, there are different views (you’ll have to choose what is right for you).

My view was that I paid for an SRS to make it efficient to practice items that I find difficult more often than those I find easy. The ONLY way the SRS knows if I find something difficult is if I make a mistake. Mistakes are a very important part of the process.

Nobody argues that cheating when you really didn’t know the answer is extremely bad for long term retention (not the priority for some).

More nuanced is cheating for typos, etc.

Personally, I made a lot of typos when I used WK on a phone, so I moved to a real keyboard and computer around level 5 or 6. Afterward, I didn’t worry about occasional typos and such: maybe a silly mistake means I ultimately see an item nine times instead of eight before burning that item. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a nit.

And if I’m making the same silly mistake often, I WANT to practice it more!

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Thanks. That was indeed what I was aiming to point out, but I guess I did not do a good job of it. These sorts of subtle (and quite hard for non-natives - at least for me) to both distinguish when I hear others and to use when I am speaking differences are a source of much of the corrections I get from those I interact with. Like ここ and 高校. Sound very similar to me, but very much are not the same thing.

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“You said originally that you pronounce shikken (しっけん) and shiken (しけん) the same way, but your friend says that you are pronouncing “it” (presumably 試験?) correctly?” – Yeah, indeed that’s what I meant. In any case, I hear you, if errors in the typing to translate into pronunciation errors that not a good thing, of course I agree. But I’ll also say that in Anki-world, there are leeches that disappear for a reason. At some point if a word is taking too much time, energy or aggravation, if it’s popping up an inordinate number of times and just not getting cleared, it’s arguably better to set it aside. For whatever reason some things don’t stick for some people through one study method or another and immersion will take care of it… as long as one hasn’t already been put off the method or even the language entirely by said annoyance lol.

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That does apply to some words for sure but what you have described sounds like you have difficulties with double consonants and not the word itself. My 1st language also uses them a lot so it was easy to pick up and in my 1st language they are essential to get right to be understood. I’m going to make a big assumption that it’s even more important in Japanese due the language’s sheer amount of shorter words.

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No, it’s not. Unfortunately WaniKani doesn’t let you suspend leeches, so the best you can do is kick them to a higher SRS tier so that they stop bothering you temporarily. Just repeating the same mistakes over and over again if the word won’t stick is not productive.

On the other hand, and as the others have said, you need to pay attention to the doubled consonant sounds, it is an important feature of the language. Same thing for long vowels.

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