Ways in which WK has disappointed me, personally

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#168

You probably shouldn’t assume. I can’t speak for thebyron, but I’m gay and old enough to remember real oppression. I started Wanikani back when those mnemonics existed and didn’t find “hard gay” offensive in the least. I thought it was funny and memorable.

I actually find your assumption that gay people are so fragile that we can’t handle language like that to be way more offensive than the language itself. Do you really think so lowly of us that our “mental wellness” is at stake over such a trivial thing?

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#169

This may help:

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#170

I’ll just chime in for the Stalin mnemonics… I get it that most of the people here don’t either care or really know who he was outside from having to read about him in history class, so maybe having him in a mnemonic doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I grew up in a country occupied by Soviet Russia and my family has suffered a lot because of that man and the regime he created.

If you want to use him in your own mnemonic, go ahead, you do you, nobody is taking away the option from you, but I personally hated that Wanikani asked me to imagine him as the default when I completed the course. And it’s not because I’m fragile or mentally unwell, as some people here have insinuated that anyone taking offence to a mnemonic must be, but because to me it was frankly obscene. So kudos to WK for getting rid of that guy from the default mnemonics.

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#171

When is it not? (Especially with @plantron_RickMatsuri)

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#172

My personal #1 feature request is an Oops button, like on Bunpro. I get really annoyed when a typo is the only thing standing between me and that elusive

:sparkles:百パーセント :sparkles:

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#173

I agree with this. I am offended by Hard Gay because his humour is poor taste and unintelligent and it is the gay equivalent of blackface. I’m not offended by a reference to him in a mnemonic though.

I don’t think any mnemonic would really offend me and if it did I have the ability to ignore it and move on which is something severely lacking in a small minority of users who complain and complain until things are sanitised.

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#174

Psst, there’s a Userscript for that…

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#175

As a woman I think it’s ridiculous to remove “boobs” as a mnemonic while keeping other mnemonics that are hinting and winking at actual sex acts.

Like what do they think, that they’ll offend people by mentioning parts that half of the population has?

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#176

I am not that good at technology :joy: no clue how to do that but I have a friend that can maybe help. Thanks!!

#177

I am from the “Soviet Russia” and I could debate that Stalin did much more harm to Russia than whatever country you are from. I think that the number of Russians/Ukranians/Belorussians/whatever post-soviet country’s citizens who genuinely would get offended by his name is so negligent, so that changing good mnemonics that would make 99.99999% or so of your users remember words/kanjis easier to please that negligent 0.000001 % who could somehow(which is also completely beyond my understanding) offend that small number, is beyond ridiculous. I has never been even aware that these mnemonics used to have Joseph stalin instead of Jourm. No wonder 4/5 of mnemonics here are one of the worst I’ve seen. Oh well, at least we don’t offend anyone now, do we.

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#180

Ah, make no mistake, I wasn’t implying that WK shouldn’t add that feature at all, I was just letting them know that there is a Userscript they can use until then.

#182

I am still relatively new to WK – only on level 6 – but I look at typos as a mistake and that I wasn’t paying enough attention.

I think an oops button could become a crutch for some users. How many times do you hit the oops button before you just admit that you’re consistently spelling it wrong?

If you consistently spell it wrong, you might actually be pronouncing it wrong too.

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#183

Just once. If it is a typo you will get it right the next time.

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#184
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#185

How nice of you to dismiss all the harm that he has done to my people. But I’m not preventing you from using him in your mnemonics, am I? Go ahead and do, for all I care.

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#186

I don’t think we’re in a position to have a conversation from this point onward, but I’ll just reiterate my first point that I’m assuming you don’t have the lived experience of a gay person or a woman, so you don’t know how it feels to see those mnemonics from that perspective. Just like seeing/hearing the n-word doesn’t affect me the same way it would a black person. Best of luck on your journey in kanji and through life. May you find more love, and unlearn some of the toxic ideas you’ve come to perpetuate :v:

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#187

I don’t think they were dismissing the harm, they were just pointing out that the harm that dictator has done to his own country was huge as well and possibly even bigger (but even if it was, it doesn’t in any way diminish the harm done to your people).
Anyway, politics is a very delicate subject.

As for offending mnemonics, well, to be honest, it is a very delicate subject as well. Unfortunately, the borderline here is very hard to pinpoint… Often the same person can be offended by a t-shirt another’s wearing and yet would completely fail to understand why someone else would be offended by their own t-shirt… All we can do is to try to understand one another and to show mutual respect to each other’s feelings…

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#188

I’m gay and old enough to remember real oppression as well. So you of all people should see how a character like Hard Gay makes it easier for straight people to call us perverts and justify beating us up and such ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯

I’m not saying users were going to suddenly become homophobic because of Hard Gay. I’m not saying that seeing his mnemonic triggered panic attacks for me. But it was frustrating to know that WaniKani was telling users that it was okay to laugh at queerness as a non-real identity, and teaching us to remember the Japanese language through that humour at our expense.

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#189

Sure, and I have friends and relatives in Russia whose family were killed and imprisoned too, so I do understand that point that Russian people suffered perhaps more than, say, people in East Germany under the watchful eye of Stasi. However, that doesn’t make the history any less painful and it’s the casual dismissal of it in favour of some people’s convenience that irks me.

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#190

“Christmas” only still exists because the people demanded their pagan festivals remain after Christianity came to their lands.

Christians rebranded it as “Christmas” but it’s still the celebration of the Winter Solstice.

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