But these two are taught as kanji words already, no?
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Incorrect. There are 5 users aggressively for or against the kana additions. Everyone else just keeps making threads about it so the same 5 people get involved 
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some people are bothered by it, others enjoy it very much.
some people are here only to learn kanjis, others are here to learn as much as WaniKani can teach to improve their reading skills.
some people think that they donât fit at all, others find that they fit just right.
some people think you should learn these words before starting WK, others think this wouldnât be necessary if WK included these words.
some people think that if you are taking your studies seriously youâll use another SRS for vocab, others would prefer to use just one SRS and not juggle between two or more.
Finally, kana words are not necessarily âbeginner course materialâ so it would make no sense whatsoever to separate them in a beginner course. The ones introduced so far are, but WK should (and hopefully will) introduce many more, including some that are quite advanced and appropriate for people much further down their studies.
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How about some more native reordering options? Something like a âkanji focusâ which puts all kana vocab at the very end of your lesson and review queues regardless of level. Avoids the potential messieness of an opt out button - what happenes to already started items, and when re-enabling it, does it account for the time or is it like a vacation mode? Also as others have mentioned, an opt out or seperate path doesnât feel very âwanikani-likeâ (whatever that is), but we already have the ordering settings and some basic options, why not add some more?
Just an idea iâve not saw yet, though I havenât read through all these threadsâŠ
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You lose less than 3 seconds per kana voc and it doesnât hurt to read words you already know. Itâs like saying reading is pointless if you already know the words that are used in them. Itâs never useless.
And adding a few easy things in the voc releases more dopamine in the brain and stimulates you for learning other things.
Or am I aggfressively for it now? 
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Ignoring the issue of whether kana vocab is a good fit for WK or not, I think WK is just not good at teaching vocab in general, and as such the kana vocab just doesnât work well.
WK is good at teaching kanji because you get some time to familiarize yourself with the shape of the components (or âradicalâ as theyâre called here), then you switch to a full kanji, its meaning and one of its pronunciation, then this is all reinforced by giving you words using these meanings and pronunciations.
But then nothing reinforces the vocabulary. Youâre just given loose words and their meaning out of context, and maybe a couple of (more or less helpful) example sentences under the fold.
That just doesnât work for me. One of the few kana vocab words I didnât know was ăŸăă. Itâs become one of my leeches, and in fact I started auto-passing it with scripts because it just wonât stick. Itâs a word with a bit of an âabstractâ meaning that I find very hard to learn out of context, without something concrete to tie it to. Iâm sure one of these days Iâll meet it in the wild while reading something and then Iâll be able to memorize it.
If Wanikani wants to improve Kana vocab, it needs to improve the way it teaches vocabulary as a whole. Given the state of the website I personally donât believe that the dev team has what it takes to pull it off and just want my kana toggle button to opt out of it.
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The thread was about suggestions for improvements, so Iâll leave this reply here and if you want to continue the discussion it might be good to do it in a different thread so we donât derail
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I will probably be staying the obvious, but the main way to improve kana only words is to add more of them. A lot more. The current 60 are insufficient to make any meaningful impact, and also they are relatively easy so they should be concentrated in the first few levels. More words, and more challenging words, should be added, so that even more advanced users can learn new things.
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So find a deck for anki or build your own. The time it takes to get through WK vs just studying both kana and kanji at the same time is only gonna dwindle WKâs appeal. The idea is you are building kanji knowledge to help you learn more complicated kanji, then reinforcing that knowledge with vocab. The kana editions make no sense, especially when they are words that have kanji associated with them and are taught already in WK. You guys can enjoy the next 3+ years being stuck on this site, I am getting to level 60 (without the kana) and bouncing tf outta here.
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You do you, you can even leave before level 60 if you want to. Iâll be happy to learn more words here and have better value for money from WK.
Donât you think that adding âa lot moreâ kana vocab â with no way to manually burn any entry or select what youâre learning and in what order â will be incredibly frustrating for most users?
