Updates to Lessons, Reviews and Extra Study are live

Hello :wave:

We just launched an update to WaniKani! You might notice some of the changes right away, and others not at all, but hopefully they add up to a nicer user experience overall. This update also sets us up to make more improvements more quickly in future, which is actually the main motivation behind this update. So, expect to see more exciting changes soon. But for now, let me tell you a bit about whatā€™s changed with this update.

General UI updates

Weā€™ve made changes to the text size, styling, colors and contrast, to hopefully make it easier to read, both on desktop on mobile. Weā€™ve also made the interface and styling more consistent across WaniKani. This will allow us to continue to improve the design, and keep it consistent everywhere.

For example, the way we highlight radicals, kanji, vocabulary and readings is now consistent in lessons, reviews and individual item pages.

The item info section in a quiz was also updated to use expandable sections like the lesson quizzes, and the hiragana chart is now consistent between lessons and reviews.

We also fixed a few things, such as the audio icon overlapping when playing, and pop-up messages obscuring the Item Info button.

Changes on mobile

There are a couple of important UI changes just for mobile devices, too. The most exciting (for us at least) is that the keyboard no longer disappears after you submit an answer, so you can just hit enter again to go to the next item.

We also changed the slide navigation to a dropdown menu, to avoid it wrapping in certain situations.

User Synonyms in lessons

You can now add user synonyms directly from lessons, and they will be marked as correct right away in the following lesson quiz.

Session time-outs

There are no longer session time-outs, so even if you leave your review session open for a few hours youā€™ll be able to pick up where you left off.

Hotkeys

In both lessons and reviews, you can now press ? to toggle (display and hide) the Hotkey (keyboard shortcut) menu.

You can press E to expand and collapse hidden sections in Item Info. The spacebar now allows you to scroll down the page. This is the way spacebar behaves on browsers generally, so should make things more intuitive for new users. So the functionality is still there, but weā€™ve updated the keys to fit with what is expected across the web.

You can also use the tab key to click through the elements on the page, which is what the tab key is supposed to do according to browser conventions.

In lessons, you can no longer press Enter to go to the next slide, but you can still navigate between slides with the arrow keys (and WASD keys). You can also hit G to go to the next lesson. So in other words, there are three alternatives to the Enter key: g, d, and ā†’.

To give more context about why we changed the Enter hotkey, itā€™s because previously we were overriding the standard user of Enter, which is to ā€œactivateā€ (i.e. ā€œclick onā€) whatever is highlighted. Overriding this standard use is not recommended (and in some cases, even illegal) because users with impaired vision or motor disabilities will have a harder time using the app.

All other hotkeys are the same as before.

For comparison, below are the old followed by the new hotkey menus in lessons:

And these are the old and new hotkey menus in reviews:

Navigating using your browser

Reloading a page during a lesson will return you to the same slide. The browser back button can be used to go back through slides, or from the lesson quiz back to the lesson slides.

Skipping lessons

The Skip button that showed up in lessons next to the home button has been removed. If you want to skip an individual lesson, you can still do this using the G shortcut key. You can now also navigate directly to the quiz from lessons if you want to, by clicking Quiz at the bottom of the screen or using the Q shortcut key.

Summary pages

Weā€™ve removed the summary pages that used to be displayed before and after lessons, so youā€™ll now go straight to and from lessons and reviews from the dashboard and elsewhere. Some of the functionality of the summary pages is now covered by the Extra Study feature and dashboard counts, but weā€™ll keep a close eye on this, and work on better ways to fill in gaps in functionality.

ā€œLessons completedā€ count

Weā€™ve also taken out the ā€œLesson Completedā€ count, which used to show up at the top right corner next to the counts of remaining Radicals, Kanji, and Vocabulary to learn. This is a consequence of other changes rather than a final decision, though. And again, weā€™ll be collecting feedback from anyone who misses it to inform our future updates.

User scripts

A lot has changed behind the scenes, which will hopefully make some things easier for script authors in the future. We released a preview update for script authors a couple of weeks back, to give authors time to update their scripts if they can. We also chose to launch this update all in one go rather than incrementally based on feedback from script authors that one large change is much easier to manage than many small changes. Still, script users are likely to notice temporary glitches related to this update. Please contact the author of the script directly with any questions about scripts. :bowing_woman:t3:


I hope you like these changes! If you have feedback or questions, let us know below or send us an email at hello@wanikani.com. Happy studying! :heart:

196 Likes

I cursed a for a few seconds when enter didnā€™t work to move to the next card :sweat_smile: I guess Iā€™ll get used to it :slight_smile:
Congrats for the new release!

