I’m not sure if this was directed at me, but I’ll reply since I don’t think I’m doing a good job expressing what I’m trying to.
My point wasn’t about “valid description” of the language. It’s about context.
Let’s take a word we can all agree on the definition on. 眠い. To say this means “sleepy” is a pretty fair statement.
If a Japanese person says “眠い” and I ask you what he said, I would give you a pat on your back if you said “I’m sleepy”. You did a good job understanding the actual meaning of what was being said and reasonably assumed “I’m” was implied/omitted.
Now let’s say I give you a vocabulary test. We are not understanding actual Japanese sentences anymore. This is just a test on vocabulary words in isolation.
ねこ - cat
にほん - Japan
ねむい - I’m sleepy
Your answers for the first two would get an A+ from me with no hesitation. But the third one is clearly a bit weird. We are now adding in omissions in an isolated test.
Wanikani is an isolated vocabulary test. What the above user is doing is arguably more valuable than being able to answer an isolated test. It’s great that she can recognize what “tokuni” would mean if it were on its own in a an actual sentence. But we aren’t dealing with actual Japanese sentences here. Context matters. In an isolated test, you should be expected to give the isolated definition imo.
Others have made good points imo but I want to add regarding this point. Wanikani is built on English-Japanese so for better or worse, it will be bound to the rules of English as a language. It will force you to use English in the ‘correct’ way because otherwise it would be misleading. As a non-native English speaker Wanikani absolutely challenges my English on top of Japanese, because even though I am used to communicating in English, there are English concepts and words that I’ve never thought about but is forced to face by way of learning another language through an English lens. Idk if you are a native English speaker or not, and for native speakers it may be even more jarring but that doesn’t mean Wanikani is in the wrong esp. in this case, it just has built-in limitations.
Ah, interesting perspective. I use Anki mode, and I’d give myself the “correct” with no hesitation for either. I actually routinely do a similar thing where I tend to answer verbs in the present simple, since I think the infinitive is not a very good parallel to the Japanese dictionary form. But I’d count either. I actually count it as more correct if I can avoid any English and just repeat the reading while imagining the object or action
Yeah, my personal opinion is that that’s actually ideal. If you can be sure that you actually know the content, it’s best to give it a pass. The limitation of WK and other input based platforms is that it needs to do that assessment for you without actually knowing what you were thinking when you gave the answer. They should and will inevitably err on the side of caution when a user gives an answer where it’s not actually clear they understand the word.
Anki style introduces the ability to be more easily abused, but I’d say if you have a healthy mindset towards srs it shouldn’t be an issue. I used self check for a large portion of my maybe 20000+ srs cards when I was learning for this reason. For the input things I used I always used an undo script for times where I actually knew it and the platform just didn’t like my answer.