Opinion: Inputting the transitive version of a verb when WaniKani is looking for the intransitive version, and vice versa, should give a warning instead of being marked wrong

WaniKani
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At least, there should be an option for this somewhere.

Half of the time, WaniKani will accept it either way right, like 映す and 映る both accept “reflect” right because that can mean to be reflected, or to reflect something. But I will still dilligently input “to be reflected” for the intransitive one because, well frankly I’m not a native english speaker and the first thing that pops into mind is the translation in my mothertongue which gramatically just so happens to more closely correspond to “to be reflected”.

But then the other half of the time - whenever the english language makes a stark distinction but my native language does not - I get mixed up like crazy. I somehow managed to get 下る back down to apprentice level. Which is kind of silly. It’s “down” as a verb, it’s not that complex. I understand what it means, I understand it when I hear it, when I read it - but basically all of the time up until getting it “enlightened”, I dilligently remembered the specific way I have to put it in english, but by the time it came around again ready to be burned, as is supposed to be the case I guess I managed to retain the meaning, the reading - but I forgot I need to specifically have it be “descend” or “to go down” instead of just, like - to lower. Or, well, to “make go down” which is roughly how I’d say it in my native language, it just so happens to be more idiomatic to convey the concept using a transitive version of the verb.

And here’s an even wilder opinion - same should happen when you input the meaning of the adjective version of the kanji instead of the verb, and vice versa. Like, I 苦しむ, if I put in “to be painful” - I got the idea. I understand full well that anything む is a verb and not an adjective. It’s not like I will accidentally start using verbs in place of adjectives in Japanese suddenly. It’s not like I will not understand the concept when I read or hear the word, because I’m confused as to what type of word it was. I put in “to be painful” because that just so happens to be a more idiomatic way of getting the concept of suffering across in my native tongue AND ALSO 苦しい is accepted as “painful” so like…? How can that be marked as an error? It needs to be “to suffer”? But honestly the “to be…” and then the corresponding adjective version of the same kanji should always be accepted. Like it’s a more direct way of transforming the concept than using the idiomatic english translation to begin with.

And it’s the same thing here right where sometimes, WaniKani will accept it. Like 好き is “to like”. Why? Because that’s an idiomatic way to translate most sentences using it into english, instead of like “something being likeable”. It’s not an issue or anything, it’s not like you don’t intuitively understand you’re not dealing with the same gramatical structure and accidentally use adjectives in place of verbs. You understand that somethingが好き is “I like something”, and to like something is a verb, and 好き is an adjective. Like there’s no confusion there. The languages don’t work the same, that’s just how that is.

And, you know. That’s just how all languages are. So really I’m just asking for consistency here. Half of the time WaniKani concedes that it doesn’t matter, just go on an make it all of the time, because it honestly does not matter. Or, like I said, just make it optional.

(or point me to a plugin that does this please thanks, I’m really frankly just thinking somebody probably already made this and this is just how I hope to find out where)

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I do find it a bit annoying as well, but I’m kind of glad it doesn’t warn me. If I didn’t remember a definition on my own and had to rely on a warning, can I truly say I know and understand that word?

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I mean, I’d go as far as to say you don’t “understand” it just by remembering the definition in the first place, even if it’s the “correct” one, so yeah I feel like in most cases “close enough” is all you need.

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I think this is a subset of a much deeper question that reasonable people can disagree on. That question is: how “perfect” do you need to be when you’re first learning? Some would say don’t beat yourself up, just get it close enough and you’ll naturally refine it over the years as you learn/need to. Others would say every time you practice it wrong makes it harder and harder to un-learn the wrong thing and re-learn correctly.

Can’t say which one is right, it’s mostly personal preference on how strict you want to be with yourself. There might also be a practical question of how hard it is to write “acceptable answers” lists that please everyone.

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I think that’s accidental, though. Like one I’ve been seeing lately, “to accumulate” - in english that’s normally said exactly the same way for transitive/intransitive. If they want to be super strict about checking whether you know which it is, they have to commit to requiring “something” (as in “to accumulate something”) which they seem to have been either very lazy about or intentionally lenient, or they have to try to re-word one of them and only insist on the more-uncommon answer. Like “to pile up”, which doesn’t actually solve the problem and just makes people add a synonym anyway.

