The description says I'm right

[mariner929]

[Belthazar]

It means “few”, and not “a few”.

[Pizh]

Try Anki, Kitsun, etc. and you will be gladful we have Wanikani’s algorithm.

[Stay_coolXD]

This happen to me too🤣

[Kinozato]

Which is weird because the word “few” means “a few”. There’s no such thing as few meaning only 1 single item hence “a few” is a perfectly way to describe it.

I understand the radical means few but I’ve also gotten words wrong where I believe the WK team could have added similar word choice to accept the answer. For example:

下さい means: please give me

I put “give me please” and it was marked wrong. One could argue that saying “give me please” sounds demanding because you’re not beginning the sentence with please but c’mon! Lol it is the same thing.

Also:

“Before the end of this year” is the exact same thing as “before the year ends”

So OP, don’t fret. I’ve had my share of answers such as this as well but it doesn’t make me upset anymore. I just learn from them and move on

[Belthazar]

@Kinozato

There’s no such thing as few meaning only 1 single item hence “a few” is a perfectly way to describe it.

Well no, because that’s not really how you use “few”. “There are few remedies for the common cold” is different to “there are a few remedies for the common cold” - the first means “not many” while the second means “more than none”. Either way, though, we’re talking about the radical form here - it’s just a name that we can designate it by later on rather than an actual sentence component.

@Kinozato

One could argue that saying “give me please” sounds demanding because you’re not beginning the sentence with please but c’mon! Lol it is the same thing.

One could, yes, but one is arguing with a computer, and the computer’s not listening. It needs to be explicitly told what answers are correct. It’s programmed to give you a bit of leeway - if you said “Pleese give me” by accident, you’d get a “close enough is good enough”. In such cases, you’re free to add a user synonym.

[Leebo]

@Kinozato

Which is weird because the word “few” means “a few”. There’s no such thing as few meaning only 1 single item hence “a few” is a perfectly way to describe it.

They’re different parts of speech. But the kanji doesn’t really need to be thought of as adhering to English parts of speech. As mentioned, synonyms solve this problem.

[plantron]

@mariner929

A legitimate complaint, but we’ll let the @mods decide.

[FlareW]

I broke down and got the ignore answers script because of things like this. I make a lot of typos and eventually being marked wrong because I typed “Un” instead of “Uni” was the final straw The script is surprisingly easy to use as intended (rather than abuse, which I was worried I might be tempted to do). I guess it’s different when your goal is learning rather than getting through a class or something. [OBSOLETE] Wanikani Override ("ignore answer button")

[WeebPotato]

In this case it’s failing the answer because “few” has only 3 letters and the correct answer needs to have 4 or more to accept typos or tiny variants which wouldn’t warrant N additional synonyms.

For ください it’s easiest to type in “please” which saved me personally a lot of trouble.

But yes, I completely agree with OP. The further you go, the more troublesome it becomes to remember specific translations when you know the meaning of a word/phrase and can just as easily put in any of the N possible translations. I just give up on these and let them gravitate between Apprentice and Guru or if I’m really hangup, stick them into an Anki set .

[Kinozato]

I understand the example that you give but ultimately you are giving the same message, just worded differently.

Also, by definition “more than none” means as long as you have at least 1. But at least 1 does not satisfy the condition of “a few”. I don’t believe you can say that “a few” means “more than none”

[MissDagger]

@Kinozato

I understand the example that you give but ultimately you are giving the same message, just worded differently.

I wouldn’t necessarily agree with this, because they would be used in different contexts.

“There are few remedies for the common cold” implies that there are not many ways to treat the common cold. Perhaps the context is that despite the common cold being common, there are few remedies for it.

“There are a few remedies for the common cold” instead implies that there are in fact several ways to treat the common cold. So in a way they actually imply completely opposite things. The context for this one could be someone saying there are no treatments/remedies for the common cold.

But this is nitpicking about nuance, and perhaps depending on how the context would be around these sentences, even my interpretation could be turned around on itself. But that was how I’d analyze the sentences by themselves.

But this really has nothing to do with the radical “few” being marked wrong for “a few”, which in the context of the radical is basically the same thing. I also use a script to fix such “mistakes” because they aren’t mistakes at all.

[UInt2048]

@mariner929 It looks like you’re on Android. You could use a mobile app such as Jakeipuu or Flaming Durtles!

P.S. In their settings, there should be an option to enable a button that lets you override such cases as correct if you want. You should do so sparingly, however, and not use it to override actual mistakes as “correct”

However, I do agree that there are actually differences in meaning sometimes with what you type and the accepted correct answer - such as what Belthazar and MissDagger above pointed out.

[Belthazar]

@Kinozato

But at least 1 does not satisfy the condition of “a few”. I don’t believe you can say that “a few” means “more than none”

That wasn’t meant to be a clinical definition of “a few” as “an integer that’s greater than zero” but rather a contrast in a few (heh) words of the difference between “a few” and “few” - that is, they can refer to the same number, but “a few” gives an impression of “some exist”, whereas “few” is more “less than many exist”.

Let me use a more concrete example.

“A few people were in the room” = I counted the people in the room, and there’s somewhere between a couple and several.
“Few people were in the room” = I was expecting the room to be packed, but there’s only somewhere between a couple and several people there.

But yeah, we’re digressing.

[evandcs]

I would just add as synonym

problem solved

[VegasVed]

The digression is far more interesting than the main topic. Unfortunately, most threads where that happened ended up getting locked .

[TheCodingFox]

The problem is that the computer does not actually know English, it does not understand the meaning of anything. It is looking for a certain sequence of letters and it will allow a certain percentage of difference from the values it considers valid. The shorter the word is, the larger of an error percentage a single letter can become. When the expected answer is 3 characters long, a single character difference is 33% wrong.

[JenK]

Thanks for pointing this out. If you could add this to your user synonym, that’d be great: User Synonyms | WaniKani Knowledge
I don’t think we’ve had too many people request ‘a few’ since few is shorter and people find it easier to remember (and like others have said, there are slight differences between the two, at least in English).

Also just FYI, for words that are only 3 letters, you have to get it 100% correct for the typo tolerance to mark it correct. If you have a letter wrong or you add an extra letter, it’ll mark it wrong.