Let us gather around and unburden ourselves of the guilt we feel to this day.
I make this plea:
Crabigator, give us the grace to accept with serenity the errors that cannot be changed
The courage to change the typos that should be corrected, and the wisdom to know one from another.
What is script abuse?
Script abuse is when you use a userscript to cheat the system in wanikani, to the point at which it becomes a habbit that over time ends up leaving you in a bad situation. Whether it’s using an ‘undo’ script to change your answer because you 'totally knew that’ or using a re-order script to always get your kanji lessons, while ignoring your vocabulary lessons.
What are the dangers?
- Not actually learning properly - always correcting yourself rather than letting an item drop a level is a road to never actually getting the item properly lodged in your memory. Certainly the item will level up and get out of your queue for a while, but eventually it will come back and you may find you don’t remember it at all.
- Overloading yourself with old lessons - if you go two or three levels without touching your vocabulary lessons you can end up with potentially hundreds of lessons in your queue. Not only does this present a problem in terms of catching up, but it also ignores the fact that the vocabulary lessons themselves aid in recalling the kanji readings and in learning alternate readings.
Are scripts the problem?
Absolutely not! Scripts are actually extremely useful and all scripts have a purpose. In the same way that cake is quite clearly the best thing ever, but if you abuse it by eating if for every meal, you’re going to get sick. Ultimately self control is the issue here, some of us have a lot, some of us (me) don’t!
So why this thread?
Lots of us have stories about how we abused scripts in the past and I thought it would be helpful to share them in one place, rather than scattered across the forums, in the hopes that people learn to use scripts responsibly!
What’s my personal horror story?
Let me tell you a tale of weakness and woe.
I have been on WaniKani for two years now, but I have twice taken long periods of time away. When I first levelled from 1-8 I made liberal use of undoing my answers. Because of this, I remebered next to nothing after a few months. So I reset to level 1.
I was then so desperate to level quickly that I skipped a lot of vocab lessons, cherry picking my kanji and radicals as I went. This went on for enough time and to such an extent that I found myself with over 600 vocab lessons undone. I’m now facing that mountain and pledging myself to remain 0/0, but I only have myself to blame for being in this situation.
If we take the time to unburden ourselves of this guilt, we can pledge ourselves to be better and hopefully disade others from this path.
