Oh, that’s really interesting! Well I personally think that that’s an option they should provide in the settings (it’s surely not difficult?!)
Of course, this situation isn’t that dramatic, but after reading your surprise at the responses, I think the following concept applies:
I read a study that said people who have gone through a particular hardship already have less sympathy for those currently going through a similar one, despite what you would think. The example they gave was someone asking for lenience at work to take care of their young child. You’d think that the supervisor with children would be more helpful, but they found that the one without any kids was more sympathetic to the situation. Once they’ve gone through something, they diminish what it was like to go through it and expect the suffering person to manage because they already have.
Like I said, you’re not suffering, but since everyone in the forum seems to have figured their way around this minor factor, they might have forgotten how frustrating it was at first.
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I think that IS color-blindness, there are different types and the least common is monochromatism (can not distinguish any colors at all).
I would imagine changing colors wouldn’t be so difficult, I still think it would be a good idea to have at least two different settings of colors for color-blind people.
It’s good to know that you’ve adapted, though. 
Thanks for your sympathy. I didn’t want to write ‘color blindness’ because I am not color blind I only can’t see red (e.g. I can’t see the difference between blue and purple because I don’t see the red in there and same for every other color).
This is what the English term color-blindness most often refers to. It’s sometimes called red-green color blindness to distinguish it from other types of color blindess (e.g. total color blindness).
If WK accepted the reading for the meaning, there would be no confirmation that you actually absorbed the meaning. Trust me, there are loads of words I can read but don’t know what they mean. I can say them aloud in Japanese, but would absolutely not be able to explain what they mean in any language.
This is a nice benefit of knowing the onyomi for kanji, and also being able to guess the onyomi of kanji you’ve never seen before.
But reading them just isn’t the same as understanding the meaning.
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Like with what everyone else said, it’s something you will definitely get used to. I had the same problem at first too, but the more you do your reviews, the more natural it will become. Like with all the quirks of the system, they may seem annoying at first, but they’re all there to make things smoother in the long term. They could put something to specify it wants the English, but I think it’d be pointless asking the for every single review. I think it does say somewhere in the guide or the faq what each one is asking for, but I could be wrong.
Sorry if I’m just repeating what other people have said.
I live in constant fear of abusing my ignore script, but I’ve got one for this very reason. I’m usually good about the visual clues, but it happens, especially when I’m churning through a lot of reviews quickly.
For what it’s worth, I really liked your suggestions and think they’re quite valid. I have made the same kind of mistakes many times and beat myself up about them when I do make them. I’ve even asked the community for their opinions on how to overcome making them (see below):
There is some great advice from others in that thread that you might benefit from. And I’ve learned that many people habitually make similar errors. I will say that since that I started that thread and reading the advice given, I have been able to cut down on such errors (what I like to call bakazakana), though not entirely.
Still, what you suggest (“English Translation” rather than “English Meaning” and using spatial placement rather than relying solely on colour hints) sound like possibly good ideas to me, with the first one much, much easier to implement. The spatial placement idea sounds potentially good but very difficult to implement especially when you take into account people using mobile devices with limited screen space. Also, (and this applies to the “translation” idea as well) we wouldn’t know if they’d actually help anyone until they were put into place.
But! while I appreciate the common sentiment here that “you’ll get used to the way things are” and (no one actually said this but) “you’re too new here to be making feature requests” because there is some merit to these positions, it’s also worth noting that from a UI point of view, if a large number of users keep running into an issue in spite of their best efforts, then there might be a way to present things better. Now, I’m a relatively new user myself, so I don’t go around making feature requests no matter how sensible they seem to me, and I also don’t have enough history with this site to know how often or how infrequently updates to the UI are made.
But there are a ton of userscripts to add features that benefit those who want those features, and I bet it wouldn’t be too hard for someone with skills to make a userscript that substitutes “English Translation” for “English Meaning”. I’d try to do it myself if I could figure out how (unlikely!).
ETA: While it’s frustrating to make these errors, if you do slow down and concentrate enough not to make them all the XXXXing time, they won’t affect your progress very much if at all, and you’ll come out stronger in the end.
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花柳 means かりゅう！
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I used to add romaji readings of items I knew really well as synonyms. Now I’m on my second run through of WK and this time I’m changing the meaning to accept romaji readings for every vocab during lessons. I’m finding it helps a lot in getting me to remember the words for actual use outside of WK. If you genuinely already know the meaning, it’s useless to have to continually enter it.
I never noticed that readings and meanings have black and white background 
The idea to put it into different regions of the screen is good, reading something is not a visual clue. But looking at black/white now is probably enough for me and a bit better than switching from reading Japanese to English for every item.
I think you were muddying your own waters by giving the reason that you want to input “hitori”, it is at least debatable. Apart from what a “meaning” is, beginners could start to input Japanese only and ignore to learn the English meaning because they are never punished for it. You also say that you want to enter the romanji version sometimes, but not always.
