Hi Jenny, the definition for 点く is a bit off. It’s listed as “To Be Lit, To Be Ignited, To Be On, To Come On.” However, “to be turned on” is marked as incorrect.
This is confusing because the meaning explanation uses “turn on” three times ("You already learned 点ける, which is for when you turn something on:; “Think of this way, when a flashlight turns on, it points a beam, of light ”; “Like, “Oh look! The lights turned on! That’s cool (く)!””). The reading explanation uses “turn on” once (“Every time you count to two (つ) a light turns on”).
It’s then only natural to write “to be turned on” as an answer. Is there any reason this was not included as an accepted definition?
Oh, come on, what’s with having to enter “something” for each of these new transitive verbs? I get it that you want to teach this more rigorously but in the meantime most of us have developed our own mechanisms of keeping track of transitivity and the rest of the site (usually) works in such a way that not writing the something after each transitive verb is a pass!
EDIT: For the record, I also find your passivisation of intransitive verbs misleading, though admittedly it is not an easy task to incorporate transitivity into such a rudimentary review mechanism. In any case, it is preferable if all items of the same category function in the same way so that you don’t lose precious time overriding items you actually know the meaning and use of but not the exact wording postulated by the site.
I agree with this. The new verbs requiring something to be written after is awkward and not natural. I just added synonyms to remove the something part but I don’t think it is a good idea if newer vocab ones are also going to use it.
WaniKani is useful for learning to read kanji, I think people can learn transitive/intransitive on their own.
スピードを落とさずに進めて下さい。
Please move forward without lowering your speed.
Not a native speaker so maybe my sense is off, but when I read the English translation the first time, I read it as someone asking me to physically keep moving forward at the same speed (keep walking forward or keep driving forward etc), so I thought it should have been “進んで下さい”.
After thinking a bit I realized the English probably mean that someone is asking me to keep on working on something (project, task, job etc) without slowing down. Maybe it would be clearer to not drop the thing that should be 進める ? For example:
スピードを落とさずに仕事を進めて下さい
I feel like it’s useful, if I were to write “to spread” for both ひろげる and ひろがる, then I might confuse them over time. I know Wanikani is not a vocabulary learning tool, but if they teach you something (hihi), I think it should be reliably accurate.
In this batch, writing “something” every time is quite annoying, but in a more natural batch, this wouldn’t be a problem.
Thanks again for pointing this out @Redglare! I moved “to hurt” to the allow list and made “to hurt someone” the main meaning. The following meanings are also on the allow list now:
To Torment Someone
To Harass Someone
To Hurt Something
To Torment Something
To Harass Something
Thanks for the feedback on the translations! I agree that having to type “something” every time is frustrating, and though @Pep95 is absolutely right that we want to help people distinguish between transitive and intransitive verbs, it’s probably not worth the trade off.
We’re still working on better ways to deal with transitivity - as pointed out, passives are not great English equivalents, but often the closest we can get if we want to keep infinitive definitions for consistency.
For now, I’ll add the translations without “something” to the allow this, so that they’re marked as correct but aren’t visible, so will hopefully make the distinction clearer at a glance. I hope this will eliminate some of the frustration!
I just came across these, and I do like the idea, but if you want to implement this, it would have to be across all transitive verbs in Wanikani. At this point (level 33), I’m used to the old way, so I think you need to make sure this is aligned so all transitive verbs follow the same pattern. This could either be to implement “something” as an option on all or to allow the old form without something on the whitelist. I do recognize that adding it all verbs would be a huge undertaking at this point, so I understand if you go for the whitelist solution.
Hi @Arzar33, this is actually most likely to be talking about a car, though it could be a task or something too! It’s most natural to leave out the object here, but that’s not very helpful for consolidating the transitivity of this verb, so we’re going to think of a better sentence
suggestion:
could you allow sth for something and sb for somebody in all the definitions requiring one of these? Those are abbreviations often used in dictionaries and would accomodate the not so fast typers.
There seems to be a small display error with 転がす on Tsurukame, though it displays fine on WaniKani, so I have a feeling there may be a broken HTML tag or something similar in the Reading explanation from where Tsurukame gets the data
So far I typed the meaning omitting “something” and it was good for all of them. Not even “your answer was a bit off”, always got “did you know there are other meanings?” Looks good!
I’ve always wondered about this. English infinitives aren’t really good translations for Japanese verb base forms, so that’s always felt strange to me. Mind you, I don’t know what you’d replace it with, either. And at least it’s consistent throughout the site.
”; “Like, “Oh look! The lights turned on! That’s cool (く)!””). The reading explanation uses “turn on” once (“Every time you count to two (つ) a light turns on”).