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Hang on, isn’t it that 好き is a noun, 好きな is the adjectival form, but you can use a noun after が if it’s followed by the copula? Is there anyone in the house who knows Japanese grammar?

Anyway, yes, either it should be strict: ‘a’ before nouns, ‘to’ before transitive verbs, ‘to be’ before intransitive verbs, maybe ‘ly’ after adverbs, and nothing with adjectives. Or, relaxed about it, and assume you’re here to learn kanji and you’ll pick the rest up elsewhere.

I think the main problem is that English is so relaxed about what grammatical role words can fill that translating between the two without context is a bit fraught, and no matter what you do someone will complain. I’d favour the relaxed approach, but there was a post putting forward completely the opposite approach only a couple of days ago.

[Edit] Actually, I do like to see if I’ve remembered which form a verb is, so maybe I disagree after all…

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I know, right? I think I’m in favor of the lenient approach as well, but at the same time I’m very (probably overly) strict with myself, to include counting typos as “wrong, practice more” :man_shrugging:

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Wait yeah that sounds right. Yeah so much for “no confusion there”. But that’s kind of what I mean at the end of the day. Different languages use different grammatical constructs to explain similar concepts. As long as you know whatever is idiomatically used in the target language, it doesn’t matter too much whether you translate it using an adjective, a noun, or a verb, transitive or intransitive. Nuance gets lost in translation anyway, and the translation will never be anything but a close approximation. So yeah all in all I guess I just want to make a case for having it be as lax as possible basically. Like I’m noticing more and more I’m not thinking “what does this mean” but “how would one say this in english”, basically having to translate it twice. In all the cases where I haven’t already made gratuitous use of the custom synonym function that is, but even then it’s kind of silly where like I get a new word and then I’m sitting there thinking “what are all the ways I could potentially get this one wrong in the future” and put them in in advance.

Like I can already predict it many times, new lesson comes along I almost try to explicitly not look at the exact words they want me to put in but try to gather the meaning best as possible from the “meaning” tab and then answer it with whatever words I think fit best in the first review, almost hoping I hit something “wrong” that I can put in as a synonym because 2 months down the line I will NOT recall the exact english words they want me to use, just the reading and the “concept”. Most of the time the “concept” and my best guess as to how it’s said in english fit, but then sometimes, it doesn’t.

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Usually 好き (and that class of words) are considered to be “na-adjectives”[*] (形容動詞 if you prefer the Japanese grammar term) – a plain noun can’t modify another noun with な (好きな食べ物 is ok, 日本な食べ物 is not because 日本 is a noun, not a na-adjective - you have to say 日本の食べ物). But they’re pretty close to nouns and some grammar analyses choose to collapse “noun” and “na-adjective” into a single category. Most textbooks and online references keep them separate though, so it’s probably simpler to go with the flow on that one.

[*] For 好き in particular the dictionaries say it is both a noun and a na-adjective, which presumably means there are some situations where it acts like a noun. But mostly my impression is you see the adjective use.

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[Edit] Actually, I do like to see if I’ve remembered which form a verb is, so maybe I disagree after all…

Also just to add onto that - that’s why I was kind of thinking this could be one of those things where it gives you the little grey shakey warning. So that you can decide for yourself whether you got it “correct enough” or not. It also seems like something that’s not impractical to do, just make it so that if you input any answer that would be correct for another word using (only) the same kanji, but is not itself on the “correct answers list”, it gives you the warning. And that also already seems to be the case in a small number of cases, where it will go “You could say that, but what’s a more unambiguous way?” and then sometimes it’s obvious like oh yeah they want the “to let” “to be” in the front or whatever. But in other cases… you just flat out guess wrong. 転がる - to roll, sure, 転がす… the “do” version is, uh… to… “to roll” is wrong apparently so how about to… let… something roll…? Nope, “to roll something”! Like you could honestly just have “roll” be not wrong and that is that. Some of these really seem needlessly convoluted.

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I think this is a subset of a much deeper question that reasonable people can disagree on.