Look at it this way: WK asks you to reproduce what you were taught, which is a text string labeled “reading” and “meaning”. You didn’t learn “hitori”=“meaning”, so it is wrong from WK’s point of view. You add it to the synonyms and it becomes valid. (Also, in WK not all meanings of kanji are included. Is it “wrong” to enter a dictionary meaning not listed by WK?)
Based on your comment, I’m sure you’ve learned how to navigate without using the colors as a guide reminder. With that being said, I’m going to take your comment as an opportunity to recommend a script that allows users to choose which colors appear on the dashboard, lesson screen, and review screen. It’s called WaniKani Custom Color Style.
Looking at the date of the last posting on that thread, I can’t guarantee if it is being actively maintained. There are other userstyle scripts on WaniKani, but I’m not sure if they go as far as to allow one to change the review and lesson screens.
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OMG…I didn’t even notice this 
. Wow…I feel…not observant. 
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@Leebo Did you see that my hope was not that wanikani would simply accept the text string “hitori”?
I’m not desiring that I (or anyone) would just “get away with” rote memorization of pronunciations without learning how things correspond to English. Rather, I was hoping that WK (or a plugin) might treat such misfires with roughly the same “try again” bounce I see after typing the onyomi when kunyomi is what’s expected.
Indeed, I was fascinated to realize this slippage (of spontaneously articulating the meaning in Japanese) has been happening with exactly those words that feel natural and familiar enough that their meaning just happens (as it were) within Japanese. It feels odd that this threshold (which is a really fun moment with many expressions, actually 
) becomes a (minor) source of anxiety rather than a friendly “oops”. “Bouncing” that kind of mis-directed answer would be much less discouraging than buzzing it wrong.
Is there a pedagogical danger in bouncing that kind of “mistake”? It’s not as though, going around in Japan (or anywhere other than a WK drill), I’m likely to confuse a translation-into-English task with a reading-out-loud in Japanese task, since they’re such different contexts. Drilling us to be vigilant not to mis-step in this way (about which of those 2 tasks is being requested) doesn’t seem especially vital.
At any rate, I do appreciate hearing all the ways people find work-arounds for this kind of experience.
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Those are different to me.
When the kunyomi/onyomi thing happens, you’ve answered correctly, but they want what they consider the most common/useful reading before you continue.
In this case, you haven’t answered correctly (in my view, since the reading does not equal the meaning). You’ve just made an understandable error.
Other understandable errors (such as putting the onyomi in for a kunyomi vocab) are not given the same warning as with kanji, as understandable as they are.
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I never noticed that readings and meanings have black and white background
Don’t feel bad, I never noticed either.
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Not sure if this was mentioned, but just as a quick answer, a big part of the reason this is the way it is is it’s helping you from going into a pseudo-hypnotic state, where you stop learning. Little things like this keep you conscious, and although it’s a bit irritating, you’ll get into the swing of it quite quickly.
As for color blindness (and various shades thereof… see what I did there?), that’s on our list to provide a couple of different color palette that should help. That being said, this is Koichi we’re talking about so it could take a lifetime.
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@acm2010 Thanks for your reply…
It’s not that I specifically want to input the romaji. It’s simply that having to be so much “on my guard” not to trip over this task-difference doesn’t feel central to learning Japanese. I just want WK not to treat this mistake as equivalent to writing “hitotsu” when it should be “hitori” or writing “entrance” when I should write “person.” Those are the mistakes that matter, because they reflect lack of progress in reading and understanding Japanese.
Hm. 
Maybe part of why this is frustrating is that I’m an intermediate learner trying to get to the place in WK where I’m actually seeing some challenging content, and it’s (as everyone knows) slow to slog through the SRS process while getting to my prior learning-level. So I’m tempted to go along typing and submitting pretty fast, because it’s … necessarily pretty mindless (or pseudo-hypnotic, as @koichi says) at this point (and I’m a parent, and have a day job, and…). And when when this is the kind of thing that I get “wrong,” It’s hardly unbearable, but it feel gratuitously irritating. I wonder whether there are other intermediate students of Japanese who drift away from WK, during the 3 trial levels, for such reasons.
I could do what @riccyjay does (adding the romaji to the meaning field), and I appreciate hearing these ideas… yet I’m surprised that this kind of thing isn’t a common-enough experience to warrant being either a plugin or an option within WK’s own interface.
It’s common. It’s just that most of us have found that this particular mistake only happens during the beginner levels and after you get the hang of it it’s just a minor inconvenience.
Maybe it’s the way that you phrased it, but from the OP I thought you WERE asking for WK to accept the reading as a correct meaning and perhaps other people understood it this way.
I would say that adding a “bounce” or whatever effect when entering the reading instead of the meaning wouldn’t be a big deal but I guess that’s also debatable. In the end I think that for people with intermediate and advanced knowledge of kanji the first levels of WK will be annoying no matter what. Maybe someday they will address this issue but it doesn’t seem to be in the near future.
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I never noticed it either. So it seems it’s not as obvious as some are claiming. And I just did a review session and even knowing it and wanting to check, I still didn’t notice (was too concentrated on my answers, forgot I wanted to check).