Hey, I’ve been going through the WaniKani wiki for a little while and have noticed a lot of people who really like the system WaniKani provides, but have trouble learning Kanji and Vocab not included in WaniKani without the SRS system.
Anki has a deck system but doesn’t organize and time reviews and lessons like WaniKani making learning other Kanji and Hiragana vocab much more difficult.
This results in a lot of people unsubscribing from WaniKani after they get to level 60, or burn everything, since the system loses its usefulness. Perhaps a feature can be added, which doesn’t interfere with the main lessons and reviews, but is seperate, where you can create a deck, or share decks with other people using WaniKani, and add synonyms, meanings, readings, and mnemonics, so that people can utilize these new kanji and vocab with WaniKanis SRS algorithm to learn them and burn them.
This way people can learn lesser used vocab with the system they’ve been used to, and have a reason to stick with WaniKani. This can also create a community organizing and sharing decks that may for example include missing Joyo and JLPT kanji, and vocabulary for example.
You could also implement a level system within these decks, where the Kanji and Vocabulary are organized in levels from usefulness and difficulty, and Vocabulary will be locked if you haven’t learned the Kanji through WaniKani or the deck, but you only need to guru the Kanji to unlock the next level, this will certainly help people forward their progress towards JLPT N1 and further their understanding of the Japanese language.
I think that Wanikani won’t go that route because a big part of their userbase doesn’t even get to reach level 60, so adding more content wouldn’t necessarily mean more users/more activity. Heck, I’ve been in here for 3 years and only know 4 people (including me) that are close to burning all items.
Besides that, the technical work it would be required to do that would be significant and better spent in other features that will be used by the current userbase.
I also think a big part of the community that SRSs vocab appreciates the freedom of being able to build things on their own way too, which would be in some way limited on WK due to the structure of WK itself (how lessons look like, information displaying, etc). Not to mention that Wanikani praises themselves (and they should) with in-house content (like the radicals, example sentences and mnemonics), so that would take away from a big selling point of theirs. No way would the community be able to build quality content like WK’s for free. I know from personal experience how hard it is to work on decks. I’ve spent 1500h on improving a version of the well-known Core 10k deck and I’m still only half done. I could have read 1000 manga volumes in Japanese instead.
Have you checked kitsun.io? Its user-friendliness is much closer to Wanikani than Anki is and it’s exactly what you’re describing. It has dozens of community decks available for you to learn. You also have Jisho integrated within the website itself so you can literally search for a word in the dictionary and add it immediately to a deck. The lessons and reviews system are closer to WK’s. However, decks don’t have a level system (a planned feature however - and it does have an overall level system for all decks). It also doesn’t have the whole unlock system (but also a planned feature). It’s a paid to use platform with 14 days of free trial though.
Thank you so much for introducing me to this. I’ll probably start using this as soon as I get into grammar. My main issue with learning any language is organization, and having a timed system rather than the self review like anki is helpful when you’re trying to learn thousands of words.
The creator of the website always replies to everyone.