I’m not really going to join in on this argument, however I would like to give you a way to check when you are going to level up 
Go to www.wkstats.com
It’s going to ask you for a API code. This code is your Wanikani account code.
On the Wanikani website, go to Menu, Settings, Account, and go down until you see Public API Key. Then, generate the new key (API Version 1)
Type the key into Wkstats, and you will see all the kanji you’ve learned, and all the kanji you are going to learn.
The kanji you have learned will be colored depending on how many times you’ve got them right. If they are pink, it means you haven’t guru’d them yet. If you hover over the kanji/radicals/vocab, it will give you information on them. Including the level. For example it might say “Apprentice Level 1” or “Apprentice Level 2”
Once you get it to Apprentice Level 4, you wait two days, and then review them again, and they are gurud. After that you can move on to the next level If you get it wrong, it will knock it down 1 or 2 levels, making you review it more. This might be why you’ve had to wait a while
I know the reviews can be slow at first, but trust me they definitely speed up! It just takes a couple levels to build up your kanji/radicals/vocab first!
Institutionalized racism, wow. Tell us how you really feel. I’m not going to spend the time I need to if I want to properly dance around an argument with you. That said, geez louise Mr! How about taking a more mild stance to things you don’t understand deeply. I feel like your being way too hasty here. I’m not foolish enough to dive into a spat about Japanese-Chinese relations historical or current, but there is much more depth to katakana than what I sense you are seeing.
I think the tendency to embrace loan words with the propensity that the Japanese do suggests anything but racism and xenophobia, as far as language goes. I am constantly tickled over the last several weeks as for example when my girlfriend explains “キス means kiss” I’ll joke and say “Ohh because kissing wasn’t a thing until English showed up?”. Apart from that, she says that English is considered “cool” and yes I’m leaving that oversimplified, but I suspect that plays a part in things. She’s helped me understand, without making a claim that one is superior/inferior that there are lots of challenges inherent with a system of language that relies as much on kanji as Chinese.
I’m not a linguist, but it seems to me that technology and specialized fields of study cause vocabulary to grow at a very high rate relative to the past. Katakana serves Japan very well when it comes to technological vocabulary. I mean can you imagine "Ok gang we need an ideogram for these “Zip drives” things oh and also on today’s agenda we are building the kanji for nonclustered spatial index since there aren’t any combinations of existing kanji that provide us with a nonambiguous way to describe the term. Oh and when it becomes irrelevant in a few years well we still have that bloat. That is to say nothing of biology, finance, etc. etc. Katakana provides a much easier way to incorporate these rapidly growing lexicons.
You improperly minimize it by when you say “denoting something as foreign,” that’d be like adding an asterisk after the word, katakana is more akin to converting the foreign to your own phonetics. But you don’t need me to tell you that.
Katakana also makes Japanese easier to read (except for the newcomer) by having another script to break up the terms that appear in a sentence. I find it much easier that way than if it were only kanji and hiragana.
On an aside, take a look at some of the Scandinavian languages. I think it might be in Iceland where they don’t loan anything, they gather a group of “language elders” (if you will) and convene on how to represent the word in their own tongue. I think you could argue more easily that this, as far as languages go, was xenophobic.
Never mind the… thousands of words of Japanese and Sino-Japanese origin that are typically written in katakana also.
Also, at the time that Japanese started importing lots of English words (or at least at some point after that period began), wasn’t katakana used for okurigana?
This conspiracy theory is falling apart…
Indeed. I think this issue (“It’s too slow”) is clouded with at least 3 similar but different meanings, and the resulting misunderstanding causes unnecessary arguments all the time.
- I want to be able to do my reviews now, not wait. That’s not how SRS works. Maybe you want a kanji learning system that does not use the SRS method, but WaniKani uses the SRS method, sorry.
- I want to be able to do as many lessons as I can handle right now. This is a terrible idea (subjectively) and WaniKani prevents you (in several small ways) from doing that. Maybe they find people get themselves in too big a hole and quit, which doesn’t make business sense for them. Also, give them some credit for just being nice people; they want you to succeed and know if you do 900 lessons your first week, you won’t.
