Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but for 発売中 your answers are ‘now on sale’ or ‘currently on sale.’ With ‘now on sale,’ I often find myself typing ‘on sale now,’ which Wanikani takes as being wrong. It’s not even treated as a being ‘off but close enough.’
If a company starts selling a toy, they might say ‘The toy is now on sale’ or ‘The toy is on sale now.’ Or I might say to a friend, ‘That thing you want, it’s on sale at the store now’ or I might say ‘It’s now on sale at the store.’ Both strike me as the same thing. And that’s how I’m looking at this vocabulary and yet Wanikani is saying that one of those is just plain wrong.
This isn’t a situation where I want my ‘wrong’ answer to be treated as right. This is just me being baffled by why this answer isn’t accepted. And I understand that you can’t include every meaning for a word like ‘fast,’ there’s limits, but in this case we’re talking about the Wanikani meaning with the words in a different order.
And if there’s something I’m missing here, if I’m wrong in my thinking, someone let me know.
The “off but close enough” feature is just a mathematical algorithm based on the length of the word and how many characters are different. It’s not very smart.
I don’t see anything wrong with your wording, so just add it as a synonym and it’ll be accepted.
Ha! I had no idea this was a feature. I was thinking there’d definitely be a userscript to solve it but I’m completely surprised to see this is an actual feature. It makes me wonder now what else I’ve been missing all this time. I feel like a real dummy here but a happy dummy.
I still don’t agree with ‘on sale now’ not being accepted but it doesn’t matter now. Thanks for your answer - it’s solved things for me and now I’m real excited to start adding synonyms and fiddling with things.
As you pointed out in your first post, there are always going to be different ways to write things and phrase them. You mentioned that it’s just “the Wanikani meaning with the words in a different order” but that can make a huge difference depending on the situation.
WaniKani uses fuzzy spell checking to see if something is roughly the same as an existing answer, but it doesn’t check for completely swapped words.
It’s not hard to think of situations where moving words around results in completely different meanings or just plain gibberish.
I understand now, thanks. And thanks to the other reply too. I guess my thinking before was that alongside the accepted meaning, Wanikani had a behind-the-scenes list of ‘close enough’ answers that they’d come up with at the same time. Apart from the typo-filled answers, I wasn’t thinking of it as something figured out by a computer.
But anyhow, I’m really fine with everything now. I’m not really disagreeing with anything anymore. This synonym feature feels like it’s changed everything for me. I feel dumb for having posted the original question but at the same time I’m super happy here to have learned about this feature.
They have a white list for accepted alternate answers and a black list of rejected answers. These lists are nowhere near complete and will never be complete. They keep finding all the time new words to add to these lists.