Why it is important? Any one here should know 90% of these kana words only. When someone is at level 42 with more than 300 reviews per day, these 5 minutes which will come up again and again will be quite burdensome.
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There needs to be an option to instantly burn these kana items. Makes no sense why はい should go through the entire SRS cycle, if you already know it.
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I think I’ve already commented that elsewhere but I think they really blundered with their word selection. They should have had a more varied mix of basic and advanced kana vocab, because for people who already are at higher levels we just receive a bunch of trash lessons every week that get in the way and don’t provide any value.
If words like する and ホテル were mixed in with more advanced kana vocab they wouldn’t feel so out of place and silly I think.
Although I also agree that there should be an option to manually burn items, or at the very least guru them.
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One becomes a master in anything by reinforcing the basics. Even if you know them its still reinforcing memory somewhere, regardless if you believe so or not.
I know all of the ones that they have added, recent and otherwise, im thankful that i get to see some nice old words i learned long ago. I will habe the mentality of greeting them again as i quickly burn them. Its satisfying burning anything, and these will be no exception. Im thankful for some basic words being added, not just for myself, but for all the new japanese learners that wouldnt encounter these.
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Oh all the times I didn’t know “ohayou” and “konnichiha”, finally my japanese got better /s
Lucky you if you have some extra minutes in a day to be wasted. Some people are working.
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At this point I’m half expecting them to start trying to teach us Hiragana and Katakana over 92 lessons
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ア
What do you say when the [curtain hook] hooks into the [steep slide]? “AH!”, of course! Why? Because the curtain hook also hooked into your hair on the way! What a predicament! Just remember curtains hooks and slides, bro. Katakana enlightenment will follow
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then they will have to change the slogan to “in just over two years” 
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Keep the threads coming I say. WK gotta wake up.
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The kana vocab are driving me crazy. If I wanted to learn those (again, mind you) I would pick up literally any beginner Japanese textbook or app. I am here to learn kanji.
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While I’m not a fan of the kana only words, I think these arguements are a bit elitist. Just because you know something and consider it to be common knowledge, doesn’t mean everyone does. WK was the first Japanese learning tool I used, so when I started I didn’t know a lot of the kana-only words they’ve added. If you want to take that approach, why not say the numbers to ten are so well known there’s no point teaching them? Or the kanji for person? You have to start somewhere, why not the basics which is accessible to everyone?
Yes there’s then the counter arguement that there’s no point teaching basic words to a high level user, but then again a high level user would very quickly burn them without any issue. It’s an inconvenience yes, but a small one at that.
Having said that, I too am on team opt-out option.
EDIT: Also, (kinda counter to the rest of my post) words like あなた or ない need to be properly explained, otherwise they’re simply going to be misused. One context sentence doesn’t achieve teaching you how to use it.
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I disagree with your argument about basic kanji. The readings are used much later on for things like counters and phrases, and the “basic” kanji like person can still trip people up with how many different readings for it there are. I’m sure I’m not the only one who still mixes up にん and じん during reviews. However the same is not true for the kana only vocab. So, its kinda comparing apples to oranges.
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I get around the kana vocab in a different way (just reorder on tsurukame), but it didn’t block me going from 39->40
How did you learn kana? How did you learn of WK?
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Well yeah that’s a good point. I guess I kinda went off there. My point is that we can’t make assumptions about what people do and don’t know based on how basic or common something is, particuarly among learners.
Ok, technically the Tofugu page on hiragana was my first Japanese learning tool. I guess I meant I didn’t do Genki or anything like that before hitting WK.
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I agree that it’s annoying and unnecessary unless they are planning to add hiragana and katakana study to the app or if the plan is to turn it into a vocab app. While I don’t need to learn kana I think including it in WK instead of just reading a page would be helpful for people starting out. But if there is no plan to add kana then what’s the point?
It’s only a minor annoyance for me, but still it starts filling my reviews with unnecessary words. I try to keep my reviews down otherwise they pile up and I’m hesitant to study.
If these are the first words I got during the trial for WK I don’t know if I would have paid for it.
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I think these words are really important, but for now I already know all of them and it just takes time.
I have most of them in my review queue in Bunpro, so it would be nice to be able to synchronise WaniKani with Bunpro for the Kana-only words as it is with the vocabulary in Bunpro.
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I don’t think the point should be that everyone knows those basic words before they start WK. I certainly didn’t.
In my opinion, it’s a bit pointless to try to learn こんにちは、おはよう etc. through SRS because I don’t think anyone ever forgets them due to how common they are. SRS makes sense for Kanji, which are hard to memorise, or also really difficult Kana words like onomatopoeia.
And for grammar items such as する or これ I literally don’t get the point of SRS-ing them. Having an association in your brain of “do = する” seems pointless to me, you still won’t know how to conjugate it, you still won’t understand how する-verbs work, or how certain grammatical constructions that involve it work, etc. I’m personally skeptical in general of SRSing grammar, but if you’re gonna do it, you should do it like Bunpro. Memorising translations for grammar items is just stupid. This goes double for これ/それ/あれ which should be learned and practiced together and not weirdly split up across levels.
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That’s the thing I don’t get. When WaniKani was hyping up kana-only vocab, they gave examples of onomatopoeia and a couple of other actually useful words. But then the several first batches are words so basic, no one needs a full-blown SRS and mnemonics to learn them. These words are so basic it’s actually insulting to assume that one needs example sentences, mnemonics and several sentence long stories to remember them :/.
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Exactly. I don’t like the kana update in general, but the poor choice of words is what really gets me. I’m still baffled that someone at Wanikani thought it was a good idea to add うん. I learned English as a second language, and I’m sure that if someone had distracted me in the early stages by adding tons of pseudo words like yeah, yep, hm, uh-huh, etc., to my SRS list I still wouldn’t be fluent. I also agree with grammar words being a bad choice. Why can’t these people at least ask themselves “Would any sane person add this word to their customized SRS list if it was up to them?” and if the answer is no, then don’t add it.
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