Question about that. If I select everything, would I get the same order as the previous version of Wanikani, or the new one that will toss in a single radical among the words? I guess what I’m asking, did they implement an algorithm that sorts or selects?
You will get the old ordering. That’s what I’ve been doing for now to study the same way I used to.
Ok, now I get what you’re counting.
It’s a non issue for me, probably because I’ve had so many “where did my app go?!” Over the years and I still got where I needed to. Takes a few days to adjust then it’s a new improved routine after about two weeks.
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Typing these complaints must have required way more time than the accumulated time of all the extra 2 clicks you will ever be forced to make until you finish all of the levels of Wanikani.
Some proportion, people…
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UI aesthetic sacrificed on the altar of lesson customization. Well, the lesson button, anyway. Reviews button looks way worse now for no reason other than matching the lessons button. RIP classic lesson/review buttons, you will be missed.
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It’s not the time it costs, it’s the inconvenience. Added all up, it will probably only waste an hour or two of my time. But the mental friction it gives is the much larger loss. Tabbing over to my browser and seeing “120 lessons” and clicking the button to jump into it takes zero effort. Tabbing over to my browser and seeing “15 daily lessons” and having to click “Advanced” and wait for a page load, then click “Select All” and check the total number of lessons, and then click “Start Lessons” - that’s just more steps added onto a process that I’m already trying to entice myslf to do in the first place.
They could have at least done a client-side route for the lessons picker to avoid the overhead of a whole new document load, which for me ends up taking about 1-2 seconds on middle-of-the-road hardware and internet speeds. It’s just yet another oversight that clues me into the fact that this was a rushed and not very well-thought-out change.
Also, it’s less that this change is really awful, and more just that the situation as a whole is confusing to me. Refusing to add things that people want and ignoring them when they ask, removing things that people liked with no explanation, and adding features that absolutely nobody asked for with no warning or explanation… It’s just weird. And that’s what my primary issue is with all this.
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I think that’s just life. WaniKani actually updates pretty slowly and incrementally. I’ve been way more surprised by updates to apps like Duolingo (removed the forums? removed comments? added hearts? Gems? Lingots? new content trees? leagues? completely changed the layout of the lessons? added a paid tier? added offline lesson support? removed offline lesson support? added practice? lightning rounds? monthly challenges? chests? writing practice? new quests? other new quests? deleted old quests? more quests?).
We just have to learn to deal with the changes.
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I understand others’ frustration with the change to both the GUI and the scheduled daily lessons but overall, I like the update.
My daily goal is to clear reviews, and do some lessons - I prefer a batch size of 3, which maps to 9 over 3 sessions by default, and then I am fine to add extra using the lesson picker, especially on days when the lessons are mostly vocabulary or when my Apprentice item count is within my target (<100 or <110…).
お疲れ様です。
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Idk if I’d call removing features and revoking access to user data “updates.” But otherwise I agree. Like I’ve said before, WaniKani tends to be very good about this kind of stuff, which is why it disappoints me so much that they’ve been going downhill the last ~12 months
And I really hope things will turn around. I’m currently waiting to hear back from them on an email I sent 3 days ago that they said they’re discussing internally. Their response to that email will heavily affect what I see in WaniKani’s future. It’s regarding a technical issue that’s been ongoing for 8+ months, and if they actually fix it then I’ll be impressed, and if they don’t then I’ll be severely disappointed.
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Idk if I’d call removing features and revoking access to user data “updates.”
That’s just how the technology sector works. See killedbygoogle.com for plenty of examples. You don’t get a guarantee that a web service like WaniKani will work exactly as you want, and you can’t guarantee that it will exist indefinitely.
The only way to avoid changes is to buy physical media. Pretty much everything else (except DRM-free digital media) could change completely or just disappear one day. You can even see extreme cases like PlayStation deleting content users had purchased. It’s tiring and I wish things didn’t change as much as they do, but there’s not much any one person can do.
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+1 for an option to truly ‘skip’ an item. There are quite a few repeated radicals and vocab I’d like to remove from my queue/just burn. It sounds like the team is open to the idea from the announcment, would be amazing to get this fleshed out.
