WaniKani has officially stopped responding to my emails

This has some “What was was before was was was? Before was was was, was was is.” Vibes. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Smith, where Jones had had “had”, had had “had had”. “Had had” had had the teacher’s approval.

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There’s some interesting irony here :slight_smile:.

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If people telling me I’m wrong and me defending myself means I’m the one arguing, then sure, there’s irony. But that’s a pretty backwards way of looking at it. Generally the argumentative one is the one telling someone else they’re wrong completely unprompted, not the one defending themselves from people falsely claiming they’re wrong when they’re not. But you can choose to see it differently if you want to, I suppose.

Unless you’re trying to imply that me pointing out grammatical issues is me “telling people they’re wrong instead of hearing them out” which would be quite a stretch. Hopefully that’s not what you’re trying to imply.

Or Yotsuba. :smiley:

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as someone with experience in email customer support - everyone please wait more than 2 days before you go on to talk about how the company couldnt care less about Feedback and is ghosting you :smiling_face_with_tear: ppl are on vacation, ppl get sick, sometimes its just super busy - 2 days is nothing!

@Cookie316 Im sure they super appreciate your effort! :slight_smile: so i think they would love for you to keep writing them emails about these things - its always really nice to have ppl giving a hand in improving one’s website
But i also think its important that if they reply to you and tell you that its actually intentional and the way they want it to be, that you dont take it personal or feel like they dont care about your opinion. Some things are subjective, as youve seen here with people arguing about “the only way is up” sentence - some people think it makes sense and like it, some hate it - its just an example sentence at the end of the day.
(Also reminder that ppl in real life often dont use “proper Grammer” - yeah this is just about the english translation but either way, i feel like that doesnt necessarily makes it a worse example sentence as long as ppl would actually use it like this (which in this case, i definitely would))

And if you think their decision is flawed you can always start a poll in the forum (i hear ppl like those :p) and see if ppl agree with you. And then if everyone says they want product and products to be the same, maybe they will change it. And maybe they wont, its not like this is a make-or-break decision for using this app :smiley:

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Quite. I was gonna post those panels, but I couldn’t find the right page with a quick scan. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Would you mind considering this?

You’re looking out at the cliffs. You see two types, big and colorful and small and white. You know the small and white are the original cliffs. Later they become big and colorful.

So which cliffs are the original ones? Wouldn’t the big and colorful ones be the original if they only become like that with age? So what are the white and small ones?

It really reads like a weird riddle to me.

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While logical, pronouns need a precedent in English and the only possible fitting noun phrase is the first/original cliffs. If the WK team want to talk about other cliffs, they need to be introduced first. “See those big and colorful cliffs? They appeared later.” would be fine.

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Should a website intended to teach users things be intentionally obtuse over being clear? Conversation is one thing, but I don’t see the point in this particular case of just leaving a mnemonic structurally confusing.

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There is a theory in language called something like “consistent difficulty”. It goes something like:

Some languages put a lot of onus on the speaker, the nouns and verbs and adjectives all need to be conjugated and agree with the other words they are linked to. The speaker has to keep track of all this, but the listener has lots of clues and parsing the sentence is easy.

Some languages are the other way around, and the speaker does very little conjugating, words don’t need to have mutating forms that agree with each other, etc. With these, the listener has to do a lot more work parsing the sentence, they need to keep track of many parts of speech, but the speaker has an easier time.

Obviously this is a spectrum, and English falls somewhere near the middle. I think Polish is the classic example of a speaker heavy language (I may be misremembering) but Japanese is definitely on the far end of the scale where most of the effort is on the listener.

An addendum to this is that formal written language tends to be easier to parse (shifts towards Polish [sorry again if I’ve got the wrong language]), and informal spoken or written language is harder (shifts towards Japanese) with ‘rules’ being discarded. So, those sentences may not be correct formal written English according to a grammar textbook, but they are pretty standard informal English - slightly more context sensitive, slightly more ambiguous.

Anyway, where I’m really going with this is that if you’re worried about incomplete predicates then you are going to have to approach informal Japanese with caution, and maybe a stiff drink.

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I actually wouldn’t bat an eye at this sentence, because it’s clear (to me) what is meant. And it would sound forced to me if someone said “My cat is really sweet. Cats in general are usually very mean.”
But it’s totally okay to disagree on things like this! Language, and especially casual language, is very subjective and doesn’t always follow the rules. And for me it’s normal to infer - as a listener or reader - what is meant.

The same goes for me personally with the example " At least all there is is up now, right? " . For me it was like : Oh, it’s obviously meant to be a figure of speech, like, “It will only get better from here.”

So,just to say, there can be different opinions about stuff like this and ultimately it’s up to the WaniKani-Team to decide if they want (or should) change it or not. And if they get enough feedback like yours, I’m sure they will, cause I don’t think they’re being obtuse on purpose!

