This kanji learning site ripping off Kanji Koohi mnemonics… thoughts?
So I was looking for WaniKani alternatives and noticed that this site, which is basically a kanji memorizer with SRS reviews, looks like they’re straight ripping off mnemonics from Kanji Koohi. Literally the crowd-sourced stories people spent years writing there. Is it cool to just take community-written mnemonics and put them in a paid product? The site has a free tier but premium is $5/mo.
Has anyone tried it? How does it compare to WaniKani or just using Anki + Koohi? Genuinely curious because the FSRS scheduling thing they mention sounds interesting but I don’t know how I should feel about this product. https://kanjikraken.com/
Having a better scheduling algo would certainly be a big improvement for WaniKani.
That landing page is atrocious IMO, it doesn’t actually demonstrate what the tool does and makes unrealistic claims (650 kanji to read manga “without furigana”? “most learners finish in 12–18 months”?).
Note that there doesn’t appear to be any SRS included in the free tier, you can just browse.
Honestly the most offensive “ripped off” thing for me is that they completely copied WaniKani’s level structure: you have 60 levels broken down in decades:
Couldn’t you at least come up with a slightly novel hierarchy? Even the way the kanji are distributed in the individual levels is very obviously “inspired” by wanikani:
壁 as a component of 囲? Why not. I think maybe some sources would call 囗 the “wall” radical and that’s what caused the confusion? This is just me clicking on kanji at random and finding issues everywhere by the way.
There also doesn’t appear to be any vocabulary to reinforce the kanji, which I think seriously limits the effectiveness of the method if you don’t supplement it. It’s certainly going to be faster to go through 2000 kanji if you don’t also teach ~6000 words like wanikani does.
At any rate it’s just sloppy and lazy. They clearly just copied WaniKani and other sources, not taking the time to review the slop before putting a pricetag on it. If they were serious about it they would add the kanji incrementally, taking the time to review everything and making sure that it fits their methodology.
Got any specific examples here? Because I’d honestly be willing to posit that it’s the other way around. Especially if they’re crowd-sourced.
Dunno how these things work, but both of the examples you’ve given here reek of a script that’s automatically generating the components from the mnemonic but failing - i.e. it failed to pick up word “suns” in the first one as referring to the “sun” component (though it really should be “sun’s light” anyway), and it’s automatically picked up the word “wall” as referring to the “wall” kanji rather than just a straight-up wall-like pictograph.
Ooh, that would make sense. I assumed that there was some kind of automation going on but couldn’t quite come up with a scenario that would lead to this catastrophe.
Also I have some suspicion that this entire thing is “vibe coded” using AI, but because the whole website is compiled and obfuscates the code I can’t be completely sure.
given OP lied/ragebaited in the first post, it feels like a rare case of ‘it’s ok to quote the deleted post’ (that will disappear in 24 hrs) to provide some context for others who get confused by this thread later:
deleted post #5 by kevy3b
Thank you for taking the time to review.
I’m gonna come forward and acknowledge most of the site is in its current state AI Slop (I am a full time SWE rip my credentials) Levels 1-4 I have manually reviewed each kanji and components but I’m making progress of 1 Level per day to review and vet the mnemonic and components make sense, but it takes time and it’s a slow process.
ignore the price I just launched this today it’s def not worth the current price,
even though I have shamelessly stolen a lot of ideas and data from multiple different products I do think there is market niche that fits in between WaniKani and Anki. Wanikani I find is rigid in a lot of ways which is its strength and its weakness. Anki is the opposite.
just looking for constructive feedback at this point I really appreciate you taking the time to give your thoughts. I’ll try to make the kanji page on the landing page so the site is more relevant and easily accessible also to unauthenticated users. I only plan to keep the srs paywalled.
<del>Sorry </del><del>for </del><del>the </del><del>ragebait </del>post <del>aswell </del><del>wanted </del><del>to </del><del>spark </del><del>discussion</del><del>.</del>
Interesting observation. The goal was obviously for them to get opinions on it, so why would they delete the original post with it? Free critiques–which was what they wanted, so why stop it?
I’m curious to see how the staff handle this… (if they even do… maybe just locking it)
