@Leebo Of course in a strict sense “hitori” is not the correct answer when WK wants the English translation (which it calls “the meaning”).
I also think you have a good point when you say that typing on-yomi when WK has marked kun-yomi as primary (or vice versa) is a less direct error (and one that is not especially likely to be a product of answering quickly), so perhaps I should appreciate that what I’m talking about (spelling the meaning in Japanese) is an intermediate case. Surely you agree that it’s not on par with confusing “enter” with “person” or confusing “hitori” with “hitotsu,” right?
The thing is, the kind of “mistake” at issue here is simply not going to mess up my actual competence in coping with Japanese. There’s no real-life interaction where people are in danger of getting these two tasks confused (unlike, say, confusing two similar kanji or failing to recognize that a kanji is embedded in a compound, and pronouncing it incorrectly as a result – both real-world challenges).
I understand WK wants to keep us juggling translation-balls and pronunciation-balls simultaneously in not-predictable order (and I see why this may be a worthy pedagogical goal). One side-effect of this approach is that WK needs us to pay attention to which kind of thing is being asked.
Still, a “bounce” would be much less harsh than a “wrong” when someone experiences a Japanese word as the meaning of a Kanji compound.
The Japanese word/phrase really is one way to articulate the meaning of the Kanji, after all. Ironically, despite causing a “wrong” score, that synapse starts firing exactly at a good moment in learning.
Sure, they’re not the same kind of “wrong”, but to me they are still “wrong.” Even if we’re talking about using the Japanese word to define the Japanese word.
This was hashed out earlier, but we just disagree on that, so I don’t think there’s much reason to continue. Using the word itself to define the word just seems to be… off to me, but in the end, the ignore script is entirely within your own hands to decide how to use.
I think I can see where you’re trying to go with this, because words in Japanese have different ways to be written, but ひとり and 一人 and 独り are all words, and if you’re going to define 一人 in Japanese, ひとり is not enough, because the two words with the same reading have different meanings.
But still, even if it wasn’t the case that there are other ひとり’s, the kanji compound is still “a word”.
Not really that’s still it’s pronunciation. For example in English class if you got nonchalant on the test, you can’t answer with ‘nonchalant’ the answer would be it’s definition, (of a person or manner) feeling or appearing casually calm and relaxed, or a synonym, calm composed, ect. Its the same thing here, you can’t answer what is the meaning of 一人 with 一人.
@jskaa Thanks for this thoughtful and supportive response.
Yes, it can happen that people experience little sympathy for a problem that they’ve already muddled through, especially if they associate their earlier struggles with having earned some progress. I believe I’ve also seen such research, and the same psychology drives phenomena like hazing…
But also, I do think brains and experiences simply differ, too. And sometimes people simply have a hard time imagining that something can be genuinely frustrating for another person, when it seems so eye-rollingly easy to them. (I’ve been on both sides of that kind of misunderstanding, I admit! I always found math to be easy, my kid thinks it’s hard, and I have to slow down and listen and find new ways to visualize and practice, rather than to say, “How much more obvious could it be? We went over this!”)
I feel obligated to offer feedback here partly because I also design interfaces (for databases), and I would want to know the reactions of early users. Sometimes people write feedback to vent or pick fights, and sometimes it’s really an attempt to add a perspective.
If early users refrain from feedback because they feel new, then the only people in the conversation are people who are already so used to the interface that it just feels appropriate to them. Meanwhile some minority – for whom it still hasn’t come to feel right – will have dropped away.
Some FAQs here imply that if someone drops away from WK, it must be because they don’t have the patience for really learning Japanese. But surely there can be other reasons too: each person has to figure out where their money and their hours will be most effectively invested. I think it’s generally better to try speaking up than to drift away quietly. (Not that this one issue is that serious for me!)
@elispringer I think I misunderstood that you wanted the romanji as correct, at least you argued to English is only one way to understand the word meaning.
I think the reason for not shaking is (apart from actually wanting to be “on guard”) that it is not so easy to integrate it with the error tolerance for meanings. A word can have several meanings in WK, and each word is checked against a different number of typos you can do to. What happens when the kana can be typed differently (for example shi, si), or both are already the same (like kimono or tsunami), or the kana looks like a meaning with typos? Sounds like a paradise for bugs, at least you have to explicitly handle exceptions. [Together with user synonyms this will be a nightmare]
From your original post:
Wouldn’t your problem be solved when you just remembered that for WK “meaning = translation”? WK also calls some things radicals that aren’t really radicals …
Are you arguing that there should be a “ooo, close” shake for answers similar to the meanings, readings, similar kanjis, similar spellings for all items?
I think you’re better off using Anki, where you can self determine if your answer is good or not.
Usually Wanikani is looking for one specific answer. It must match what the database has a possible answers. If you don’t get it right, you have to study what Wanikani wants as right.
You can add your own synonyms as alternate answers. I think users whose first language isn’t English put their own meanings and make their own mnemonics.
Well, @Leebo, I don’t think you’l be persuaded, but for the sake of anyone who cares to follow the question I’ll clarify how it coheres for me:
Kanji are Chinese idiographic symbols. They mean things (ideas, concepts), and when Japanese people adopted them, they connected those characters (based on their meaning) to words they already knew, and/or dovetailed helpful Chinese words into their spoken Japanese. (Some Chinese compounds, like 一人 and 大人, got mapped onto whole words in Japanese based on matching meanings – or do you object to the word “meaning” for that relation?)
