nods
I do like the idea of that feedback cycle in Kitsun (and the ability to more easily manage updates to decks), but I tend to want to make destructive / layout changes to shared decks which I don’t think anyone would want me to upstream.
The part I’m not clear on is this distinction between community decks and personal decks, as AFAIK you are not allowed to export the former but can specifically request exporting the latter, so it seems like that distinction is being used for IP ownership or similar.
If it is for IP ownership then its DRM and I’m not a fan, if it is to lock people into the platform then I’m very uncomfortable, but it is pretty much impossible to tell these apart.
I tend to pretty freely mix my decks together, and try to modify the shared and personal decks to have a very consistent feel, which I think wouldn’t work in Kitsun.
oops sorry I realise my original phrasing was poor.
What I was trying to say is that the developers of Kitsun deserve to make money for the work they do, as I was worried that my statements could be taken to mean otherwise and wanted to clarify.
+1
I personally wouldn’t charge for my decks and prefer to use decks which are free, sometimes I will give a small tip to deck creators if they do a lot of work or I find myself regularly using their decks or engaging with them.
There are deck creators who charge money and supposedly offer higher quality decks, but I tend to make my own decks for most of my content (often from WK book club vocab decks, or my own reading), personally I don’t really see the need to buy into someone else’s deck ecosystem (yet?).
nods
I get that, for a long time I was frustrated at WK because of this and didn’t want to use it, it took repeated nudging from a friend for me to seriously try it, and even after that I was grumpy/frustrated for a while.
I eventually kind of changed my position by reflecting on what I actually wanted WK for, for me personally I want WK to be a supporting element of my study rather than the core.
I regularly add new Kanji vocab to Anki above my current WK level, as my Anki tends to focus on reinforcing words I’ve encountered in reading (or pre-learning words I am about to encounter).
AFAIK the deck exports from Kitsun are only for personal decks, and they are CSV and don’t include progress. I’d be interested in knowing if they included media, but I’m assuming/hoping they have some mechanism to include images/audio in the export.
AFAIK it was also a manual process where you had to email the dev, which seemed like unnecessary friction. It’s possible that my understanding on this is out dated.
The power of the API in WK for me is also more than just an export, I (or someone else) could hack together a different WK frontend and use that to study rather than the main website (the WK API allows making changes, rather than just reading). This is what enables 3rd parties to write mobile apps for WK.
Yeah, having to type out vocab is a mixed bag.
There is also Lipsurf which has special features where you can speak the answer to your WK reviews in Japanese instead of typing them out, but the WK functionality is locked behind a subscription ($3-4/month) and only works in Chrome, I set it up the other day to try test it but couldn’t even test the WK features without paying so I gave up on it for now.
I haven’t yet used Talon much with WK yet, as I’d need to figure out a better solution for typing out the answer than dictating each character one by one. I had tried to use Mac’s Japanese dictation, but it emits Kanji which Wanikani refuses. I bet there will be a bunch of WK plugins to help me, just need to get around to finding them.
ahh yeah, the known words feature of Kitsun is cool.
If I were importing more decks it’d be a bigger issue, but for now I tend to make my own decks - either from manga / anime I’m consuming, or sometimes by looking over WK vocab sheets.
I have been thinking about finding a better way of parsing through entire game scripts to generate cards from, so I could see Kitsun having some cool features in that space which would likely help, today I came across Lapis (wk forums, website) which looks promising too.
nods
For Anki this is a bit easier than WK scripts, as I can put all of my plugins inside a system for synchronising files across machines (I use Git, but it’s basically like Dropbox except less user friendly).
Since I’m a developer I already have a lot of things I want to sync between machines so I’ve already paid the upfront time cost to get this working. I get how having it all on a centralised website could be a big win.
Thanks for taking the time to reply and being so friendly and polite, I was initially worried about posting in this thread as I didn’t want to risk inciting passionate users 