Why doesn't WK have a progress bar for vocabulary?

When I’m studying my radicals and kanji it’s fun to see my progression on the dashboard. But there is nothing like that for vocabulary and I cannot understand why. As I wrote this I see “Your topic is similar to…” and someone brought this up over five years ago! The absence of this relatively simple to implement feature is … disappointing.

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It’s probably that they envisioned the bars as being for the practical purpose of tracking unlocking things, and vocab items don’t unlock things.

The progress bar for kanji displays how far you are from advancing to the next level. They don’t track all the kanji in a level, just the number needed to level up.

In that sense, the reason for not having a vocab progress bar is simply that vocabulary is not related to leveling up. You don’t need to hit any particular vocabulary threshold to move to another stage of WaniKani.

Similarly, getting a vocab item to guru status doesn’t unlock anything. So that’s probably the reason for not having individual item bars.

I’m sure someone has made a script for this kind of thing though, so maybe someone who knows can help you find a way to alter the dashboard to suit your preferences.

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has separate progress bars for all categories that aren’t completed, that includes multi-level

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“In that sense, the reason for not having a vocab progress bar is simply that vocabulary is not related to leveling up. You don’t need to hit any particular vocabulary threshold to move to another stage of WaniKani.”

Actually, one does need to progress through the vocabulary to then have lessons begin on the radicals and kanji of the following level. Maybe there’s a way to start the radicals/kanji before the previous level’s vocabulary reaches guru but I’m not aware of it and even if I were I wouldn’t employ it.

Lessons can be reordered with some minimal settings in the website itself, and extensively with userscripts. Yes, in practice the typical user (who isn’t using reordering) will need to do vocab lessons to make room for other lessons in their queue, but they could proceed to get every vocab review wrong and never progress in any vocab items and the system would still let them advance to level 60.

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Thank you. I’ve seen how the scripts offer a lot of interesting tools and so forth. I tried to get them going a couple of months ago but wasn’t successful. I don’t recall what happened but I was afraid of having to spend much time on figuring out and maintaining that at the expense of time studying Japanese.

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Aha, I wondered. Knowing me if I found a passing lane I’d use it with the good intentions of returning to the vocabulary later, and then simply wouldn’t do it. :slight_smile:

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I’m the OP of the thread linked. I’d be happy to answer your questions if you wanted to try to set this script up on your dashboard. There are plenty of informational scripts like this that make your dashboard more stat-filled without affecting your WK progression… :wink:

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That is such a kind and generous offer, thank you, but I must decline. Overall I love WK the way it is and am patient to just follow the program while asking them for such updates and new features. :grinning:

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