Recently Wanikanni changed how some Radicals are written, and this really threw me off. Also, I started encountering Vocabulary that has had it’s meaning altered. I find it not helpful to change definitions of words I have not yet burned yet.
They change things to avoid people learning incorrect definitions or nuances. They’re not doing it arbitrarily. Unfortunately you’re just gonna have to re-learn those words - in the long run, it is helpful. And getting vocabulary wrong a couple of times won’t make any difference on your ability to level-up in WaniKani.
If they have to change incorrect definitions, these should have never existed in the first place, they should have been more careful when they integrated it first in the website… now of course it’s not the same thing if they just add some nuances to better explain the words. Personally I don’t remember having a problem like that but perhaps it will come later.
Sure, in an ideal world that would be true, but in practice some adjustments are needed, and it’s better to rip the bandaid off and just do it rather than go "hmm, I’d better not do this, because some people are going to be mildly inconvenienced.
In reality, translation is kinda hard, it’s not always possible to tell ahead of time what nuances you’re conveying by accident, and the WaniKani staff are only human. And one of them is Koichi.
Plus, learners should get used to the idea that there’s not necessarily always going to be one singular 100% proper translation choice when moving from one language to another.
I have an Anki deck that translates まったく as “entirely, truly, indeed.” Here it’s “completely,” while the first definition in Kenkyusha lists the following meanings: “quite, entirely, utterly, completely, thoroughly, totally, altogether, simply.”
I guess another explanation besides human error could be that sometimes, words do just change meaning. Think about how often it happens in English - there’s lots of words that were once common that aren’t anymore, that meant one thing and now mean another, were considered rude and now aren’t and vice versa. Languages are fluid and always evolving, so it makes sense that there could be some changes every now and then.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some outright errors in there which have resulted in changes. I know the admins post the changes on the forums, but they’re very easy to miss if you’re not frequently checking for them. Maybe some sort of flag on each changed item for 6 - 12 months afterwards would be helpful, particularly for people who take a break or who’ve got an item to enlightened or something and haven’t reviewed it in a while…
They’ve posted change logs by date* every now and then. It would be easier for customers to be able to check change logs by items* as well. (And of course, add a link to Item Pages.)
This probably can be done very cleanly in their Notion website. Maybe more fitting for Feedback category.
WaniKani is quite a rigid quiz system, so it’s probably not good to just let mark previously correct answers as wrong (including removing synonyms / alt meanings).