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.
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.
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.
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.
Since there is considerable confusion about what I’m “proposing” (I know Wanikani won’t change, I was just throwing the idea out there). Let me clarify it as:
“If a translation, viewed on its own, has a verb meaning in English it should be preceded by ‘to’. If and only if it intends the noun of identical form (‘(a) suit’ vs ‘to suit’) it should not be preceded by ‘to’.”
For comparison, the current Wanikani rule is
“If a word is classified as a verb in Japanese grammar, ‘to’ is used in the English translation.”
(好き and 嫌い seem to be exceptions)
I had a brief look through the vocab list but I can’t find one where I did that, sorry.
Ah, I was reading it as a noun, sorry.
I really just wanted to point out a contradiction.
I do not mind giving an adjective a noun translation and vice versa. Just pick what fits the meaning best, I’ll sort out part of speech.
Do you have an example sentence in English where it’s used as a noun?
“There is a whisper in my ear” sounds more like auditory hallucinations than “Someone whispered in my ear” to me. 
I think we just have different conceptions about English.
“to suit” is the “original” form of the verb to me.
It’s not forming anything and it’s not a grammatical alteration.
Note how the nouns are listed as “suit” and the verbs as “to suit”.
(Yes, I know some dictionaries list it as “suit, v.” or the like instead.)
I will readily concede the point that I may have an unusual conception about English due to being ESL.
Also, if Kanji are not part of speech, why can they be noun or adjectives?
I just don’t understand why it’s fine to drill a noun meaning for a Kanji but not a verb meaning.
Following your logic, shouldn’t Kanji that correspond to prefixes (like 不) be drilled with English prefixes (un-) instead of English words?
Why is it ok to drill 不 as “not” but it’s wrong for me to drill 合 as “to suit”?
(Again, I don’t care about mismatched part of speech, so I think it’s fine to drill 不 as ‘not’. I’m just trying to understand a perceived contradiction.)
No, it’s not.
The noun “suit” has little to do with the verb “to suit”.
When I see “suit” I think “the noun ‘suit’” not “the verb ‘suit’” (because people usually write “to suit” when they mean that).
I get that you can infer the meaning from all three.
But “a join” and “a fit” are nouns with different meanings as well.
The ambiguity of English noun/verb meanings is a minefield that consistent use of “to” just bypasses entirely.
“to suit” would be the most natural thing for me to drill because it’s clearly associated with the right meaning.
I’m sure you can start a brawl by asking a group of linguists “Are na-adjectives adjectives or nouns?”.
I prefer to think of them as nouns (na-nominals), but I was following Wanikani terminology in making my argument.
I really do not transfer parts of speech between languages.
In German I might say “Ich hab dich gern” (lit. something like “I have you enjoyably”) which uses an adverb to express “I like you”.
You can also say “I am fond of you” in English, using an adjective.
Similarly, in Latin and Spanish to express “I like X” (X being a thing, in this case) you have to swap subject and object positions (“X me delectat” / something with “me gusta” = “X pleases me”).
Grammar is just a technicality that is not worth keeping across translations.
I don’t have statistics on that
Often enough to be frustrating.
It just feels wrong to drill ‘suit’. I want to enter ‘to suit’.
I have to force myself to remember not to do it and it still feels wrong.
I would have to undo years of drilling English vocabulary always strictly prepending ‘to’ to the verb.
Yes it’s possible, but I just don’t see the point.
That’s what I’ve been doing, I’d just like to automate it.
Treating the Japanese school grammar as gospel is silly, I think.
School grammars are often arbitrary constructs that don’t really make all that much sense, that’s why they’re often ignored in foreign language teaching, but they’re traditional so people are resistant to changing them in native language teaching.
English also has “traditional grammar” which is mostly based on incorrect and inappropriate comparisons with Latin.
E.g. “I like skiing” has skiing as a gerund but “The man skiing on the mountain slipped” has skiing as a participle.
(Modern English grammar just considers it both to be gerunds)
I think there are good arguments why な is not an inflectional suffix.
I personally think of な as the attributive form of the copula だ although it’s “defective” in the sense that it can only be used after な-nominals or before の.
Note that the “English” terms are really Latin terms that were repurposed for English
I don’t really have an objection to transferring them to Japanese, too, even though “nouns” and “verbs” don’t directly correspond.
Even JSL which uses “different terms” because the author worried about confusion picked terms that are closely related (nominals, verbals, adjectivals).
Feels like you’re moving the goalposts. It doesn’t have to be a phrase someone would actually say in English, because that’s not the purpose. Isn’t the most “dictionary-esque” definition something like “the act of whispering into an ear”? And yet, no one is ever going to say anything like that.
But sure, even though I don’t have to, “he was awoken by a whisper in his ear.”
No one said that they are “gospel” (I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean) but if you start to mix and match with things like “形容動詞 aren’t actually adjectives” it starts to become pretty confusing, because you’re talking about one language using words that are going to be misinterpreted because the other terms aren’t defined for that language.
Good point. I was really just curious because I couldn’t come up with a sensible way to see it as a noun phrase.
For me the Wanikani “translation” is just a “mnemonic” for the meaning, really.
I just find “to X” more evocative for the verb meaning than “X”.
I got the impression that there was some implication on EiriMatsu’s side that the Japanese school grammar is the “right” way to think about it and any explanation using “English”-derived terms (such as noun, adjective, etc.) is inherently less accurate.
I was just trying to inoculate against that belief, whether or not it was actually implied.
I agree. Mixing and matching up terms from different grammar systems is confusing.
