On one hand I appreciate that they acknowledge the issue and hint at a future change, but at the same time the addition of this vocab is most annoying early on (when the SRS intervals are low and the words keep coming back, and people in higher levels get all the new vocab unlocked at once with no first-party option to skip/deprioritize it). If they add the toggle in 2 months when we’ll all have it to Enlightened it won’t make much of a difference.
As always, this could be addressed simply and elegantly if they just decided to implement lesson filtering/reordering natively on the website, one of the most popular features currently implemented with third party scripts.
I’m very much not a speed runner, but if this change goes through and there are thousands more items in circulation, that would have increased the total time it took me to get through WK by probably another year, since I capped my daily lesson count. This would’ve slowed down my (already slow, by speed runner standards) kanji acquisition substantially, to the point where I’d probably consider using a different program other than WK.
So both speed runners and slower paced users are negatively affected, just in different ways. Either you eat the increased daily workload, or you spread it out over time and take longer to get through the program. I wouldn’t want to deal with either of those things.
Like, my head knows that WK is a one-size-fits-all solution and that it’s not actively trying to make me feel like I’m being forced to watch the Teletubbies, but my heart…
Oui
Would you like some baguettes? Whee! How about a croissant? Whee! WHEE!
In French, « Oui » means “Yes”. So, whenever you want to remember how to say “yes” in French, just picture a crazy Frenchman running around, yelling “whee!”
Oof… that led me down an unexpectedly deep rabbit hole - especially since I mostly haven’t tried using my (poor, beginner-level) French since freshman year in college (long, long ago) - and even that time when I visited Paris for almost a week I was mostly cowed into speaking English only, for (rightly justified) fear of being ridiculed for my bastardized spoken French.
It’s hard enough to count in Japanese, always having to recompute things to figure out how to use 百万 and other ‘oddities’ (for a typical American English speaker, anyways). So I’ll be happy enough to leave all of those quatres and vingts et al to others, thank you very much.
Yeah unfortunately they aren’t offering a separate track for kana only vocabulary which i feel would make more sense as the kanji are the building blocks for the vocabulary that build onto each other. They did send out an email talking about making some kind of opt out option for the kana only vocabulary, but I don’t know when that is going to be.
The developer of Tsurukame made an opt out option so I just clicked that so I’m not dealing with kana only vocabulary in my reviews at all.
Yeah a lot of the kana only words are something someone would learn after just doing a few grammar lessons and the spacing of words that are usually taught together in grammar lessons are spread out throughout the levels.
They said they are adding the kana only vocabulary as it is there goal to help users be able to read, but how can they do that if they aren’t teaching grammar? Makes no sense to me.
it’s funny because I am a lvl 54, after learning long and complex vocabs like 自動販売機 and 衆議院 and then こんにちわ and ホテル appears in lessons right now is very odd
it’s like finishing air space engineering major and then the last exams you get questions like 2+2 = ?
After learning hiragana and katakana I started with Wanikani. I hadn’t learned grammar or vocabulary from any other sources. I can see how learning words like こんにちは, おはよう, する and これ on Wanikani can be useful for someone on my situation. This is why I disagree with people who think these kinds of words shouldn’t be in Wanikani.
On the other hand, it’s probably best if they make this vocabulary optional. I’m sure many people who already had a foundation came here to learn kanji.
This. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that people who have decided to start learning kanji will already know words like はい, これ, and する. But as the dev team mentioned in another thread, they had developed this ages ago, wanted to put it live and that’s the end of the discussion, no two shits given what their users think of this addition.
To throw in my two cents: I actually like this. When I started BunPro, having these words and their different forms (この,そこ,etc.) together really threw me off. I had the same problem with Genki.
I don’t know what their intentions were with dividing them, but it works out in my opinion. However, putting all the こ’s in one level and all the そ’s in the next makes more sense to me.
As a bunpro user, I find their introduction here somewhat jarring. I don’t mind words like “apple” at all, but when it’s more grammatically inclined like “this one” or “where,” I feel like I’m missing a sentence context.
That being said, it’s still overall a good addition; for people that rely on wanikani as their exclusive first step (which you shouldn’t), it gives a more encompassing start.
I feel like the logic with grouping them together is that you only need to learn one rule that applies to all of them, as opposed to just learning each item in isolation.
Since the rule applies not just to これ, それ, あれ, どれ, but also こう, この, こんな, and so on, the only thing you need to learn is that the こ~ items are always “this”, the そ~ items are “that”, etc. And then you just learn each set (the れ set, the の set, the んな set, etc.). In total you’re learning 4 rules about the first part plus a rule for each set, so that’s about 10 unique things to remember for:
これ、それ、あれ、どれ、この、その、あの、どの、こう、そう、あう (is this even a thing?)、どう、ここ、そこ、あそこ、どこ、こちら、そちら、あちら、どちら、こんな、そんな、あんな、どんな
(23/24 items)
Although everyone’s brains are different, that’s just what made sense for my brain to learn it.
Yep. At the end of the day it’s just that. For me, knowing how the ending kana changes the word is very simple, yet having to “see” how the point of view shifts from こ- to そ- is something that still manages to trip me up from time to time.
Maybe that’s where all language learning websites could learn regarding user customization.
