Update beneficial or detrimental for higher levellers?

Are you above level 30? and have you updated?
How do you feel about the update?
do you think it will benefit those who are more then half way through wanikani?
or will it be a detriment?

The fact that you can no longer search for old radicals.
I wasn’t aware that some of the mnemonics for the old wanikani, were also being completely changed. I thought they were only being edited for certain spelling mistakes,but I had no idea that they were planning to eradicate main characters for which are used in hundreds of the mnemonics for the vocab.

also the lessons are going to be mainly onyomi first from now on, but the old wanikani will not have the stories updated to reflected this change. there for depending on weather your using the old wnikani or the new one you may have different readings for lessons.

It doesn’t feel like the old wanikani is being support propyl and it should be considering with spent hundreds of hours and pounds on it. Maybe this changes will be a beneficial to those above level 30? but I Don’t really see how that could be? I feel like there should maybe be a video put out walking us through the changes and provide reassurance as to why these changes will benefit higher levellers.

if anyone has any thoughts on the matter please share.

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Especially for slow learners like me.

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Being so close to level 60 the content overhaul really threw me off, not gonna lie. I’d have to relearn a lot of radical names and also change my Anki setup (I got a deck for radicals only) but that seems way too tedious for me, so I’m not gonna bother. For me it has more cons than pros.

Overall I do like that they renamed some radicals to make more sense and introduced more, so there’s less kanji made up with 4 or 5 radicals, but for me personally this update comes way too late. Oh well.

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Yeah I too have been inputting into Anki. so far I have learned to write over 1000 kanji using there stories and mnemonics. on top of that I have been in putting burned vocab in there too.
Due to anxiety and feeling stressed that I would be missing out if I didn’t update, I updated… now I kind of regret it, and am just going to try and use the old mnemonics. Like a fool I delete the stories from my Kanji deck thinking I would use the new ones… but after doing the new vocab lessons I realised I prefer tho old ones. I been trying to merge a back up deck with my new one in order to get the stories back and not have to write an extra 40 kanji reviews. and on top of that I have been hesitant to do my reviews today as I feel dishearten by the situation. I spend like 4 hours a day minimum studying Japanese and it’s stressful… so It’s like one one thing starts to fall apart the whole routine is out of whack.

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I feel you, I didn’t do any lessons until today either. Routine is really important to me and if something is even slightly off or has changed then that can frustrate me to no end, haha. But maybe this sort of “shock” will subside with time, just keep going and don’t let it throw you off. :slight_smile:

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Relearning things will be annoying, but I think my leeches are about to plummet to Hell. The new mnemonics are much better and the general difference lets me look at longtime leech bastards from a fresh and new angle. Overall this is a good thing.

With that being said, if they do this again before I finish Wanikani, I will fly over to Tofugu headquarters with Charlie Sheen and the other dead characters, and we will personally strangle every employee in the building and toss their barely alive bodies into the incinerator that they cruelly throw turtles in. Then I will pull Koichi’s still alive body out of the incinerator (that weasel doesn’t die, something about selling his soul to the devil) and imprison him in a yurt for the rest of his immortal life.

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Honestly, I was not happy about the change even if I’m at level 19. I like the non-PC, ugly mnemonics: they help me to remember things easier. I’m sticking with the old mnemonics. And for the ones that they deleted permanently, I downloaded the Anki card set that has all 2017 Wanikani material. But I don’t think that complaining now is worth unless it is on the Complaint Thread, :slight_smile:

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Honestly - Beneficial.

I’m lvl 48 and even though I’m relearning the radicals, a lot of words suddenly make more sense to me. Especially the canopy/mullet change was really good, aswell as butcher/building. I can reimagine the words and get rid of my stupendious amount of leeches

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I do believe most of the new radical names are simpler to learn and remember in kanji. So from the standpoint of a new user it is well done and I appreciate that WK is still striving for improvement.
Of course being over level 30 means that a lot of the Kanji I learned now have different mnemonics. But once you’ve read a kanji a lot of times, do you really still need the mnemonics ?
I’ve already reset all the new radicals. If I’m not wrong there were about 70 ? That is less than one WK level, so I don’t think it is that much of a deal.

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though I didn’t like it at first (meaning more reviews and all), I must say that the radicals are more standard now, so it’s easier to put some sense into them.

Specially since more than the mnemonics I’ve been using the phonetic semantic compound script for quite some time, and now it’s easier to relate the radical with the related kanjis.

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Hey sergiop, drama has actually existed on Wanikani since before the update. Just looked at the page to check and I unlocked it in June '18. I think the level in which it appears just got changed (since I wasn’t level 17 this past June).

I also remember Geck from when I learned that kanji/group of words - that’s not a new mnemonic. It’s a silly one, but not the update’s fault :slight_smile:

Definitely worth it where I am at. There’s more reviews, but I literally feel responsible for less material because of how I’m not actually “relearning” any radicals or mnemonics since they intrinsically make far more sense than the old ones.

Like, what’s the opposite of a leech? That’s what these are.

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Those 70 Radicals affect about 1000 words

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I tired googling Phonetic semantic compund, but I could figure out How to use that script. can you explain how the script works please? or link me to somewhere I can find out?

Thanks

It is specially useful, since it’s pretty much how Kanjis are taught in RTK (I did some months of that before WK)… you can somewhat infer the readings of many kanjis once you notice what part of the Kanji is there for the meaning and which one for the reading :+1:

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Thanks :slight_smile:

Do you know if there is a plugin like this for anki?

Thanks

They do effect a lot of kanji, you are absolutely right. And if one has the ambition to learn all kanji with the most recent radical composition/meaning it would be very stressful, indeed.
Or if you run some sort of anki deck, that now needs changing, I can totally feel your pain.

However I believe, that once you have commited a kanji to memory with the help of mnemonics, you don’t need them anymore. For example 行, I don’t remember the mnemonics for this one anymore, but I still know the meaning and how to read it.
But if my logic is flawed, feel free to point it out!

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You make a really good point. When I forget a kanji I can usually glance at the story and remember it.
but If I have never read the story before, I’m not sure It will be the case? and may to have read the entire story to make it stick? And maybe mentally draining and more stressful. I don’t know how to do things halfway, it’s like 100% or I’m just worrying. at the moment I can figure out if I should learn the new readings or not, I’m spending way to much time looking about both the old and new readings as I just levelled up. but I’m like hesitating. The reason why I liked wanikani is coz there wasn’t much to think about it was straight forwards and felt clear I could just steam through the lessons even when tired coz, I knew if I just push through I will level up,. But now I have the feeling of wait what if I level up ten more levels then relize I should of done it the new or the old mnemonics… All though I’m quite stressed about it now, I feel stressing about it now till I find a solution as to what I should do, would be better then going with the flow and just picking one or the other, only to wonder why I’m lacking in a certain area . theirs just too much choice to something so important, I realise if I picked either route I would level up now, but ultimately I may not reach as far as I could have.

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i didn’t relearn any radicals, and i set the system to show me the old mnemonics. i’ve seen some of the new ones, many are the same thing, just rephrased, which looked like change for the sake of change.

i’ll learn all the new stuff with new radicals and stories obviously, and the overhaul is still too fresh to see if the mnemonics work the same (or less/more) as before. i’m also not high enough level to comment on the impact on 40/50ers, just barely knocking at the half-point door.

i think though that some things didn’t need a change (can hardly call stalin a “pop culture reference”), while others did, but didn’t get it.

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