You are preaching to the choir. Doesn’t seem like our complaints are being heard since the post announcing the rollout of kana had TONS of comments along these lines and yet here we are.
I continue to see newbies saying they love to have them added and then older users say “this is a kanji learning site” and then newbies say “but its only a few words” and then we say “its a ‘few’ words that we all learned before we even came here and we already have leeches bogging down our reviews ”
This site was meant to teach kanji. That’s why I and others like me came here. If you want to learn to read, this site isn’t going to be enough. You will need to study grammar. You will have to go elsewhere to study grammar. If you study grammar anywhere you will learn most of these kana in the first few lessons, most likely.
If this is the direction the site is going, I’m more than a little disappointed. It happens to so many things…“this is going well, lets add more bloat… ” It was great while it lasted
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.
Oh I totally get auto-deleting the emails, I usually do that for everything outside of the level warm ups because it’s how I keep track of how fast I’m leveling up (I can’t use scripts cuz work computer is where I do most of my reviews…)
If you’d like I can copy paste the email where it talked about updates under this spoiler here.
We have this weird tendency to just not actively tell people about any updates and new features. So in a way, we’re about to tell you some of our most closely guarded secrets. And if we don’t forget, we may tell you what’s new next month, too. Here’s what’s new on WaniKani this month.
WaniKani Updates Page
In case you don’t keep up with the WaniKani Community, we now have a page where we post all our upcoming updates. Content changes get posted here weekly too. Access it directly from the Help dropdown menu on the dashboard. More Forgiveness and Warnings in Reviews
You know the shake animation and messages you get if you enter a different reading for a kanji, or accidentally enter a word’s reading into its meaning review? We’ve expanded this feature to cover more common scenarios. If you accidentally enter the following, you’ll see the shake animation and have another chance to answer:
a kanji meaning for an identical radical
a radical meaning for an identical kanji
a vocabulary meaning for an identical kanji
a vocabulary’s meaning into its reading field
It also covers obvious typos, and a few other scenarios. For more details, take a look at the screenshots and explanations here.
Kana-Only Vocabulary is Coming Soon
I know it doesn’t seem like it, but there are Japanese words out there that don’t primarily (or ever) use kanji. They’re common, they’re useful, they’re written in hiragana or katakana, and you need to learn them to reach fluency in Japanese. I’m talking words like ほとんど and バイキング. Or ふわふわ and ペラペラ. There’s even まぐれ.
From May 17, all learners will begin to see (a few) kana-only vocabulary appear in their Lessons. We’ll slowly add more over the next seven or so weeks.
We realize that some people only care about kanji. We’re looking into giving you an option to filter kana-vocabulary out, but for now we’d love it if you gave it a try. They’re important to know, after all! Please check out our FAQ about this new feature here.
That’s all for now! Hit that reply button if you have any questions.
Love,
How many reviews per day I will or I will not have only depends on how many lessons per day I do and what my accuracy is. If I keep doing the same lessons and my accuracy doesn’t change the number of reviews I will have to do each day won’t change because of the inclusion of kana only words. This only affects speed runners who do all available lessons as soon as they are available, but that’s something I wouldn’t do regardless as I find it completely counterproductive.
I get what they mean. The few vocabulary for each kanji that they teach is for reinforcing the readings of the kanji in context. It means the future when you’re reading native material you’re better able to pick up whether a kanji should be read with its kunyomi or onyomi readings.
It allows you to fairly confidently read words in Japanese which you may have never come across before and also understand its meaning because you know what the individual kanji represent in English.
Also some of the vocabulary words that they choose are quite odd in that they’re not all that commonly used. But they do fit well with the kanji that were taught in that or recent levels to reinforce the kanji you’ve recently learnt
Lol they already had ホッチキス.
I already know that vocab, but it took me awhile to remember, so it would’ve more helpful with SRS in the earlier levels. Why would they put that in level 48? That’s such a weird level to have a non-kanji vocab.
Most miserable lessons I’ve done in a while, had to churn through 15 when I normally only do a set of 5 a day. 15 of them being these bloat words like ホテル that we were supposed to get given in “small” batches.
And while we’re at it, can we stop calling it speed running. For most of wanikani, max speed is just a comfortable, normal pace for some people out there. It just happens to be what wanikani restricts us to.
We aren’t “speed running” wanikani any more than people who do 2-3 week levels are “dragging out” wanikani >_>
(though I have used the term myself on several occasions lo)
This was in a reply to someone saying the kana only words would increase the daily number of reviews. They don’t, unless you are a speed runner. If you keep doing the same number of lessons per week you will do the same number of reviews per week you did before the addition of kana only words.
If you’re in the habit of doing all lessons when they become available, though, you would not keep doing the same number of lessons per week. That’s the point.
If one happens to find the maximum pace wanikani allows exactly the normal comfortable one, they can keep the same pace even after the addition of the new kana only words by slightly delaying some lessons.
If they decide to keep completing all lessons as they become available and such addition makes the pace overwhelming, this can only mean they were already stretching themselves, hence the ‘speed running’. Speed running is not about going at the maximum allowed speed, but doing so in spite of how bearable is the consequent workload and how compatible it is with effective learning.
This is a very easy thing to change. If one does all lessons when they become available it’s not wanikani’s fault. In fact wanikani even has a warning somewhere about pacing the lesson so that the number of reviews doesn’t become overwhelming.
But if they already knew all the content, in order to learn 20 new items a day they would need to do more than 20 lessons, thus increasing their review count.
If they didn’t and kept it at 20 per day (including the kana they knew) , that would mean they would be learning less than 20 new items per day…
EDIT : are you sure you are properly understanding full speed? You can do 20 items a day for like all normal levels and go full speed. You don’t need to do all at once and extremely few people do. All people are affected regardless of speed tho
Ive wanted to finish WK in around year and a half - i would say thats far from “speedrun” you are describing, but it does put soft time limitation on it.
One of the reasons why i wanted that is that consuming content knowing kanji makes the biggest difference in comfort once past the ~N4 point as searching up for kanji takes much more time than searching up few kana words or occasionally researching a grammar point.
Another reason is that burn time here is quite low, once you burn something you wont see it again, but you will forget it eventually, so taking several years would mean i would have to immerse much more while it was still frustrating to me to keep it in my memory.
Would i be able to do it with few hundreds or thousands useless duplicate items in my queue? Possibly, but it would be pretty demotivating and annoying. I would have to chose between slowing down for no reason or to tackle on more reviews.
”
” It was great while it lasted 