The meaning of a written kanji compound like 一人 can be expressed in spoken Japanese, as well as in various Chinese dialects, and of course its meaning can also be expressed in English or in French or in Turkish, etc. (I can imagine you’ll suggest that in the context of WK, the deeply cross-linguistic origin and function of the characters is to be disregarded. They just are Japanese now. Shrug.)
Peace… thanks for devoting time to this discussion.
一人 is an interesting example, as I pointed out, since it does have another word with a different meaning (or nuance at least) that has the same reading.
Since 一人 and 独り are both read ひとり, can you really say that ひとり is sufficient to function as the definition for either of those? If someone says まだ独りです, they don’t mean that they are “still one person”, but that they are “still unmarried” or “still alone”. Even though it sounds identical to まだ一人です.
So I guess it’s like… Okay 一人 can mean ひとり if you want to phrase it that way, but then we need to check your understanding of ひとり, since it has multiple definitions.
Regarding the origin of kanji… I’m aware of the history of kanji and the point that malauren was trying to make, but I don’t agree that the kanji compounds themselves can’t be referred to as words.
You point out that it’s silly to answer that the meaning of “nonchalant” is “nonchalant.” Indeed. (It’s true, actually, that every word means the same as itself, but entirely trivial and deserves no credit on any exam seeking to gauge understanding.)
Yet if I say the meaning of 一人 is ひとり it’s pretty different from saying the meaning of “nonchalant” is “nonchalant”… There are lots of people in the world who can read and understand 一人 without knowing that Japanese people express that meaning as ひとり. (The same can’t be said for “nonchalant” and “nonchalant.”)
The whole reason Chinese characters take the form they do is to be a meaning-holder that does not depend on written pronunciations of this or that language. Of course there are divergent lineages and uniquely Japanese compounds. But these characters have meaning independently of Japanese. Do you disagree?
Once ひとり becomes a meaningful expression in my mind, directly associated with certain feelings and experiences, it makes perfect sense to see 一人 and see that it means ひとり (in Japanese).
I think possibly the main thing here is how did you get to the point where ひとり became a meaningful expression in your mind? Surely at some point you needed to associate it with something in English first.
@Belthazar I certainly concede that 99% of my Japanese vocabulary has been mediated by English…
The intriguing experience for me here (Don’t other people have it too??) is that even if a word or expression limps into my life with English translation as a crutch, eventually it starts to get its footing and starts running along my neural pathways on its own. This is especially true when a Japanese word develops nuanced associations that don’t attach to the English word which originally helped it gain traction.
(For what it’s worth, meanwhile, there actually are some Japanese words that I learned not through translation, but through exposure. I took shakuhachi lessons in Japan from someone who did not speak English. A few meanings were clear just from context, tone, and exposure. And other words, like ukemi and nage and irimi, have been absorbed into aikido subculture in ways that do not lean on translation.)
This has happened to me sometime too, I agree with your points, but I doubt anything is going to change just because it is a pain to change, so I guess you will have to go back to “slow down” and notice you are not writing in hiragana. Also, you can try fixing this if it happens with a word just add a new meaning and write the romaji there just in case. Or maybe someone in the future will develop a plugin for wanikani which does this sort of thing.
@Leebo. I indeed didn’t say that kanji compounds should be thought of as words, just that I can read them, recognize their meaning (which is generally a meaning deeper than Japanese), and then have the experience of reaching for the Japanese word that expresses that meaning.
As for the fact that ひとり can be equivocal between multiple meanings, that’s no worse than the fact that writing “bank” for 銀行 fails to show whether I understand the distinction between financial institutions and river-side slopes.
Again, I’m not suggesting that it’s ideal for people to write ひとり when prompted for what 一人 means (since “means” is shorthand for “translates into English as”). I’m just suggesting that wk will seem more friendly when it laughs at me and says “oops, you answered in Japanese silly, try again in English” rather than a stern “you got the meaning wrong!” (I do want to experience real error-corrections as stern, and this kind of thing cheapens them.)
Hopefully wk will feed me more difficult content to learn soon and I won’t be splitting philosophical hairs at this forum so much.
Drilling down on whether ひとり can be thought of a meaning (from my perspective) is kind of tangential to what you wanted, and wasn’t meant as an argument against the wrong-answer shaking idea directly, but we went in that direction separately.
I’m fine with you ignoring whatever WK marks wrong for whatever reason, whether we agree that ひとり is a meaning for 一人 or not.
Yesterday I was on a different PC, so I didn’t have my scripts installed, and WK marked “ht” wrong when the U key on my keyboard got stuck as I typed “hut”. It’s too short of a word for the fuzzy misspelling checker to accept it, but I have no choice but to review it again. Just them’s the breaks I guess.
Yeah, I managed to answer “bi” instead of “big” on my first session, and figured that especially since “bi” is actually a word, I couldn’t expect a break!
I guess I’d better go get that “ignore” plugin, if only for typos!
But really, I’d be thrilled to see WK (or a plugin) respond to any “meaning-in-English” input string that is not an English word at all with a “try again, ht is not an English word” before marking it wrong or right. (I’m a teacher, and I do some analogous things for my students, except where catching a detail in the directions needs to be part of the content being tested – I want to see they’re swinging at the right nail before I say whether they’re hitting it well.) But I’m not holding my breath!!