Miss me with that differentiation I’m not a reasonable person. But also this is why I pledge for more options here, I feel like if there was a “hey do you want to not really care about mixing up pairs of transitive / intransitive verbs”-button I would press that in a heartbeat and I’m probably not alone in that.

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:man_shrugging:

I mean you can use Anki or any number of scripts and mark yourself right any time you want. Wanikani can’t be everything to all people. Nothing wrong with voicing your opinion, maybe they read this and listen to them.

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Yeh I’m just mad because there was that one I got wrong that I felt really bad about. So I’m shouting into the void hoping the WaniKani gods hear me

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I feel you. I’ve noticed wanikani is like golf for me - the less I worry about how I’m doing the better I do. Doesn’t make the red bar any less infuriating sometimes, lol.

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I’m not done screaming into the void after all. I just really have to put this SOMEWHERE because by GOD it annoys me more than would be adviseable to put into writing here. There is not just not an option to ignore “mixing up” transitive / intransitive verb pairs - in some cases, and this is not the first time I’ve encountered this, THEY ARE EVEN BLOCKED AS A SYNONYM. WHY oh why? This is bullshit, honestly. I understand that 入れる is to put something into something else, and 入る is to, say, enter a building yourself. Trust I know it because it’s not like I’ve been seeing this card for half a year straight now. But my head REFUSES to learn it as anything other than “the transitive version of ‘enter’”, because, THAT’S WHAT IT IS. And “to enter” CAN be used transitively! It may not be idiomatic depending on what you’re translating, but it’s NOT WRONG, I’m thinking “oh right entering something into something” and it get’s marked wrong and I can not not have it be marked wrong and that is SO annyoing. It’s like, the way it’s set up is actively forcing you to commit wrong stuff into memory.

Okay I’ve calmed down thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.

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I don’t mind failing reviews when I mix transitive/intransitive versions of a verb. Sometimes I correct my answer (with the double-check script) and sometimes I let it slide, depending on the verb.

What I’m less happy about is the lack of consistency. Around lvl20, you start learning purely transitive verbs (no intransitive counterpart) and the answer “to … something” is not accepted.

I’d rather it was always available, because as it stands I just stopped taking risks and I input the truncated version everytime. And I don’t think it’s beneficial to my learning

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As a non native english speaker I do sometimes think that using english as a proxy language does a lot of harm. There are many things which would be way easier to map to my native language (finnish). I even sometimes wonder if I am learning english or japanese with these apps. When I’m writing this reply I’m not thinking how I map these words to my mother tongue. I’m thinking in english. That should be our goal with japanese as well. Not some weird fantasy land of correctly mapping every word to some precisely equivalent english version of it.

This triggered me to make my first post. I think about this a lot…

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I had “someday” plans at one time to write a one-shot “style guide” script that fixed all the consistency errors like the “something” problem, the “counter for X” vs. “X counter” problem, etc. It would do that by batch-adding synonyms so you didn’t have to manually enter each one. (Might as well throw in British spelling as an option)

I never got around to it, but I don’t mind if someone beats me to it.

Could do the same thing with that, have a native-language synonym package.

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Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. I don’t think the devs really realize how incredibly arbitrary some of these distinctions are. To go as far as to block synonyms? Why does that feature even exist? To make sure native english speakers map each word to a translation that would be the most idiomatic to use when translating? The thing is, for a native english speaker, the one they learn with the japanese vocab ought to already be the most intuitive translation by default, so isn’t that a total non-issue? Isn’t that something that really only hurts non-native english speakers?

I mean, I’ve had this happen, say, 5 times maybe, trying to put a synonym where Wanikani then says it’s blocked because, I guess, they already have that same english word in use for the translation of a different piece of japanese vocab. I’m willing to bet MONEY that’s more often than has ever happened to a native english speaker, ever.

What are the devs afraid of here? That someone could confuse the two pieces of japanese somehow, based on the english words they put in when trying to guess Wanikani’s solution? Meanwhile ten different pieces of japanese will just be translated to “feeling”, because, I guess, that’s the best the english language has to offer, so no distinction necessary. The inconsistency is a little ridiculous.

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I do think blocked synonyms in general should give you warning while creating the synonym rather than an actually be blocked