I thought you were just talking about the spoken pronunciation.
I am. That’s why misspelling isn’t a thing. This is what I talked about in my post about 王
Oh okay. I’m clear now. Thanks 
I’m having a hard time accepting this concept though when we have “っ” and that can change the word completely.
Like 音（おと） vs 夫（おっと）
BUT I get what you’re saying, and I know they aren’t the same thing.
I was probably unclear here. It is not required of course. It just makes more sense to me and I don’t encounter the problem that the OP encountered.
My irritation with wk is when I forget the little う in things like じゅう or しゅう、にゅう、りょう、じょう どうect… I add it in because sometimes the kanji reading will have it but the vocab reading for the same kanji doesn’t have it, and the female reading won’t pronounce it but often the male pronunciation will have it. So often im getting a mistake counted against me when it was a spelling mistake. I wish wk would do the little shake thing for missing just the う at the end.
Sorry, I meant misspelling isn’t a thing in the specific context of how you choose to represent reading between the different ways I listed. It’s a 書き方 vs 読み方 thing. オウ or オー would be weird ways to write 王, but they wouldn’t necessarily be weird ways to represent the reading. Similarly おっと or オット is fine for 夫. But if you did it like おと for 夫 then yeah that’s just straight up wrong. Similarly トーカ would be fine for 十日 or 投下, but if you asked someone the 書き方 for either in hiragana then the potential for a misspelling arises.
We don’t have the ability to depict readings in English like Japanese does since we don’t have a nice phonetic system like them and instead need to use other systems. But in Japanese the concept of 読み方 is its own distinct thing that isn’t necessarily bound by the conventions of how you would typically write words in everyday situations.
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It’s just having you write it in because that’s how Katakana words with long vowels are written. While the pronunciation/reading is correct, a Japanese IME would not let you type びいだま for ビー玉, it would not come up. It’s annoying but also a necessary thing to type for katakana words. There will be more katakana vocab that come up that will require the dash so just be prepared for it.
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Ok, I get it now. Thank you. Sorry for the constant back and forth T-T
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All good, I probably should have taken time to just write out one longer clear response when I first came into the thread rather than a bunch of shorter responses in between work as well lol.
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The issue might be about the language being mora/syllable-timed. Need to get used to.
Actually, it’s also about input methods, IME, here.
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Probably just me, but i try to never use the hiragana for katakana, just so I don’t forget about katakana and never have it in my head. it’s a little annoying on mobile, but I make due.
As far as requiring the - instead of the elongated vowel, feels like them just re-enforcing the “correct” way of writing katakana words with elongation. It isn’t penalizing you, just telling you to go do it correct, like when I get a “technically correct, but there’s a more common way of saying that” prompt for when I type ねんちゅう instead of ねんじゅう.
How I personally see it.
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This too took me a while to get used to, but I’ve come to think it’s a much more fundamental part of the language than is initially obvious for a native English speaker, as @polv points out.
じょし and じょうし might be very difficult for an English speaker to initially hear the difference between, but to a native Japanese speaker they hear totally different words (same goes for the yoon characters, like びょういん vs びよういん). I think it’s probably for the best that kanji and vocab teaching programs don’t really hand-hold here between the two.
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Well yeah the pitch accent is completely different when you hear it spoken by a native speaker but my personal issue is hearing specifically the very very quiet almost unvoicedう in the feminine pronunciation example for most of these different spellings
Amusingly in my experience it’s a lot more common for Japanese people to use ー instead of the repeated vowel even in hiragana than the other way around when writing informally. It’s very common in manga for instance:
しようがない→しょうがねぇ→しょーがねぇ
いいけど→いーけど
そういう→そうゆう→そーゆー
Regarding the question at hand I think WaniKani’s decision is reasonable, it’s not outright incorrect but it’s also probably not how you want to spell it.
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I just had one. WK wanted “with all one’s might”. I missed the ‘the’. Result; marked incorrect. It’s frustrating. The Onyomi vs Kunyomi is frustrating too. I never know which is which. I just use the reading I’m most familiar with…. which usually seems to be the wrong one.
Missing a word you definitely knew is frustrating, definitely. That’s just where you need to add user synonyms so that doesn’t happen again. You can do that on the item page during reviews or from the home page when you search the words on there.
As for onyomi vs. kunyomi, the main things to understand are the different situations kanji are used in. The two I look out for are jukugo words (which are kind of like compound words with two kanji put together) and kanji words with hiragana after them. Jukugo words are usually the on’yomi readings, and the ones with hiragana after are usually the kun’yomi readings.
It makes more sense when you think about the origins of the words. On’yomi comes from Chinese words, which are just going to be kanji by themselves. Kun’yomi readings are for the native Japanese words, which tend to have hiragana involved somewhere. At least, that’s the way I look at it. Of course, everything I’m saying is a massive oversimplification and is probably wrong somehow, but I feel like I can guess the correct reading for kanji the vast majority of the time, so it helps me, at least.
Edit: When you go through the reviews, the Reading tab will tell you if it uses the on’yomi or kun’yomi reading, and it will generally tell you why it uses it. It took me a little while to get the hang of it, but I did eventually.
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possibly, but in this case they would type “bi + [dash]” and not “bi+i”
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