I think it’s a similar situation as with the Summary Page. The Summary Page was first removed and then people had to keep expressing dissatisfaction on the forums for WaniKani devs to consider adding it back.
We have the WaniKani Community. It would’ve been so much easier to brainstorm such ideas with the community before they go live so the devs don’t have to do disaster management and the product doesn’t lose reputation among learners. The Community is immensely valuable, because it provides critical feedback on the shape of the product from the users’ side.
Regarding the summary page, what’s worse is that they claim to be coming up with something to replace it, but not in its original form.
I didnt actually care about the kana only words until I realized they were extremely basic… Why am I learning the word for “hello” along with the significantly more advanced kanji word for “heartfelt desire”?
There’s the review API that’s been dropped in April too.
I don’t know how WaniKani is managed internally but they seem to be understaffed, because implementing a summary page or basic review statistics shouldn’t take months to design and implement.
Maybe they’re working on some big thing behind the scenes that will blow us all away though…
I personally don’t mind them and I think it would be nice to encounter some kana only words that I don’t know yet. (Unfortunately I know every one they added so far). They did say they would consider the possibility of opting out of them in the future though for people that don’t want them in their review pool, so for now just be patient, I’m sure it will be added in at some point.
What you can do now is just add like one letter as synonym for them. So for example have the letter ‘a’ as a synonym for every kana word so you just gotta put that in to skip it for now. Obviously it would’ve been nice to just have a skip option from the start but this is a simple workaround until it gets added.
You do realize “just be patient” isn’t good enough? I don’t mean to attack you personally, but I’ve seen this argument thrown around so many times and it really grinds my gears. The way in which it is non optional doesn’t allow you to ignore them. If you want to continue taking any lessons at all, you’re forced to pick them up and add them to your review pile. Because of how front loaded WK’s SRS intervals are, over half the time anyone is going to spend ‘reviewing’ these silly items is going to be spent within the first two weeks of adding it. At this point, anyone who hasn’t stopped taking new lessons in protest has already been forced to add ~50% of the kana only vocab and there hasn’t been any announcement of making them optional in any way. Even if they add it in the future, it’ll be too late. We will already have been forced to waste our time.
Before someone comes in here telling me that “it’s just a few seconds”. Let’s do the math: 60 items, 8 review per item. I’d say it’s reasonable to count 2 seconds for each review on average to read it, type in your answer, and possibly roll your eyes in annoyance. There’s also the time it takes to add them to your reviews in the first place: going through the lesson before your initial review, but I’ll ignore that as it’s just a rough estimate anyway and it compensates for any overestimation on my part of the 2 seconds/review. So it’s 60 x 8 x 2 = 960 seconds = 16 minutes. Let’s just call it 15 minutes.
Now let’s look at it this way. We’ll imagine the following hypothetical scenario: rather than these items, WaniKani had decided to add a one-time mandatory customer satisfaction survey that takes exactly 15 minutes to fill out. All WK users over level 30 would be forced to take said survey upon first starting a session of new lessons, preventing them from starting their lessons until they filled it out. Would you, in good faith, still try to make excuses for the WK team? From some of the responses of low level users I’ve seen, I’m sad that to say some probably still would… I can agree that this amount of time is not significant enough to quit WK over, but it sure is enough to warrant irritation at being forced to commit it for their benefit, and suspicion at any future ‘additions’ they might shove down our throats.
With your arguement that it takes 15 minuites…that is spread over months and not all at one time. Your arguement is flawed. I would bet that you get distracted at least a few times a day and lose more time than that in the few months it takes to spend those 15 or so minuites. At 60 total with the last 10 being released on week 7 and taking bassically 4 months to burn an item, you are looking at a total of 6 months to clear those 60 items.
The argument that you might waste more time on being distracted otherwise is pretty weak. Just because I sometimes waste time doesn´t mean I don´t care when someone else wastes it.
15 minutes is also a generously low estimate, I think I might be closer to 4 seconds per review, since seeing Kana-Vocab in WK always trips me up. Add to that the fact that I will probably get some of them wrong at some point, not because I don´t know them, but because I made a typo. Since WK doesn´t have doublecheck this adds several more review cycles.