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This is why we should not send suggestions via the shadows of email, where it’s hidden and nobody knows if the email actually arrives or lands in the spam box. We have the forums here and people can make suggestions here, where it’s open to be seen by everybody.

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I think this is such a silly argument. You can’t excuse poorly-formed sentences and contradictory thoughts with “well, some languages just put more burden on the listener” and it’s especially silly to draw parellels between English and Japanese as if poorly-written English is comparable to properly-written casual Japanese. It’s true that Japanese speech generally leaves out a lot of details, but that’s because they’re implied from context, not because they’re just entirely abscent. An incomplete thought in Japanese is no different from an incomplete thought in English. “Over there.” is an incomplete thought in both languages, but given the proper context, like “Where is the pencil sharpener?” it becomes a perfectly valid statement because “it is” is implied from context. Just because Japanese often omits words doesn’t mean Japanese people communicate in incomplete thoughts - it just means they leave the listener to fill in the blanks with existing context more than we do in English.

So yes, it’s true that スーパーに行った。 is a complete sentence in Japanese even though it’s lacking an explicit subject. But now imagine if someone said ならちゃんは台所で読んでいる。スーパーに行った。 ← Now what? Did Nara go to the supermarket? Did I go to the supermarket? Did someone else go? It’s an incomplete thought, and just because it’s in Japanese doesn’t change anything. Trying to draw parellels between “Japanese often leaves a lot of context up to the listener” and “Incomplete thoughts are perfectly acceptable in Japanese” is nonsensical. Leaving something up to context when there is no context is just writing poor sentences. You can’t use the language’s features as an excuse for omitting information entirely.

But then, again, your final point of “if you’re worried about this in English, it won’t be any easier in Japanese” - I’m not worried about it in English. I was still able to read the sentence just fine even though it was malformed, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also point out that it’s malformed and hope it gets corrected. Professional writing isn’t about getting things close enough so that a native speaker can make sense of it - it’s about writing proper language that is clear, concise, direct, and not obtuse.

Not sure why people feel like they need to so fiercely defend improper grammar in professional writing. It’s not like I’m personally attacking someone for making a grammatical mistake - I’m literally just pointing out that it’s wrong and should be fixed and people keep on feeling the need to explain to me why it’s not lol.

Well it shouldn’t be, because what I actually meant when I wrote that sentence was my cat is usually mean, not that cats in general are. You misunderstood it because I made improper use of a pronoun, but it’s okay, because some languages leave the burden of understanding on the listener :wink:

I agree with this. They totally don’t have to fix it if they don’t want to. It’s totally fine. Grammatical mistakes are normal and if they like having them in their app then that is totally, completely fine. But it doesn’t mean they’re not still mistakes. People in this thread need to shift the focus away from “well ackshually those aren’t mistakes” (which is factually incorrect) and start moving it towards “mistakes are totally fine,” which I agree with wholeheartedly. Or, you know, people could just stop posting in the thread in general since it was solved yesterday and the only new additions are people trying to argue with things that are already settled lol.

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Wow @Cookie316 . You really are passionate about English grammar. I wish that I had half of that energy to study Japanese :slight_smile: Good luck with all of your studies :blush:

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I think you might be expecting 1940s textbook grammar from a deliberately casually written website. I’m not defending WK, I never use their examples or mnemonics because I don’t like most of them, they don’t fit with how I think, their tone is wrong.

I also think you’ve missed my not entirely serious point - which I guess I should have expected - that casual Japanese takes much greater liberties with textbook Japanese than WK does with textbook English so… be ready.

If that’s what you meant, the correct way to express that in English is “My cat is being very sweet”, nothing to do with pronouns, you just missed out a temporal modifier.

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MaruMoriiii

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Update: Just got an email saying they finally got to my email and they agreed, and added “product” as a valid meaning for the “Products” radical.

No it wasn’t.

In this case it was best to do what I did: Send them an email. Now instead of only being fixed for me, it’s fixed for every future user too.

Not sure if this is a genuine question or merely scoffing. If it’s the former, I could spell out some subtext for you; if it’s the latter, well, there’s the first part of your answer right there lol

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Not to discount the other concerns you’ve mentioned, but this and other comments really sounds like there may be some miscommunication/misunderstanding/confusion due to some issue with email.

I’ve found from time to time that emails I’ve sent to various people got stuck in Drafts, had emails missing from threads, etc., due to a problem with email settings on a specific device. There could (also?) be some issue on their end of course, but definitely worth double-checking when you send emails that they’re actually being sent successfully (i.e. in the Sent folder, no error response coming, etc.)

And, just my personal opinion, I think it’s maybe better to post about many issues here on the forum anyway to get a second opinion/sanity check (sometimes I’ve encountered an issue that I thought was a WaniKani problem when really it was a misunderstanding or issue on my end). Cheers! :slight_smile:

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