27 Likes

wasd? Outrageous. Everyone knows the correct navigation keys are hjkl.
old-timer vi throw-back

Thanks for the hard work, much appreciated. :+1:

52 Likes

Is there any way the old version of Wanikani could be temporarily published under a different subdomain, like old.wanikani.com?
Iā€™d love to be able to still use userscripts without having to wait for all of them to get migrated to work with the upgraded version of Wanikani.

96 Likes

Nice work! I canā€™t hardly wait until scripts start to work again. :slight_smile:

The interface feels really nice.

11 Likes

Going to take a while to get used to.

Is it possible to restore the ability to click the ā€œReviewsā€ button on the dashboard even when it is 0? Now I have to refresh the page and then click it if I keep the window open between reviews.

15 Likes

Immediately noticed something had changed by enter no longer working on my lessons. Wish it still worked because that means I can no longer advance to the next item in lessons in the same way I do during Quiz and reviews. I liked the consistency.

At least now I know itā€™s intended.

Another thing I noticed is that you put common usage and example sentences on the same card during lessons, which makes sense. But now that card is substantially longer than the other cards, which makes a scroll bar appear on the page only on that card. Due to the scrollbar the entire page, including the kanji/vocabulary/radical, shifts leftwards by a little bit, where as before it remained static as you went through the different cards.

Might be a minor annoyance, but still an annoyance.

Other than these two points, the update seems good to me.

24 Likes

Old way of seeing a meaning of a missed word, as it was larger and more pronounced was better for me. Now having to search that small meaning is new and weird and while it is more consistent, it makes a quick glance at the word harder. I guess itā€™s just a change I gotta get used to.

Otherwise, thank you for your hard work! :sparkling_heart:

edit: missing review summary is a bummer. Immediate feedback is so vital for motivation and learning!
edit2: found the missing Enter. This is inconsistent with the main part of the page, which is entering your answer while doing reviews and hitting enter when correct/wrong - while in new stuff/learning mode, using WASD now is unintuitive.

74 Likes

My user scripts are not running as i do my reviews, please resolve

38 Likes

It killed the lesson I was in the middle of and there are now some less-than-optimal behaviors that I just documented in a different post.

Hereā€™s what I found:

  1. Suddenly thereā€™s a thick black border around the text input box. Donā€™t like that.
  2. Hitting ENTER no longer advances through the tabs of the lessons. Donā€™t like that.
  3. After learning five new items, thereā€™s no longer a screen asking if you want to take the quiz. It just goes right into the quiz. Not a big deal, but I prefered the question.

Hopefully this stuff will get fixed.

89 Likes

Fantastic update. Thank you!

4 Likes

Any documentation on that last point (script changes). Does it mean API changes? I have a few personal scripts I wrote and use, would be good to see an API change log.

4 Likes

Well I kinda hate it, because the most important userscript for me stopped working. Is there any way we can use the previous version?

51 Likes

Maybe a minor bug but I noticed that when I entered a user synonym Iā€™d added previously in my reviews just now it didnā€™t accept it. It didnā€™t mark it as wrong but did the shakey thing like when youā€™ve entered the wrong reading, just without a message of any kind. Double checked after using the other writing that Iā€™d spelled it correctly, too.

6 Likes

Wait, you removed the Summary Pages AND the Lesson Completed count? This basically removes every element I used to get a sense of accomplishment from my lessons. Might be a strong motivation killer for me. Hope this will be reconsidered and soon.

192 Likes

Iā€™m not a big fan of the centered UI, I dislike centered UIs in general. I liked the previous version just fine. Also it broke most of the userscripts, which is a huge bummer :confused:

49 Likes

Iā€™m dying without the double check script (or whatever it was called). Iā€™m a terrible typer, so often I know the correct answer but simply type it wrong. I know progress needs to be made, but that feature was a huge deal for me, and Iā€™m sure a lot of others will miss it too.

Now a simple spelling mistake or hitting the wrong key will result in an item being downgraded.

Also while I havenā€™t done any lessons since the update, I often used the lessons summary to open up and review kanji that were similar. Now it looks like I wonā€™t be doing that either. I donā€™t see the point of removing it? It doesnā€™t seem to streamline anything or make any significant affect to how people use the site.

Sorry for being a whiner.

98 Likes

horrible update. everything else was fine before this update. also, my user scripts are also not working. Whats the point of paying for something you can just do on anki for free & at a much faster pace?

51 Likes

I am now constantly getting a ā€˜lost connection errorā€™ despite same old excellent Wi-Fi connection. VERY annoying. :(( Also, canā€™t scroll down in reviews anymore one answered to see full content. :((

6 Likes

I am also not a big fan of the new review UI. I think it looks a little dated and I thought the old one was cleaner looking, but I can appreciate it being more visible. I think it would be nice to be able to choose to use the old version.

Edit: Also want to echo other people, not having the summary page on reviews (havenā€™t tried out new lessons yet) is kinda a bummer!

106 Likes