I know that theyâve mentioned that they intended to add a lot more kana vocab in the future but I donât even understand how they intend for it to work. Would they really double or triple the amount of vocab taught on every level?
Iâm sure some people would want that but for others like me it would render the website near-unusable.
And note that if the objective is to teach all the vocab necessary to read basic Japanese, theyâd have to add a huge number of kanji words as well. I simply do not understand how that could ever work with the current WK ultra-rigid structure.
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No, I do not think it would be in readily frustrating for most users. Many users maybe, but I am convinced they are a minority, although very loud.
The vocab per level might double or triple, or the levels might just increase in number. It doesnât really matter, levels are an arbitrary thing anyway, they are there just for the purpose of gamifying the process and making it more fun. Maybe the best approach would be a combination of the two: adding some more level and at the same time increasing the number of words per level. At least at the end of it people would know a sufficient amount of kanjis AND vocab to be able to read stuff, whereas now a lot of people finish WaniKani and still donât know some very basic words because they did nothing other than WK.
Perhaps a consideration is, how to add new low level contents for people who are already at a high level. Gradually, maybe, but what to do with easier and no Kanji ones?
I see that Kanji have their own value, so the need to go to the higher level. More Kanji-containing vocabularies, too, might be added, to support Kanji with few vocabularies.
Many vocabularies can be guessed, and many can be easily remembered, with sufficient knowledge of Kanji. (And word fragments too, tbh, maybe in Kana.) Iâd say, not the raw count immediately matters.
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The levels are arbitrary but the progression isnât, where would the levels be added? I think we all agree that basic vocab should be added from the start but if they start adding interstitial levels from the beginning itâs going to dilute the kanji content a lot.
The way levels break down is not the issue, the real question is more about how fast can you make it through the 2000-odd kanji in the current inventiory. Right now I think itâs more than doable in less than two years with an assiduous but comfortable pace. That wonât be the case if they add thousands of additional entries.
As to being part of a minority of users, Iâm sure that youâre right, if only because I made it past level 10. You and I (and many people in this thread) are part of the very small minority of users who actually use the website seriously.
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The stats are not great actually. The fraction of people who make it beyond level 3 is in the single digits or so.
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Thatâs presumably massively biased by that being where the paywall kicks in, though? Iâm sure lots of people try the trial levels and decide theyâd rather learn a different way or that they canât justify the ongoing cost; or, like me, only have a WK account for forum access.
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Apologies, I shouldâve been clearer. Yes, that was what I was implying.
Which is completely fair, to be honest. A yearly or lifetime subscription is not something one shells out from pocket money.
To stay a little more on topic, I feel like the best way to improve (new?) kana vocab wouldâve been to first brainstorm the idea with the community before rolling it out. There are words which could be useful to both beginners and advanced users. If some users are advanced enough to not need the beginner words, why not gate the beginner words with levels and auto-clear the ones users shouldâve learned already. Or better yet, to make the kana vocab pool sortable so one can prioritize regular vocab, radicals and kanji over the kana vocab.
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For sure, thatâs why I picked level 10 in my comment, because even among paying users most wonât make it extremely far. IIRC from estimates made using this forum, the majority of paying users doesnât make it to level 20.
My general point being that I donât think itâs necessarily convincing to appeal to a silent majority that would love more vocab on WK when said silent majority for the most part barely touches the content that already exists.
I suppose a counterpoint would be that maybe people would be more motivated to use the website for longer if it taught more useful vocab but honestly Iâm not convinced. Itâs a harsh truth that the vast majority of people who pick up Japanese are not going to make it, regardless of the method.
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The other thing to to think about is what is motivating people more? Learning more kana or seeing measures of progress increase (ALA your WK lvl). Heck even the complexity of kanji is an indicator youâre progressing. Kana can really only make you feel like you know kana which after a week or less you should have somewhat down so learning just kana words after is gonna feel slow.
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Thatâs an excellent point too. The content that already exists isnât keeping newer users on. Now imagine increasing the volume of content. That number isnât gonna grow. If anything theyâre gonna quit at lower levels.
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