I’ve never commented here before, so add me to the five who are aggressively against it
I’m not sure how adding these words works depending on where you are in the levels. So far they are words that would make sense to me if people are seeing them at the beginning. If we are at higher levels, are we now getting these words added in no matter where we are? If so, this seems like the mistake. If they are level 5 words or whatever, fine, give them to people when they get to level 5, but don’t add them in now when I’m at level 34.
That’s by design, unfortunately. If a new word gets added to the system, it’s retroactively added to the lesson stack of every user who’s on the required level. We had this happen in the past when WaniKani added a bunch of lower level words to extend the existing vocab pool. The friction was minimal, because these words were unique kanji words so had some benefit even to advanced learned. That can’t be said about absolute beginner kana words added to the lesson pools of advanced learners, especially if these words are actually phrases or grammar concepts which really don’t belong in a SRS.
I think depending on the words there can be good reasons to do it retroactively, but both doing that and your suggestion have drawbacks . I would be in favor of your suggestion in my app, for instance.
It seems like it would also solve the problem to give users the power to remove particular items from their reviews. I know we can’t expect an app like this to cater to our individual needs - for example, the thing that inspired me to finally complain about this here is that I got the word ドキドキ. I edit translated manga for a living, so trust me I do NOT need to see that word more often Yes, I know that’s a unique problem! But if we could remove items we could all cater to our own individual unique situations. I’m not sure if this is a particularly difficult programming challenge, but it sure would be nice to have this flexibility.
I’m truly thankful that WK is my secondary SRS, after I finish my current set of anki I feel I might just turn WK into another anki and blitz through it so I too can just finish 60 and move on, not keen on the current dev pipeline of slowly trickling out worse changes and then ignoring all feedback
ドキドキ might be individual to you (even tho let’s be honest, this is such a common word), but the pattern of needing to opt out of words is a valid one. I wish it was possible to test out of vocab and kanji.
That is exactly what I want to see, too. I live in Japan, I’m learning kanji so I can actually function in my day-to-day life. Dumping a bunch of beginner level kana words into my reviews is a waste of time and energy for me. I’m sure it’s very useful for people under level 10, so it would be nice if they could give higher level users a way to auto-burn or skip words we already know. People who are serious about their learning won’t abuse it.
The changes aren’t worse, we’re just waiting for them to actually happen.
We are actually still waiting on the update for the community section on the dashboard. The panel there was supposed to be the placeholder but we’re coming up on a year later.
Same goes for the summary page, where we’re at the 3 months mark and no update there.
Kana stopped because of the negative feedback but we aren’t getting updates on the opt out feature that is definitely happening like the previous 2 features that are definitely being worked on and updated.
I think you mean when the summary page disappeared was in March? The announcement about the code base being in a better shape and ready to implement some version of the summary page was in May. Still not a great thing, obviously.
I feel like adding an auto-burn to any word would be a general improvement to the site.
As someone mentioned above, a lot of people don’t utilize the content already here and I feel like the site could have a much bigger draw for both beginners and intermediate learners if you could choose to eliminate things you already know (which let’s be real, probably every user encounters several kanji/vocab they already know well). It would allow each user to focus on what they really want to learn and allow people to start at higher levels if they’re not a beginner, or learn everything from the beginning if they are. It also wouldn’t negatively affect anyone but yourself if you auto-burn things you don’t know.
That’s at least my main suggestion for a way to resolve a lot of the site’s problems, kana-vocab included.
I think the main thing with WK is your building off of each item to teach bigger badder kanji. So doing this could create it’s own set of problems. I feel in the case you laid out you might be better served just making an anki deck of the stuff you don’t know and call it a day… Which I’m getting closer and closer to doing lol
To me this points to the fact that WaniKani as a learning tool wasn’t well designed from the get-go if a user is forced into a very specific progression pattern, there is no way to opt out AND any opt-out feature would negatively impact the learning process to a significant degree.
For instance, Duolingo (as much as we don’t like it in general) also builds lessons on already completed content, but features milestones which any user can test out of. The content is quite rigid so for a given word or phrase there is only a small variety of accepted answers and for many of the sentences you literally need to know the whole sentence by heart, because nothing else fits. Still, one can test out of content they already know and jump into the tool at any advancement level.
It definitely wouldn’t be without problems but, at least in my opinion, if you already know the meaning/reading of a kanji you won’t be confused when they use it as a building block for other things. An improvement but not a perfect solution. Maybe they could make radicals unskippable, easier to breeze through just those than several levels of kanji/vocab you already know if you want to join when already intermediate.
The problem with making an Anki deck of stuff you don’t know is first you have to know what you don’t know. Ofc it’s helpful to make one of words you encounter but sometimes it’s nice to have a general one. All premade decks have the same problem tbh of almost definitely including things you already know, except at least with Anki you have the option of deleting things you already know.
Also for some reason I’ve never gotten Anki to stick into my routine (100% a me specific problem, I know) so that’s not a solution that works for me unfortunately haha
There weren’t any recent changes that were user-facing other than a few content updates, especially with some of our team going away on vacation, etc. Maybe late Aug or Sept.
If you mean using it in general absolutely do it, even a little reading around to design html/javascript and you can craft it into a perfect learning tool. Been using it daily and am truly grateful for it
Yes, they are already taught as kanji words. I mean that the pronunciation option that is shown when you answer the vocab reading is helpful to me, and that I wish the the kana only words had that feature. I realize that most of the people here are at a higher level, and maybe even speak Japanese already, but there are lots of us still in the learning phase, and for me at least, the correct way to pronounce words is not intuitive.
While I can’t relate anymore and I would say Japanese pronunciation is on the lower complexity side, I can understand it being challenging for beginners.
Also, it’s probably a little unfair that kana vocab doesn’t have audio
. I would be in favor of your suggestion in my app, for instance.
Yes, I know that’s a unique problem! But if we could remove items we could all cater to our own individual unique situations. I’m not sure if this is a particularly difficult programming challenge, but it sure would be nice to have this flexibility.