To be fair, regarding the transitive and intransitive verbs, Japanese does treat them like different words completely and you can confuse people if you try using the wrong verb. I’ve hard breakdowns in communication because I assumed that my “close enough” idea of a transitive verb actually ended up with me getting in trouble for not having that thing officially done because I answered in an affirmative intransitive verb. As frustrating as the words can be, I am in favor of them keeping the meanings separate as the nuance is really important, However…
This is the part where I think that learning the transitive and intransitive pairs require more effort on the WK end to explain them. Their inconsistency in adding “something” to each transitive verb should be standardized. Or at least something of like a memo marker? Like IN for Intransitive or TR for Transitive verb. something that will grab the learner’s attention as I often skip meanings if I have heard of a word before. I just look at the word bank, try to get a feel from the ones with multiple answers, and then go from there.
Also related to this here,
Every content updates post has several words that get changed or refined. Some of the refining parts include things like blocking synonyms (in this linked one there is a new blocked synonym for 繋ぐ)
The reasons for blocking words usually come from this thread I believe (at least this one is the most common one where the mods are asked to block certain words)
This is a recent post highlighting how sometimes the WaniKani forgiveness for spelling errors can accidentally add words that mean completely different things and then starts conversations about the nuances between similar words.
I think someone asked how to see all the blocked synonyms for words but I think it was a script or it was an offhanded comment made around the forums at one point but I’m sure there’s something out there somewhere.
I can’t even begin to express how much this frustrated me when I started communicating more frequently in Japanese and I better understood the meanings and use cases of the words popping up in reviews instead of just the words WaniKani happened to prefer.
I installed an undo script for typos, but I might have ended up using it more to “correct” words I can definitively say I did not get wrong.
One warning though, for beginners there may be cases where you might feel like this or that word should also be allowed, but then you understand why WK made some distinctions a bit better when you more deeply understand the word’s nuance. The issue here is that WK tends to not really explain that difference in nuance that well either, so there’s no way to know ahead of time outside of doing extensive extra research on everything WK teaches, or becoming semi-fluent through experience. (I did do extra lookup and study for the last 10 levels I still used WK.)
Even though this annoys me sometimes, just like making a typo and demoting the item back to zero does, I think people overthink Wanikani a bit too much sometimes based on this forum. I usually just shrug and trust that the srs does its thing eventually. Like with these transitive-intransitive pairs, I get that it can be frustrating, but to me it also sounds like Wanikani is the only thing you do for learning. When you encounter more and more examples in the wild the problem just goes away. Maybe the real problem is that we tend to give this app too much attention and not just treat it as an aid, and only one of them. Just one little thing you do and not everything you do. Why does it matter that sometimes there’s some red color on your monitor? =P It will go away.
It’s funny you try to format your argument this way, because that is entirely the reason I ended up moving on from WK because its speed degrading based on that funny little red color for things I understood on a more instinctive level than what the site allowed. Ensuring that this learning program could not keep pace with me, despite the ridiculous amount of time it requires to be spent on it if you want it to move on already. And I doubt I am the only one in that.
My average time spent on WK a day entering the card answers was about 2 hours. I do the same amount of content on Anki in about 15 minutes. That difference in time spent is going to make you feel very, very different about the material and inconveniences you might have with it.
Anki gives you multiple levels of considering an answer correct, with the top one hugely decreasing the amount of time it takes before something pops up again. That alone helps prevent it becoming a colossal timesink that feels more like lost time than anything if you want to learn new things without being held back by an arbitrary videogame leveling system. (I do not think the gameification is a good thing. It gives a cheap dopamine boost at the cost of staggering forward momentum with new material and increased frustration if you got an answer wrong once or twice.)
In my opinion this isn’t an either/or thing. In the end what we want is a map of japanese words to concepts in our brain, not map of japanese words to english words (unless you are a professional translator). So I think most time should probably be spent on that (which Anki style system (and for example something like NativeShark) does ok). BUT that said, I think it’s a different perspective on the whole thing to try to produce exact words like Wanikani and Bunpro demands. I think all these approaches sort of boost each other and if you just focus on one, maybe it works eventually, but i could be less efficient. I just personally notice that when I “cross train” I get a lot more of these “AHA”-moments when meaning, sound and kanji just click. I even think that Dualingo style naive drilling has its place because it hammers down those words so well and they stick longer. I just wish it was like 5 times faster (and longer). With Anki style apps I feel like it’s easier to sort of accept a more vague answer faster, which is something we want to also do, but sometimes we also need that little bit of extra discomfort to really crystallize the actual meaning, if that makes sense…?
