Ah yes, ku-adverbs. Good point. They don’t quite qualify though because they are almost certainly unambiguously adverbs if you know the meaning.
I get the @aiju’s frustration as it’s difficult to mentally map English “infinitive form” (to eat) to the Japanese “dictionary form” (食べる) which means more “eat” than “to eat”.
@aiju: while I get your frustration, I think your first inclination on this thread is the right one. Use a script to get past the particular WK behaviour that doesn’t work for you. Install the Override script or the Double-Check script and use them only if you accidentally don’t type “to” or whatever. (Or use them however you like as long as you don’t forgive yourself for genuine mistakes.) Problem solved and you don’t need to question a WK principle that seems to work for most people.
I do use the Override script on occasion when I know the meaning of the word but get the “part of speech” part wrong, because in some cases I think it’s a distinction without a difference when going from Japanese to English because words meaning the same thing are used in very different ways.
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Yeah I though there’d be a few exceptions but couldn’t think of any. I think it’s a decent guideline to at least get most of them right.
Yes, I understand it’s fine for most people. I’m not asking WK to change. I’m just explaining how I feel about it.
I suspect it’s related to my general difficulty with distinguishing kanji and vocab. I’m not really sure what’s going on with that but it’s a very common error for me. I just tend to focus completely on the shape of the kanji and often forget to consider the things surrounding it. Colour is particularly useless for me.
Yes, these things are not a problem if I do Wanikani paying 110% attention to it but doing that every single time I sit down to do reviews would burn me out very quickly.
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Believe me, I totally get the frustration. If it’s any consolation, I was quite similarly frustrated with the “dumb” mistakes I was making at around your level*. And I also didn’t want to use a script to forgive myself these dumb mistakes, because as much as I didn’t like it, I believed that through pain comes enlightenment (or something silly like that).
But whether through greater mindfulness or just getting used to the system I did get better at not doing things like confusing kanji for vocabulary or writing reading instead of meaning, etc.
So you might find that your problems clear up in a few levels. In my case, I did eventually decide to install the Override script at a certain point, but by then I’d been using WK so long without it, that I was pretty sure I could trust myself not to abuse it.
When I said what you quoted above, it was really from the point of view of trying to save you from feeling so frustrated. But I also understand the need to vent a little. Anyway, keep your chin up, because even 11 levels isn’t enough to fully acclimate to the WK system. You’ll get there.
*I still make plenty of mistakes in my reviews, but these days it’s mainly things that I just can’t seem to remember. And then eventually after inventing all sorts of silly mnemonics, I do start remembering them.
大嫌い for example marks as wrong if you type “really dislike” or “really hate” without putting “to” before it.
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Isn’t that just a matter of them not having gone to the effort of listing all the possible permutations? “Hate” is the main meaning.
And while that still is presumably something the OP doesn’t like, the fact that we almost invariably translate that word as a verb in English is just the reality of it, even though it’s not a verb in Japanese.
That’s not a verb though? Even in the example sentences they still add しました to the end which is a conjugation of the する verb. I’m still learning a lot, but I don’t think you can 耳打ち as a verb. While the translation “whisper in ear” sounds like an English verb, Japanese has its own grammar system with verbs.
I could be wrong though.
I think the “to” is important, it makes sure you know which verbs are so when you are thinking in your head you will be able to easily pick out the verbs and produce sentences correctly.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not agreeing with the OP. I strongly believe that the “to” of the infinitive should always be included with verbs. I was simply providing an example of one of those cases where confusion arises due to differences in how certain English verbs are treated as adjectives in Japanese.
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I know Koichi has said before that they require “to” before verbs so that they know you can identify it as a verb.
I figured someone would bring up 好き or 嫌い as confusing, but that’s English’s fault.
I’m not sure if people just don’t know the user synonyms exist or if they just refuse to use it, but a lot of these problems are solved with that alone.
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What are you implying that I don’t like?
I don’t treat Wanikani pairs as 1:1 translations because that’s often quite misleading and wrong.
They’re mostly just mental crutches to establish some links between meanings.
That’s also why I care more about identifying the intended meaning (suit vs to suit) rather than part of speech.
Part of speech is naturally different in different languages and encoding the Japanese part of speech into the English meaning is confusing to me.
Also note that Wanikani does not apply this “matching part of speech” idea to anything but things that are verbs in English or Japanese.
None of the meanings of 好き listed are adjectives even though it’s usually a na-adjective in Japanese!
きもちいい is an even more obvious example, an i-adjective that’s listed as “good feeling” which makes it sound like a noun.
Correct, it’s not a verb, in Japanese, in the strict sense, since in ‘proper speech’ it requires する.
But I think about English meaning which is a verb.
You mean the “to” of English infinitives should be dropped when the Japanese entry is not a verb?
Or do you, in fact, agree with me that ‘to’ should be attached to English verbs?
(The script idea is just more practical than implementing this ‘correctly’)
I do use user synonyms extensively, often for things where the synonym I provide is wrong on some technical level but where it has become “code” for the correct meaning in my head (e.g. literal translation of Kanji compounds where such a translation isn’t the equivalent phrase in English but makes perfect sense if you think about it).
I’m kind of curious of some examples where you did this, if you have any on hand.
I’ll be honest I don’t really know what you don’t like, because each time I think I do it seems like I don’t.