I personally think the use of Japanese terms like 形容動詞 should be restricted to Japanese school grammar which means “形容動詞 don’t inflect” is inaccurate (because they do inflect in Japanese school grammar).
Kanji are not words, so they can’t be part of speech. There are one-kanji words, which is confusing, I know, but it’s not the same to have a one-kanji word that is a noun than a kanji to have a noun meaning. It’s ok to drill a kanji using the meaning of a verb, and I agree that it’s confusing not to see the infinitive form in WK, but whether you drill it using the meaning of an English verb, noun, adjective, etc., it’s important to remember that the kanji itself does not represent that part of speech, only words can do that (and again, that word can be made up of a single kanji).
You could add “to suit” as a synonym for 合 but you could also learn it as “suitable” or “suiting”, it’s a meaning, not a translation, whereas for 合う the most accurate meaning would be the translating it as the verb “to suit”.
不 does not correspond to a prefix, even if certain Japanese words containing it could be translated into English using the prefix un-, it does not mean that the kanji correspond to a prefix. Sure, you could learn it that way, it would just make it more confusing when you learn a word using that kanji and it is not translated using the prefix un-.
I know. They are morphemes, just like the various affixes (many from French/Latin/Greek) that English uses to compose words. E.g. “syn” (together) + “cret” (believe) + “ism” (ending for a ‘system’) or “con” (together) + “flu” (flow) + “ence” (nominaliser). None* of these are words in English and none have part of speech.
(* Well con and flu are but not with that meaning )
When I said “why can Kanji be nouns or adjectives” I was being imprecise, I meant to say “why can Kanji have meaning that correspond to nouns or adjectives but not verbs?”.
There is some objection here to drilling “to suit” because it’s a “verb” and Kanji are not verbs.
My argument is, “cat” is a noun and it’s fine to drill that.
“good” is an adjective and it’s fine to drill that.
“to suit” is a verb and it’s not fine to drill that?
Where is the logic?
(I think I realise now what’s going on: people here (native speakers?) think of “to X” as something that is “formed” as opposed to just being the English dictionary form of a verb)
I’m not sure I understand your objection. Is it that 不 is not always strictly a prefix or that it does not literally correspond to “un-”?
My main point was about part of speech, which both un- and 不 lack.
Looking at a dicitionary, indeed “join” apparently can be a noun. However, I have never heard that up until now, so I think you are fairly safe to assume “join” will be a verb 99% of the time. I do admit “fit” is quite commonly a noun as well, so it would not be as useful.
I think I would’ve been out of a job in the US if I’d taught that your second sentence example was a gerund and not a participle. 
There are plenty of ways of thinking about it, I suppose, but, as a Latin scholar myself, the difference between gerunds and participles are incredibly important for determining the difference between present continuous (progressive) tense and -ing adjectives. “He is boring” could mean “He is uninteresting” or that he is making a hole (without a stated object, of course).
In English grammar, infinitives, gerunds, and participles are not verbs but verbals. An action requires a tense in order to function as a verb, but infinitives, participles, and gerunds don’t apply a tense. Turning an infinitive to its present tense would be a grammatical alteration from an infinitive to a present tense verb. Dictionaries use the infinitive because it provides the present tense form of a verb without attributing any tense.
[quote=“aiju, post:32, topic:31847”]
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.
Kanji is formed by meaning and attributes sound, while English is formed by sound and attributes meaning. While most Latin- and Greek-based words contain roots that attribute meaning, native speakers (with no interest in literature) generally don’t retain knowledge on those roots consciously. I couldn’t say with any confidence that many people would understand if you said 時 meant “chron.” I’m quite certain that translating 耳 as “ot” would confuse any native unless they have etymological knowledge. As a result, the easiest way to translate the meaning of a kanji is to use an actual word
No, because they don’t line up exactly. Both 無 and 不 can produce translations resulting in un-, and not all proper translations of some Japanese words using those adjectives can have a negative prefix. It’s too inconsistent, and those prefixes meaning “not” anyway. The most comfortable translation of 不便 is “inconvenient,” using “in-” instead of “un-.” If you include “in-”, then what happens when you consider the Japanese for “income”?
Fair enough! 
I agree (I’m quite used to “join” being a noun from engineering contexts but I get it’s not the most common use).
I just wanted to point out how deep the noun/verb confusion goes in English.
But since when are Wanikani translations always 100% literal translations?
不正 is not literally “not correct”, it’s injustice.
And the best “in- does not mean not” example is inflammable
I fail to see how any of this is based on any sort of consistent standard (“The Crabigator is always right” does not count).
If the standard is “what makes the meaning clear?”, there is no reason not to translate the Kanji with “to”, which greatly disambiguates the meaning in some cases.
“to X” is the standard way to disambiguate nouns and verbs.
If the standard is “if X has part of speech Y in Japanese, then the translation should also have Y”, it can’t be applied to Kanji which don’t have part of speech.
Logically Kanji are affixes but people point out that translating them with English affixes would be too confusing (proving my point).
And it’s violated for nouns and adjectives vocabulary as well.
(All parts of speech are equal but some are more equal than others?)
If the standard is “Kanji can’t be described by meanings which include ‘grammatical alteration’”, that depends on a very specific interpretation of ‘grammatical alteration’.
(I wonder, are there any examples where Kanji have a meaning that involves plural or gerunds?)
People rightly point out issues with my examples where the meaning becomes less clear when you switch to a standard other than “make the meaning clear”.
But somehow we must not apply this standard to disambiguate “suit”, where it’s fine the meaning is ambiguous.