Now, one might wonder why even use apps at all. And that’s a fair question imo. But for me they suit my daily routines better than word/sentence mining to Anki does. Maybe some day…
Okay so I really don’t want to turn this into a deck measuring contest but I also feel the need to point out that you guessed wrong there, for me, with trying to wrap my head around Japanese, Wanikani is just a small part of a bigger routine made up of a bunch of different tools and media. As the other poster said, this is a problem that kind of sort of does not go away, but keeps compounding on itself. When more and more cards show up where you know what they mean, but can not guess what Wanikani wants you to write, you stop thinking about the concepts and start thinking about the English language. Like, I’m sure I have anki cards which literally use a translation that Wanikani blocks from being accepted as right - and if I was a bit liberal with translating from Japanese, to my mother tongue of German, to English, which I often have to do because Japanese vocab will be more closely tied to a translation in my native language rather than the concept itself - I’m a learner you know - then I’m sure you could make a case for just about all of the transitive/intransitive pairs both working out to the same English vocab.
I understand that there’s a massive difference in meaning between using one or the other in the wrong situation, and understand that it’s sensible to make learners aware of that. But no matter how carefully you map the words, no amount of SRS will make you able to properly apply them in the wild anyway, so being strict with it is pointless. Wanikani does the mapping just a bit too strict where I feel like it’s starting to impact my ability to use it. I wouldn’t be talking about this if it was just about red boxes.
This is one of the biggest problems with wanikani, and is the primary reason I use the doublecheck plugin to cheat when faced with pairs like that. I REALLY wish they’d just teach EITHER intransitive OR transitive, and not both. yes, the assumption is that you’re reading and immersing yourself in japanese on a daily basis like some super student and spending 4 hours on it per day, but out of context, anyone could confuse a trans/intrans pair pretty easily. root of the problem is no ability to redo wrong answers, that fixes pretty much everything.
Okay so I just installed the double check plugin and holy moly it’s a godsend. Much like the one that makes it so you can cycle through different fonts, it really feels like this one should be a default option because maaaan I’m annoyed I went so long without it. This one is gonna save me hours upon hours by just getting to redo the ones I know I understood. Should have installed this ages ago but was kind of afraid for some reason, you know with enabling one to cheat and all. But man this is so incredibly useful for cases like these. Thanks for making me see the light.
Problem is that not having any good way to deal with leeches IS an issue, regardless of whether the issue bothers you or not. also accidentally making a typo and missing something even though you objectively know it with NO way to undo/fix other than refreshing the review page is also an issue, regardless of whether it bothers you or not. Bunpro doesn’t have any of these issues, and it’s an objectively better service as a result. Fair enough that their vocab might not quite be there yet though, but their grammar is good.
Expect better from the services that you paid actual cash to access, my guy.
Also, for the record, I agree with OP: if there was a way to ONLY learn transitive OR intransitive versions of verbs, I’d hella turn that on instantly. It wouldn’t be as much of an issue if they didn’t block some synonyms for some verbs.
It probably depends on your goals though: I’m not looking to live in Japan at any point, not unless there’s a way to avoid having to work for a japanese company. Horrible work culture.
Honestly, I’m instantly starting to notice that probably half of my “mistakes” are caused by this phenomenon where I feel I have a good grasp on what something means but am stuck figuring out what WaniKani wants to hear. With くs and るs they go “Oh, make sure to add “to” because it’s a verb!” But then with nouns, it just feels completely random. 中毒 is, uh… addictive…?? Maybe? No, it’s an addiction, we stuck to the noun here, okay. 有毒 is, uuuh. poison-having… as a noun? Poisoning maybe? No, it’s poisonous! Gotcha, this time we wanted an adjective! Can’t even add poisoning because it’s already another translation for 中毒! Great! 中毒 won’t accept poisonous, even as a custom synonym, either. But a poisoned apple can be poisoning you, as can a poisonious apple, as you can be poisened by it. These are just… random, honestly.
But now with the redo-script I see these and just think to myself in advance “well I know what it means, I’m gonna enter my best guess and if they don’t accept it I’ll just redo it.” Lifesafer. Like it doesn’t even feel like cheating if I know in advance which ones I’m likely to not guess right on.