And as with every good morning, you start with feeding the wanikanitachi-chan.
During reviews, I encountered this word:
残る (のこる) To Remain Behind, To Stay Behind.
So I added “To Leave Behind” as user synonym because I knew I will mess it up at least once and write down “to leave behind”.
But then something new happened and my synonym was flagged in red color with the warning:
“Red Synonym = Blocked Synonym
The Crabigator has detected a blocked synonym and has marked it red. It will not be accepted during reviews. No other bad things will happen, so you can keep it there if you want.”
“It will not be accepted during reviews.” …
I understand the concept of the word and that there is a difference between “to stay behind” and “to leave (something/someone) behind”.
So I deleted the synonym and entered “to be left behind” and it worked, no red warning.
Not sure how I feel about this (new?) update. So far I’m leaning toward the negative because I feel like it’s trying to teach me English instead of Japanese.
Is this new? First time seeing this warning mechanic after 56 levels and I always add a lot of synonyms from Jisho (I don’t like how often WaniKani leaves out commonly used alternative meanings).
Doesn’t that just go back to different philosophies of flashcard vocab study, one saying you want to get it 100% right, and the other saying you want to get the gist, expecting to pick up the remainder through input? Self-move and Other-move distinctions definitely seem like the sort of thing that one will pick up reading regardless of whether or not one was solid on it doing flashcard study
In any event, the double-check script makes this a non-issue
I didn’t say anything about 100% right. The fact that we are answering in english especially makes that impossible more or less and I think some leeway is necessary for efficient learning. But “some leeway for efficiency” doesn’t mean allowing a blatant lack of understanding for how a word is used in a sentence imo. I would argue if you don’t know leaving something vs remaining (残るvs残す) then you didn’t “get the gist” enough.
Sure, in reading particles and usage in the sentence make it an almost non issue, and there will be a good amount you can pick up just from reading.
The amount of mistakes I hear and see from learners though tells me that you definitely won’t just “learn the remainder” from input, though and you aren’t doing yourself any favors if you don’t bother to learn the difference when you learn the words in the first place. Especially with how nice is with the patterns intransitive and transitive pairs have in japanese.
In short, sure you will pick some stuff up and things are easier in the context of reading as opposed to output, but that doesn’t validate OPs gripe that wk is “trying to teach him english”.
Perhaps, but WaniKani is clearly not neutral on this: it has opinions/choices that are the devs deliberately taking a position on this question, and it comes down much more on the “just getting the gist isn’t sufficient” side of things. Otherwise it wouldn’t be forcing you to type out the answers, for instance.
The ない makes it a negative, the word on its own is not negative. That’s like saying “possible” can mean “impossible” because it’s common to write “im” + “possible”
A: Isn’t there something you’re supposed to get done today?
B: Nope, not particularly / No, not really
not sure what resources are out there regarding this, but as someone living in japan for about five years now, i’ve heard it used that way quite a lot, in a similar way that 別に is used (but with a slightly different nuance)
fwiw, the nuance is usually that the it’s about the speaker’s preferences/opinions or things that they would know best? idk if that makes sense, but here are some more examples：
We are getting a little into iffy territory by saying 特に is “not particularly”
特に can be loosely translated to “particularly” as wk says at the very least. I hope we can all agree on this.
特にない is a very common construction to just mean “there isn’t anything in particular”/”there isn’t particularly anything”. This is a clear usage of the above form of 特に + ない
Japanese people have a habit of omitting things. The ない part of that is just being omitted. So while its nice that you recognize that is a common omission, it doesn’t actually change what 特に means. For a site meant to test you on an understanding of the vocabulary, you can see how weird it is to accept the literal negation of the correct answer just because if that vocabulary is used with something being negated there is a chance that negated thing will be omitted and you will be left with just the vocab word in question.
I’ve lived here for about 5 years as well, but I haven’t heard it as much as I’ve heard 別に. It’s more rare where I am living, and if it’s used negatively it almost always has the ない attached to it or a verbal trailing drop in voice plus other body language clues. I think for a website that teaches 特に it would be extremely confusing to have that negative connotation included. I’m not saying that that meaning can’t exist, but I believe that is a grammar point regarding omission rather than being an accepted meaning for the lone vocabulary word.
別に is used very very commonly in a negative way which is why I believe WK expresses that one’s negative use.
Also looking it up on jisho.org, 別に has (not) particularly in it’s meaning, while 特に is explicitly particularly.