- I know all the kanji through level X and don’t want to spend weeks “learning” something I already know. This one’s the most legit. The WK team has chosen not to allow skipping ahead, probably for several reasons. Probably (but I’m guessing) the number one reason is, they have custom radicals, preferred (first learned) kanji readings, mnemonics, etc. that you can’t possibly “already know”. They want you to do it in order so you don’t get lost later when something depends on something you skipped.
I could imagine a system where you could mark individual items or entire levels as “burned” or even “master” (so you get some review) manually and the SRS just accepts that and schedules it/unlocks the next items accordingly. The WK team has chosen not to do that, for reasons of their own (and it’s not that they didn’t think of it.) The only answer to that I have is, “Sorry?” 
Edit: 4th common meaning of “it’s so slow”
- I don’t know what I want, I’m just excited and want to be doing something. I know. We all did, and the only real answer without breaking WaniKani is a two-pronged strategy. 1) Understand it gets better [cue inaccurate “workload” charts, grumble, but the concept is correct at least]. 2) Other non-WK resources in the wait times (e.g., BunPro, KaniWani, graded readers, YouTube)
This is how I get myself into trouble on Anki. And I’m sooooo glad I didn’t have the opportunity to bork up WK like this.
Uuggghhh the thought of having to read all those words in the same hiragana string. You might as well send me back to my hepburn textbooks.
I never said that they don’t “embrace” loan words, I said they denote that the word is foreign. There is a huge difference there that you don’t understand deeply. It’s not about being “cool” or easier, there is a deeper reason for this. It’s not about “converting the foreign to your own phonetics” as hiragana would have worked fine. I’ve never heard it described by a Japanese person as making it easier to read.
Japan is famous for being xenophobic; how do you think that manifests itself?
A mechanic for incorporating scientific/technical is a good argument for katakana but again I just point to China…they don’t seem to have this issue; what gives?
I’ve seen where you take threads when it comes to xenophobia et al, not falling into that trap.
Here’s a little insight into what it’s like being a programmer in Chinese culture
Spoiler alert it’s a lot of english:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150318071301/http://odwks.com/2009/03/mandarin-chinese-programmer-communites
Haha
But why make it harder on yourself? If China is continuing to create ways to “spell” loan/technical terms with characters, then that’s their affair, and probably due to simply not having another system. Japan does have another, simpler, more practical system, so they use it. Occam’s razor.
No one could have known how much those monks who developed katakana hated America, nearly a thousand years before it was founded.
That is a good point as Occam’s razor is hard to dispute. I’ve just seen too much and talked to too many people to not have my Spidey sense go off when katakana comes up. Maybe I am too harsh and “racism” is too strong; I can pull back from that. But my point of institutionalization stands and language, being one of the foundations of a society, means that anything that makes a “us” vs" “them” distinction should be noted.
Is that how your refuting that claim?
I find this katakana = institutionalized racism claim so hilarious that I’m not even mad.
I mean, it is true that Japan has an isolationist history, and there is still evidence of that, as there is evidence of similarly bad history across the world. Katakana is just a weird place to pick at, as it is overall pretty benign and ultimately a practical tool that would be odd to stop using.
Sorry I missed where all the data and links to back-up the initial claim of “being easier” was made…please point that out and until then I will meet the same standards used in this casual conversation.
Also, curious about what experiences you’ve had to trigger Spidey sense on katakana in particular? Again, just seems a fairly benign thing to pick at, so I’m genuinely curious.
Well as mentioned, my core point is the institutionalized bit and yes, it’s a stretch.
Here is a question for you: If you wanted subtly way to prevent foreigners from access to things at a bureaucratically level or at the very least make it harder, how would you do that?
The modern parallel can be seen in the west where sometimes names are not included in resumes to prevent gender or racial bias from creeping in during the selection process…this has shown to increase access to the interview process for non-western sounding named people and women by a very signification percentage.
It’s more of a thesis(sic). If one can acknowledge that a culture is inherently xenophobic then one next needs to look for how that manifests itself…and IMO this is one of them.
Since when did requesting help threads become threads for spreading absurd conspiracies?