tl:dr; Typing with IME results in very inconsistance behavior with the Synonym input.
I. Opening
Just a heads up, this post will speak for a very small type of users: Non-English-Speaker that has to use a special IME to type their native language.
I’m a Vietnamese that has chosen Wanikani for my Japanese Endevors other than my native apps because:
- I don’t want to forget English as I progress through Japanese. Seeing I can learn Japanese with English sounds like a win-win to me. And tis went great so far, other than some minor details which I’ll suck it up like a man and deal with it.
- Quite frankly, my native apps kinda suck. Other than a good Jisho which I’ll mention later here, I don’t have much to work with.
And for the Japanese level, I’m currently holding a N2 since July 2024 (which I barely passed with 1 point to spare: 91). My Reading and Listening Comprehension went quite great but I was scrapping by on the Goi/Kanji section so I decided to take it slow and grind my vocabulary/grammar/kanji for now.
II. The “Problem”
Now thats out of the way, let me present my minor but frustrating problem when using Wanikani, especially on the Lessons: Typing Vietnamese in the Synonym. IME will not trigger unless I input a special character to “wake” the IME up, or turn it on and off, on every. single. lesson.
Naturally, I also want to understand and remember the vocabulary in my native language. A bit of history for you guys but Vietnamese and Japanese both derived from Chinese. Which means that a lot of Japanese words have equivalent meaning and surprisingly similar reading to Vietnamese, and that’s pretty cool to remember. So, imagine me learning a word, “管理” for instance. I would take the world, paste it in my go-to Jisho app and got the meaning for it in my native language, some explanation and a few often-used examples which is very cool. But the part I look at the most would be the Vietnamese-Chinese meaning for it because its meaning derived straight from its reading most of the time. In this case:
- 管: かん - Quản - Manage
- 理: り - Lý - Reason
If you paste these into Google translate and listen to the reading, they both sounds bloody familiar, because they are originally from the same Chinese character. And that’s why I also want to type in these meanings when learning new kanji to help me remember better.
With that being said, I will demonstrate my typing experience with another example:
Normally I can just type it down and done with it, but with this issue I would often:
1. Type down the word
2. Delete everything up until there are no vowels left
3. “Activate” the IME
4. Retype it again
And sometimes, realize that y is also a vowel sometimes, delete the y, retype the word, realize that the accent mark is at a wrong possition, delete the whole thing, and type it down for the last time. Granted I can “activate” the IME first but I’m an idiot who resets its memory every 15 seconds. My aho-ass has to type a word upto 4 times with a word instead of one, and the frustration builds up after over 50 times per day, every day.
III. But why?
I wanted to rant, thats all. And it would be nice if it is fixed and I know it can be fixed because the Review input doesn’t have that issue, but (being a fellow software engineer) I reckon it would be so low on the Trello Board it would take a few months at least for the dev team to even consider this.