気持ちいい風
A good feeling breeze
Seems fine to me, but you don’t like that one either… Really not sure what you want them to do with it.
For 耳打ち and “(a) whisper in (an) ear”? As I said, I’ve always seen it as a noun, just with the articles omitted, but you seem to have different interpretations if ambiguity is possible.
Pardon my confusion, but I don’t think I understand the issue clearly.
If a Vocabulary item ends in a う-based kana, it is highly likely it uses “to.” Aside from this, 好き, 嫌い, and their variations likely use “to.”
If する isn’t there, it’s not a verb. WaniKani has a separate vocabulary for a large amount of the nouns with a suru function.
Kanji have no part of speech, so applying a grammatical alteration to the meaning (turning a verb into an infinitive through the addition of “to”) is not accurate.
That’s exactly the purpose.
The others already covered this, but this is just a (poor) translation choice on the part of WaniKani. A better translation is “whispering in one’s ear” to actually place a nominal participle there, but it’s also wordy. If WaniKani had intended for it to be a verb, the answer would have been “to whisper in one’s ear,” which would be the suru verb meaning and therefore have been 耳打ちする.
To be fair to WaniKani, the site is designed with the assumption you’ll use the mnemonics. If you do, that misunderstanding shouldn’t be a problem, since it also includes the alternatives “join” and “fit.” Both of those are also official synonyms, so why not use those if “suit” causes you confusion?
In all technically, by function, na-adjectives aren’t even adjectives, but attributive nouns. As English uses attributive nouns completely differently, there is no good way to translate them while maintaining the part of speech exactly. In the case of 好き and 嫌い, I’ve always personally vouched against translating them as “to like” and “to hate” since that’s not how they function grammatically, but that’s the usual method for almost any system.
As for 気持ちいい, I see where you’re coming from, honestly, as most translators don’t even translating that phrase that way. “Feeling” in this case acting as an attributive noun (or one could argue it’s “to feel” acting as a participle) and modified by “good,” like in @Leebo’s example. The noun phrase would actually be reversed as いい気持ち. The biggest problem here really as the dual nature of “feeling” as “emotion” and “sensation.” It may just be my reason of the United States, but I don’t think I’d ever actually say “good feeling” either as an attributive noun phrase or an adjective when referring to “sensation” (which this phrase does). I’d just say that “the wind feels good.” That’s also how I’m used to seeing the phrase translated. “Good feeling” or “feel-good” I am accustomed to viewing as referring to “emotion” unless context says otherwise.
As for what I understand to be the core issue, how often is this causing you problems? Rather than needing a script to accomplish, I feel just adding/removing a “to” by making a synonym when you come across a problem word would solve your problem. Of course, should you have trust in your integrity, the Double Check and Override scripts would work fine). I personally think that simply researching further why WaniKani choose the translation they did (for example, 気持ちいい is both “good feeling” and “feeling good” on Jisho) will help ingrain that response further. Sure, it takes a little more work, but learning a language is one of the hardest educational endeavors one can attempt.
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What exactly does that mean? By default, な adjectives can’t function as 名詞. When they can, it’s an exception. I think using the English parts of speech just gets messy anyway.
形容動詞 may not be able to function as 名詞, but they function like 名詞 in how they behave grammatically. 形容動詞 cannot be conjugated or turned directly into 副詞 like 形容詞 can. Like 名詞, they are stuck as they are and require a particle to function (nouns require の to become attributive while 形容詞 require な).
It’s likely more accurate to simply refer to 形容動詞 as adnominal adjectives, since they don’t correctly function as any standard part of speech in English. I referred to them as attributive nouns because of their behavior, but you are correct that, unlike in English, where all attributive nouns are actually nouns, 形容動詞 cannot be 名詞 despite behaving like them.
形容動詞 in 連体形 are essentially 名詞 in that you can replace the 形容動詞 with a 名詞 and the な with a の and the form is essentially the same. This is exemplified further by 連体詞, as they carry specific functions separate from their 形容詞 pairs and usually cannot perform adverbially.
I completely agree that English and Japanese parts of speech comparisons are incredibly difficult to accomplish accurately. 
One of the defining traits of 形容動詞 is that they are conjugated…
Are we referring to conjugation the same way? I consider the copula (な・だ・に・で) to be a separate component from the 形容動詞. Meanwhile 形容詞 drop the い in place of conjugated endings like verbs.
静か is always しずか; it’s the copula afterword that conjugates.
美味しい becomes 美味しかった, 美味しく, etc.
I’m referring to conjugation the way that Japanese grammar refers to conjugation, if we’re going to use the Japanese term 形容動詞. One of the defining features of 形容動詞 is 活用がある.
名詞 do not conjugate.
https://www.weblio.jp/content/形容動詞
Here’s a video on the conjugation of 形容動詞.
And of course, yes, 形容詞 also conjugate, no one is saying they don’t.
So anyway, like I said, it ends up making things messier when we mix the English parts of speech and the Japanese parts of speech in the same explanations. It’s simpler to keep it restricted to the Japanese perspective.
Interesting. I find it strange that counts as conjugation, as that makes it seem like 名詞 would conjugate too, but I will take that up with my 国語先生, as this has digressed far enough (sorry OP! 
). I do appreciate the insight on the Japanese side though, as my grammatical comprehension is still largely based off of comparisons from English.
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