Hello! I’m still rather new to WK, so my take may not be as important but ill say it anyways. I can 100% see where people are coming from when they say they don’t want kana-only vocab. For those that came here to learn Kanji and kanji only, it is simply put a waste of time for them. But, like anything, there are two sides.
As a Japanese beginner, the few kana-only words that I have encountered so far have been of big help to my vocabulary. Even though most of the words that I have gotten so far are rather “basic” and ones that I have already learned, I believe the more I go on, the more kana-only vocab I will encounter that I haven’t seen yet (I haven’t taken the time to look at all the added vocab).
To appease both sides, I don’t see why the devs couldn’t make an option to turn the kana-only vocab off. For the time being, I assume that is possible for someone to make a script that could disable kana-only vocab IDK though.
Thanks for reading!
Edit: Forgot to mention that as you said, audio on the words would be awesome!
To cater to beginners, it’s even possible that they aren’t fast at reading Kana yet, or they can’t hear / pronounce properly (differing from English, for example). Not to mention there are also pitch accent patterns, which indeed many of which are rules.
Frankly I think I mentioned it as a joke originally in one of these threads but the more I think about it the more I think it would make sense for WK to gate some features behind the level progression.
Something like “at level 5 you can switch onyomi to katakana, at 10 you get undo, at level 20 you can manually guru items, at level 30 you get to pick and choose the kanji you want to learn, at level 60 you can draw your own kanji and add them to other user’s lesson queue” etc…
When people generally argue against these features they say that it risks being confusing for beginners, or teach bad habits etc… On one hand I think this is overblown, but I do concede that for complete beginners who are not used to dealing with SRS it’s possible to mess up by abusing these tools.
The problem of course is that by the time you’re a couple dozen levels in, you’re no longer a noob and you no longer need such a strict level of handholding and in fact I suspect that for many (including myself) it becomes more of an annoyance than a help.
By gating these features behind level progression you keep the simplistic approach for beginners and you incrementally introduce more features as they become more needed. It would also give a reward to look forward to as you toil through your reviews, something tangible to have as an objective to keep pushing.
Yes, I think those are some of the complaints raised against Anki, for instance, and why WaniKani wins for so many people. Unless one goes straight for an existing deck and just rolls with it, the UI can be extremely daunting with its scoring system, customizable SRS intervals, penalty scoring, etc.
I believe the same could be said about WaniKani content in general. Goofy mnemonics and context sentences might be endearing in the beginning, but when you’re over 1000 kanji in, learn how semantic/phonetic composition works, get exposed to kanji from other resources, etc. the structure of WaniKani starts becoming problematic. So the features you mentioned become the more valuable.
I am a busy person with RSI and I don’t need another 60 bits to type through
Plus I live with a Japanese man so these are all words (except さようなら) which tumble out of my mouth 6000 times a day. They are so reinforced in my mind at this point that they’ve got barnacles growing on them
Oh thanks! I keep saying to myself I should write the rest of my experiences from that year down and publish a book called “A Year in Japan Before the End of the World”
and then I just don’t do it because I have the sticking power of an old post it note
Plus, I want to read about this terrible date because that sounds really fun.