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Physical media that makes me think of Verbatim as in look at my comment from 3 hours ago…
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Yeah, again, I’m not trying to act like it’s my human right to have these features or something extreme like that - I’m just expressing disappointment in the fact that a company that has such a good track record like Tofugu is seemingly falling down this slippery slope. Their ToS more than protects them from this kind of thing and legally speaking they’re totally welcome to make any of these sorts of changes that they want. But I’m also allowed to see it, pick up on it, and be disappointed by the implications of it. That’s all. It’s not too late to turn it around though, so we’ll see where things go over the following months. I hope they can get back on their feet and start making better decisions for their long-term users and stop neglecting them on behalf of newbies. Newbies need features too, but they should be receiving those features not at the expense of everyone else. It’s a balance and I hope it will be found soon. In the mean time though, I am a bit bummed. Nothing more than that.
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It’s something I think about a lot. Actually, my first-ever post on the forum was about the longevity of WaniKani in this context.
https://community.wanikani.com/t/what-would-i-pay-tofugu-for/43870/14?u=northpilot
Edit: @2tea, I actually didn’t read your comment before writing mine. That’s my fault. It’s surprising how similar they are; we have the same opinion on this.
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In case anybody’s not aware, you can actually download the entirety of WaniKani’s data (ordering, mnemonics, etc) through their third-party API, and as long as you never misuse it then they’re totally okay with it. If you’re a lifetime member, then you can keep that data forever and use it for your own personal use (e.g. never sharing it or distributing it) for as long as you want. Every time they make a content addition or change I download a new copy of the entire collection of data for this exact reason, and they explicitly say in the API docs that they’re okay with it. Just don’t open-source it or anything, since that would not be respecting the hard work that they’ve put into building all that data. Only use it for yourself.
https://docs.api.wanikani.com/20170710/#caching
and
https://docs.api.wanikani.com/20170710/#respecting-subscription-restrictions
Although seeing what Tofugu did with Textfugu, allowing their users to keep access to it for many years after it went out of business, I don’t fear that they’ll do anything bad with WaniKani or its data. They have a great track record of respecting their customers. Still, it doesn’t hurt to have insurance for things outside of their control.
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This is one of the primary reasons I was comfortable purchasing a lifetime subscription.
I know you didn’t, the Verbatim was a pun it’s a name of a physical media brand but your comment was almost verbatim mine… so it made me laugh (in a good way).
You can see how the wanikani homepage changed over the years in the wayback machine.
Newcomers sometimes aren’t aware of the history of the updates/overhauls wanikani went through over the years and how their terms of use have changed in order to deal with users assumptions/expectations/ reading comprehension or lack thereof
It’s just my experience with it… but yeah, hypervigilant contracts readers (in my case anyway 
)
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Speaking of layout nitpicks, it kind of bugs me that the height of these buttons change when Today’s Lessons load. The worst case for this is when you’ve finished all your reviews but still have available lessons.
I’m using this userscript CSS hack to fix it (caveats: only works if you don’t hit the mobile/tablet breakpoints that put the image above the text, makes the “no lessons + no reviews” state look worse):
.todays-lessons, .reviews-dashboard, .lesson-and-reviews-loading {
min-height: 220px;
}
.todays-lessons__image {
max-height: 100px;
object-fit: contain;
}
But it would be nice if the loading placeholder more accurately reflected the height of the UI after it loaded in, for example by removing the lesson-and-reviews-loading__buttons div if there aren’t any available lessons.
Otherwise I’ve been really liking this feature so far!
Thanks for the details! This is exactly the type of explanation I was hoping for.
I’m gonna keep giving this new method a try for a bit, to see if it works for me — though I’d normally sort items by type in the opposite way you’re describing this sorts it, I often did get a bit stuck when there was a big backlog of vocab to learn, which ended up slowing me down a bit. Maybe the interspersed thingy will help there — if not, I can always use the lesson picker.
Thanks~~~
It’s not an algorithm in the machine learning sense, more the hard-coded traditional algorithm sense.
More details here were posted here:
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