Subject Page / Lessons Makeover & New Context Feature!

Awesome, just as I’m finishing up on level 60 :smiley:

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Thanks Cam!

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Amazing feature! :durtle_love:
This looks very helpful! :durtle_noice:

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Thanks for pointing this out. I’m going to look into it!

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I just finished WK and I no longer have any more lessons. So, I never got to see the new cool lessons features. :pensive:

It does look great though! Great work WK team! ^^

CM5Ob2JWUAAI87T

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@camfugu this looks great! Might help me start to put my expanding vocab together rather than ending up with thousands and thousands of words I can’t use :joy: Obviously not your responsibility to teach me how to use Japanese but much appreciated!
When you say it’s going live on selected vocab only, is it focused on earlier levels or just words that the WK team are fans of, like crab and alligator? :high_touch:

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Thanks for this! Now I’ll have to actually look at the context sentences :smiley:

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Wow, I literally JUST looked up 生 because I was having trouble with it, saw this new feature, and came over to check what was up! This is great!

I’m new to WK (on LVL4) and it’s great to see that WK has such great support from everyone and gets continuous quality dev updates! I found that even the extended shake animations were recent, just before I joined, and it’s such a great feature. I appreciate the content overhaul to improve the mnemonics too :open_mouth:. I was very skeptical of mnemonics because I thought it was ridiculous but now I can’t wait to hit LVL60. :smiley:

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When you say it’s going live on selected vocab only, is it focused on earlier levels or just words that the WK team are fans of, like crab and alligator? :high_touch:

In our first launch of this feature, we focused on some of the vocabulary we have that are composed on only one kanji. The reason for this is to help you differentiate the kanji subject from the vocabulary itself. We will probably be adding to more of these single-kanji vocabulary, but also we plan to add to all types of vocabulary starting with the earlier levels.

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just noticed the update :eyes:

I’m always thankful that you keep bringing improvements to WaniKani but this time I would like to ask you to rollback the lesson changes, or at least give us an option to merge Reading and Context tabs again in one.

I usually study the reading, then read the Content sentences and check again if my reading is correct. Sometimes I even forgot mid-sentence and I check the reading again. Until this update I could do that in the same tab, but now I have to go back and forth so the vocabulary lesson study is a bit more inefficient for me.

So please, give us the option to merge both tabs again during lessons.

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I like it! I use these sentences to practice “sight reading” aloud. In particular, it helps to see the various ways a word might be used, as it’s easy to use a word by definition, but it turns out to be a misuse.

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Hey all, we iterated on this new feature and there are a couple updates I want to share with you!

  1. We added “Word Type” back to the Meaning slide in Lessons. Some users pointed out that having the word type/part of speech listed helps them understand the meaning of the word better as they are learning it, and we agreed that this makes perfect sense! So it’s added back to that slide :slight_smile:

  2. Common Word Combinations have made their way into Lessons! Note that we changed the header from “Word Type” to “Patterns of Use.” This is because as we add common word combos to more and more vocab, we realized that this would make more sense across the board (that’s right, more common word combos on their way too!)

  3. Context sentences are moved to their own slide for vocab that have common word combos.

Stay tuned for more updates! We’re hard at work making WaniKani more robust and effective for you! Cheers :v:t3:

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Oh sweet, thank you for the recent update Cam!

I’m someone who loves learning through patterns, so seeing more of the common word combinations contextually makes me feel like I’ll be able to tackle vocabulary and grammar down even better as time progresses. :durtle_noice:

Looking forward to slamming through my lessons now… ruh roh.

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@WaniMekani thank Cam


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I think the new context features are very cool, and I look forward to seeing them make their way into new words!

I’m a little bummed that the Word Type pane got taken out of the Context screen - for a while it was showing up under both Context and Meaning, which was ideal for me since I could glance at it on the Meaning tab and then think about how the word might be used in its other forms on the Context tab (also because I like to enter all my new words into Excel so I can more easily search them and use them to write practice sentences later, and that order matched the column order in my Excel sheet, lol). But I understand if it’s inconvenient for the majority of users.

Is there an easy way to remove this entire section and turn lessons back into a 3 slide window?

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No, there is not. If we get enough feedback from users that they don’t like this feature perhaps we will consider a way for it to be turned on/off, but as of now the update is for everyone. Can you explain further why you would want to turn it off?

Chido padrino

While I’m not the person who brought this up initially, I would like to add my point of view.

I would like to turn off the fourth page in the lessons because it is one more click that I need to perform for each lesson. (It takes time and it puts more strain on my wrists.)
And, in all honesty, I learned early on in my WK journey that the example sentences are either full of difficult words or have some sort of silly twist, both of which is not something I find very helpful when starting out with foreign language acquisition (via a foreign language btw), so I simply don’t look at the sentences at all. :woman_shrugging:

I would also be happy if you could further reduce the number of clicks by integrating the breakdown page into the readings and/or meanings page in the same way as you do in the reviews pages (where the breakdowns appear in the lower left corner). I find this much more intuitive because it gives me access to the information right where I need it (i.e. while thinking about a reading or a meaning).

And last not least (while I’m at it :wink: ) when I look at a vocab or kanji in the lessons, my first instinct is to think about the reading because that’s the most natural (and the most immersive) thing for me to do when I see a word - read it :slight_smile: So if I look at the word, trying to guess its reading, and if I then step through the panels in the given order, I am immediately pulled out of my thought process because I need to first learn the meaning and dive deeply into its mnemonic. Only then can I occupy myself with wondering about the reading and whether I guessed correctly or what its difficulties are. This interruption makes me a bit sad each time, and I also noticed that in cases where I’m really engaged with thinking about the reading, I tend to barely gloss over the meaning, which is often enough for the initial quiz but not enough to still know stuff after 4 hours…
Ideally I would like to go to the reading page, then back to the meaning, then to the next item. But more often than not I’m too lazy and just think that it will work out some way or another even if I don’t go back. So I’m wondering why WK intentionally set up this disruptive workflow? (Or am I the only person that starts to think about readings when reading a word or kanji? :thinking:)

(PS I know that there is a script that is supposed to rearrange the lesson pages, but it doesn’t work correctly on my computer. And I would really prefer WK to have a good workflow instead of being required to depend on a script tbh…)

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