And according to the team their plan is to add a lot more of those words. Would it only be limited to those 60 then people wouldn´t complain as much and probably just bite the bullet. But it´s expected that they will just keep coming.
An example: You are watching Netflix and binging a show. But at the beginning of every episode there is an unskippable recap of what happened so far. Now, one might say: It´s only a few seconds long, the show only has 16 episodes and it might be helpful to get all the important plotpoints again. But I would be pretty annoyed, because it still wastes my time, Netflix has announced to add this unskippable recap to much more shows and I just want my Netflix to go back to the experience I´m used to.
Because that´s the key point: People are used to a better experience and now they are told to be patient and then it might get back to the more pleasant way.
People don´t usually react very well when they are used to a certain standard and then it suddenly gets taken away.
I’m only in my early 40’s, but I have memory issues. It takes me way more than a few seconds to clear reviews! I’ve had to make a cheat sheet just for the kana because it’s just not sticking…
Yes obviously it is spread out, but that only serves to make it more annoying. I’d rather spend a 15minute session one day, so I can forget it even happened in a month than have it spread out and periodically annoy me for the next 6 months.
How about this hypothetical then? WK will now run unskippable 10 second ads during reviews for all users over level 30. These ads will randomly occur at any point of your review session, but only once per day. They will also continue to run until a user has accumulated their mandatory 15 minutes of ad watching. Is this enough to convince that WK just… messed up?
I mean there really isn’t much else you can say other than be patient though. They added this in thinking it was a good idea and even acknowledged that some people might want to skip these so they will look at adding that option in the future. I just don’t understand why people need to be so up in arms over something so minuscule that will have a skip feature in the future.
I think there can be a point to complaining. I think it helps WaniKani know that they messed up and should do things differently in the future, it might help them make opting out a higher priority making it come quicker, and it might also deter new users from using WaniKani and search for something better suited for them if this is an issue that they care about.
That’s a fair point and I agree. I just don’t like when people complain as if the developers are dumb for implementing this. I’m all for constructive criticism though.
These are from 2015. Are there many more such threads later or did people just give up on asking for it?
Also, it’s worth noting that it’s not merely about kana-only vocabulary being added, because there was a ton of people, me included, very positive about the idea itself. The issue is the execution. Likely no one other than absolute beginners needs words like “hello”, “yes”, “no” or “this” in their SRS. Not to mention grammar-like words which require explanations + context for the learning process to be meaningful.
2 of the threads from 2015 mention kana-only vocab as an “add-on”. That can be implemented as opt-in and wouldn’t disrupt the original flow of WaniKani’s kanji learning.
Cause usually you don´t roll something like this out if you don´t have a workaround for all the users that don´t want it. This isn´t an existing feature that needs improvement, they announced something entirely new, got negative feedback, rolled it out anyway without addressing the feedback and now we are supposed to wait for a fix that might take forever or might not even come at all, given the Teams track record.
And quite honestly, with every passing day this turns into an even bigger PR disaster. They “announced” the big, script-breaking update hidden in a forum post, it went live and it turned into the biggest shitstorm I have ever seen on WK. People were extremly angry about it, demanded an opt-out, complained about no heads up, about missing features, it disrupting their study routines etc.
Then they turned off the review API. Their reasoning made sense and as sad as I and other users are that it breaks streaks and heatmaps it was at least understandable. Still, another beloved feature gone.
Now, this time they at least announced the feature a little better, progress. But there were a lot of people complaining about how they didn´t want this and that they wanted an opt out. It went live anyway, with no opt out function and now a lot of peoples patience has been spread too thin.
Of course the users are gonna be up in arms if they continously see a tool they use daily get worse.
For the users among us that still want the summary page back it feels like a slap in the face that they are prioritizing the roll out of a new feature that´s so heavily opposed while we still don´t have a timeline for a replacement.
I´m usually extremely patient but the WK-teams is currently on a speedrun to lose peoples trust.
the argument that “it only takes seconds” also completely falls apart when you consider that WK has said that they’re planning to add thousands of kana only words.
we’re not talking seconds. we’re talking a hundred hours and more, we’re talking two to three weeks of work-time.