What's something you wish Wanikani had explained to you?

maybe not a “wish they explained” but wish they tried harder to emphasize that you should limit how many lessons you do in a day, but they really like pushing the “You can learn all the kanji in a year!” Also considering they have a paid subscription model it would make sense to not push people to rush it. Just my 2 cents.

6 Likes

I’m still working on expanding the list, but we have a thread for such explanations over here

2 Likes

WK really needs a clear, simple article explaining what kanji are, what onyomi and kunyomi are, and how kanji, kanji readings, and vocab words are related. Right now the information is scattered between a few Tofugu and help center articles, but it needs to be more prominent. I frequently see new WK users say stuff like “I understand how onyomi and kunyomi work, but [question that shows they actually don’t understand].”

3 Likes

Yeah, I wish there was a definition for the primary meaning section. Just a short one. Sure you can read the alternate meanings and the mnemonic but would it be easier if you didn’t have to? I get a kanji for spring, I don’t know if it’s the season of a place where water wells up from an underground source until I read through the mnemonic and hope it makes it clear. 札 has the primary meaning as Bill which has 5 dictionary definitions, and the first that comes to my mind is something you pay, as only in American English can it mean a banknote. Bill is お会計 though, so I am looking at it trying to work out is this a bill in parliament or an invoice or what. If it said Meaning - Primary Bill - Definition a banknote it would be faster than having to read the entire thing. I guess they want you to read through the whole mnemonic and hint.

I could see that being messy though if there are multiple primary meanings that all have different definitions, from a UX perspective.

Level (rank, not floor / story), floor (level / story, not the ground), and spring (not the season) are the only ones that come to mind that have been a bit ambiguous lately where I have had to read the entire thing to work it out. I was able to figure it out though.

Or like a “Similar Words and use case differences.” The context section with example sentences are terrible so I think a written explanation might serve a beginner better.

I’d of liked it if they provided that (how many lessons to do in a day) in some user guide. I talked about this in another post and was advised that it’s “just SRS.”

For me, I try to control how many reviews I have coming up and when it drops below some threshold I do ten lessons which automatically increases the reviews.

If my success percentage in reviews declines then I definitely don’t do more lessons. It’s time for me to knuckle down, improve my success rate, and then add lessons.

I agree completely, don’t rush it. Even if one has the memory to do it what’s the rush. If it is rushed I suspect that retention will be challenging even with SRS.

Here I am advising you, a level 23! Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Agreed, and I don’t know why they don’t provide voicings of onyomi. After all, we will be using onyomi in many kanji: why not start learning those pronunciations sooner than later?

I really wish that, when introducing 当 at level 5, there had been something in the details box reminding me that I already knew a kanji for “correct” (正). It took literally weeks for me to realise that the reason I kept getting the readings wrong for “correct” wasn’t anything to do with Onyomi vs Kunyomi or a poor memory, it was just because there were two versions of correct and they have different readings. If WK had made this clear (heck, it seems like it shouldn’t be that difficult for it to show you a message saying “Nice try, but that’s the wrong Correct” or something when you put しょう for 当) then it could have saved me a lot of pain.

4 Likes

I had this same problem, but the confusion guesser script managed to figure it out for me. (At least I think it was the confusion guesser script.)

2 Likes

Yes, however, 辞職 only had that 1 example sentence and the example sentences for 諦観 also included this sentence, which to me felt very ambiguous:

父は、様々な経験の後に諦観に至った。
My father’s various experiences led to his resignation.

If you changed that to “resignation with life” or “feeling resigned” or something similar, I would say the example sentences would be enough to clear up confusion in this case.

Again, not saying you can’t usually figure out how to use the word from either the example sentences or a little searching, but it would be really helpful if WK included a clarification in the “explanation” section.

受領書 (receipt, level 22) and 領収書 (receipt, level 23) would be another example. The example sentences help a bit, but see these links for the type of further clarification that I feel would be really useful, were WaniKani to include it:

I do understand that this would be a LOT of work to add in, but I feel it would be very valuable to language learners.

2 Likes

Thank you, I will definitely bookmark this!

1 Like

Please feel free to add to it as you like!

Oh boy where to start… mostly echoing the above…

  1. Transitive vs intransitive pairs as mentioned above. I can’t remember how many times I got wrong 出す and 出る because of this. Yes, I know that WK is not a grammar resource but still - I wish I had known this.
  2. I’m not sure if this is the “phonetic-semantic composition” as mentioned above, but for example a lot of more complex kanji inherit their on- reading from their components. So, 働 and 動 share the same on reading(どう), but I had to infer this myself. Same for many sheep-related ones! e.g. 羊、養、洋 share the same reading(よう)- which I inferred myself and it’s cool to infer the pattern but it would have been easier if it had been explained to me.
  3. Two pet peeves that I have: many vocab items have very close meanings and it’s not clear how to differentiate among them, even after watching context sentences (which I mostly find useless because they want to be too cute and humorous for their own good). For example, how are 映像 and 画像 different? They both mean picture or image but I don’t know where/how one might be preferable.
    Also, as said above, it would be so much easier to remember kanji if they used “bigger” kanji as subcomponents. For example, it’s easier to remember 暗 as 日 and 音, but it’s only described in terms of 日 and 立 - which is not wrong, but it makes mnemonics more convoluted and harder to remember.
1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.