Hi everyone 
You know the shake animation and messages you get if you enter a different reading for a kanji, or accidentally enter a word’s reading into its meaning review? Soon, we’re going to be extending the shake and message to a few more scenarios, including if you accidentally enter:
- a kanji meaning for an identical radical
- a radical meaning for an identical kanji
- a vocabulary meaning for an identical kanji
- a vocabulary’s meaning into its reading field
That means that instead of marking these answers as incorrect, you’ll see a shake animation and have another chance to answer, with no consequences for SRS stages. The idea is that we don’t mark an answer as incorrect if it’s a slip-up, and not related to your Japanese knowledge.
Update: All of the following changes are now live! Read on for full details of what has changed.
So what’s new exactly?
With this update, all the following actions now trigger the shake animation and a warning message, in both lesson quizzes and reviews.
Entering a kanji meaning for an identical radical
If you accidentally enter a kanji meaning for a radical that is identical to that kanji, it will result in a shake and a warning. For example, if you enter “again” for the radical “stool” (又):
Entering a radical meaning for an identical kanji
Conversely, if you accidentally enter a radical meaning for a kanji that is identical to that radical, it will result in a shake and a warning. For example, if you enter “stool” for the kanji “again” (又):
Entering a vocabulary meaning for an identical kanji
In cases where vocabulary consists of a single kanji and nothing else, you’ll now get a shake and a message if you accidentally enter the vocabulary meaning for the corresponding kanji. For example, if you enter “tip” for the kanji 先:
This will also work for single-kanji vocabulary that includes a tilde (〜). So if you enter “boy name ender” (the meaning of 〜君) for the kanji 君:
And in case you’re wondering, we also added a shake for the opposite case, so if you enter “buddy” for 〜君, you’ll also get a shake.
Entering a vocabulary’s meaning into its reading field
Accidentally typing the meaning when we are asking for the reading:
This shake is designed to catch errors that come from going fast and not noticing that we’re asking for the reading rather than the meaning. Please note that you won’t get the shake if you use backspace or modify your answer some other way (e.g. by selecting it or copy and pasting from elsewhere).
For example, if you type にね instead of きゅう for 九 you will see the shake and warning. However if you then delete all the contents and type にね again, it will be marked as wrong. Similarly, if you type にね and delete then retype the ね, you won’t get the shake.
Adding “to” to the beginning of a kanji meaning
We always ask you to type “to” at the beginning of our verb meanings for vocabulary, and we’ve had feedback that this sometimes accidentally carries over to kanji meanings, which never have that “to” on the beginning. We don’t think you should be penalised for this, so now you’ll have a shake instead of being marked wrong.
So for example, if you type “to go” instead of “go” for the kanji 行:
Typing too many "n"s
Typing one too few "n"s in a Reading answer field already triggers a shake and message. Now the same thing will happen if you enter one too many "n"s.
For example, if you type せんに instead of せんい for 繊維:
The message is a little less explicit here, because we want to make sure it was definitely a typo and you do in fact know the correct reading.
Impossible kana combinations
If you accidentally type something into the reading field that doesn’t exist in standard Japanese, you should now get a shake. For example, if you type “sshita” instead of “shita” and end up with っした for the vocabulary word 下, you’ll get a shake:
We’ll be refining this last scenario over time, but we hope it will already catch quite a few more typos and give you a chance to show that you really did know the answer.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback or questions, let us know below or send us an email at hello@wanikani.com.
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