I’m certainly not the only person to say this, but I wanted to reiterate it so the devs know what people are thinking: please make kana-only vocab opt-in. It’s helpful to some, but I doubt many people past level 5 are getting much out of having する and おはよう added to their six month srs system. It’s just useless extra work for most of us.
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I just Mastered my last Level 60 item…to be greeted with coffee, when, and this. I was torn between laughter, tears, and rage. Beginners might find these useful…but I don’t want to see this stuff.
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Making a whole different track or opt in / opt out system might be a bit of a load on the devs, but please at least give us an “I know this” button that auto-burns that stuff
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Ya we already exploded about this weeks ago. WK dev team doesn’t care. They’ll railroad whatever they want. They have completely lost the plot. Openly hostile with their community at this point.
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This was included in an email 8 days ago.
They said they’re trying to find a way to make this happen, but to be patient as they can’t do it right away. Just give them time. They did hear all the comments and are trying their best to accomodate us.
Yes, it is frustrating that this didn’t come natively, (I also really am not the biggest fan of the kana words as I had already learned the ones being offered in my first year of Japanese) but the site isn’t just going to leave us high and dry. Just give them some time, please.
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How much trouble are the new words really? They’re very simple words and only take a couple of seconds to input. These aren’t going to make reviews intolerable so I don’t really get the backlash if I’m honest. While I agree that it’s useless for 99% of people who are higher level, it does provide some useful vocab for others. And how long would it really take to do these items? Maybe 4-5 seconds per item? Assuming you get them all correct every time, then that’s like 50 seconds over the course of 6 months. It really isn’t going to slow you down or take up much time at all imo.
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Talk about losing the plot…
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But I don’t need to give words a try I most definitely know
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I don’t really use the mneumonics anyway so I don’t really pay attention to them XD I think the fact that they’ve added 今日は and お早う as seperate items is a bit redundant tbh, but also I’ve never once seen anyone write those words using Kanji, always just kana. I’ve even seen native Japanese people writing 「こんにちわ」in messages before.
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I mean, I’m just gonna put in the answer until we have a work around cuz knowing the word is like getting a freebie. I’ve just added the readings as user synonyms so I don’t need to think more than a second on the word. Besides the easiest way to get rid of em for a long while is to level the words up so they don’t come back 
Until the workaround is put in place there’s not much else to do if you wanna keep studying the kanji. But my original comment is just to say that, the team does know what people want, it just takes time to implement the features. The team hasn’t abandonded us, and they’re also not hostile
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I don’t think they’re useless in general, just for a lot of people. To me adding that extra minute to per session makes studying a bit more tedious. I made the thread so the dev team hears my and others’ option on the matter and hopefully speeds up the development process on the opt in/out system they said they were working on.
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Completely agree with all of this.
However I also do understand people’s fears when it comes to this platform changing. The Wanikani team have implemented a lot of controversial changes in a very short space of time, even to the point where I’m worried about what will happen in the future. The day the big update dropped, broke all the userscripts, changed the UI and removed the review screen was an eye-opener for a lot of people. WK works well now, but a nudge here and there in the wrong direction and you’re on a slippery slope.
That all being said, I have faith in the team, they’re active on the forums, they take on board criticisms, they work fast, and they have made a robust codebase that is easy to modify. They’re not incompetent or malicious people, they know what they’re doing.
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This is also a cool idea, having more settings and customization tools is never a bad thing. More options more good.
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If you have the Tsurukame app you can opt out of kana only vocabulary.
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But that’s an opt-out. Practically speaking, is there any difference between auto-burn and opt-out?
The former lets you be selective (“I don’t need to spend time reviewing これ or それ but I’m happy to learn ホッチキス”) and the latter is a global decision (“I use WK to study kanji and already get my kana vocab study somewhere else”). You can make good arguments for providing both, I think.
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There is nothing in the word “opt out” that denotes global.
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What were they thinking??? This is so annoying. The goal of this website was supposed to be to increase vocabulary by learning kanji, not to increase vocabulary by using beginner sight words.
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what @pm215 said, plus adding a little “cheat” button that uses the pre-existing systems would probably be an easier band-aid solution than creating entire different classes of WK users
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