I don’t really agree. It makes me happy that WaniKani is a well-defined product that does one job and does it well. The payment model is straightforward, honest and doesn’t involve advertising or selling user data. Good for them.
Not enough software is designed in that way and tech companies tend to want to “take over the world” and end up transforming into bug-riddled, mediocre Swiss army knives. Imagining a WaniKani with video chat, NFTs, flash games and ride hailing just gives me a headache.
WaniKani is a sharpened sushi knife, not a swiss army knife, and I find that respectable.
All in all, hard to judge the team and call them lazy for it.
Fair enough. I mean I feel like If i was in charge of the product, and a user made a good script that makes my thing work better, I would hire him to help me officially implement the thing onto the app. Or do something similar, If its a game changing thing its adding. Lets face it if wanikani was perfect there wouldnt be a need for users to make side workarounds to make wanikani work like they feel it should.
But to me it seems like, cause there is a lot of users making scripts and apps for WK, the development team doesnt feel the urge to actually do the changes themselves, cause the users already brute force the change themselves.
This and things like the EtoEto development is why I said what I said like that… but I admit it was a bit harsh… wanikani is a great working site as it is, great effort. And I commend it.
From my perspective anyway, Wanikani has honed in on doing exactly what it does, teaching the kanji,
Well I dont think Wanikani is as honed as you may think. It doesnt teach you all the readings, it only teaches you some, if not just one, that you end you remembering. Then even if you finish the whole WK course, is not like you can ready like advanced material. There will be a ton of readings you dont know and this and that and the other thing.
I definitely feel like there is a lot of room for growth, within the niche, that is kanji learning. Maybe make something like when you reach max level in an MMO game, and its all about the “end game” and what people can do after that. There could be reading materials developed to for WK that focus on using the kanjis they teach you in here. And then slowly ease you into reading materials with the kanji readings that WK does NOT teach. So you get a more complete kanji learning experience. After all the sole purpose for learning kanji is to learn how to read japanese.
This is just one area, but my point is, you say WK is honed to teach kanji, but in reality, WK is far from being enough for you to learn what you need to learn in order to walk into a book store. Grab a random japanese book, and read it fluently. And that should be a goal of any kanji teaching resource, of the caliber of wk. This is my opinion on that.
Seems like some people in this thread are misinterpreting what my point is. I dont want WK to expand into other stuff that isnt kanji, I want it to build upon its amazing foundation, and become a true kanji learning resource. Whats the reason we learn kanji, we want to be able to read Japanese. There is a lot of improvement possible to happen, within the niche of kanji, and teaching people to read japanese. I dont think the swiss army knife thing applies here.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
This is true, I didnt mean to suggest kanji is all you ever need to learn, to be able to read japanese. I just meant in the sense of, not finding words that you can’t read. Of course we should actually learn grammar, to actually understand whats up. haha
good catch man! I should’ve clarified that. Grammar is hella important.
I think you should also consider that Tofugu is a really small company, like… under a dozen people, and I don’t even think that they’re all full time. Before you go calling people lazy I think you should consider that it’s probably already a lot of work for such a small group to maintain the websites that they do.
Sure thing. I’m just a costumer, this a product with a subscription model. I dont think its wrong to voice opinions and criticisms on it. I already admitted it was harsh of me to call them lazy, lets not ad fuel to the fire focusing on that bit and lets try to have a productive conversation.
Ah, I see what you mean. I’m somewhat torn on the issue. I personally would not want WK to add more stuff. I already abhor all the additions to the vocab and additional kanji, as I think there comes a point when we got to let go of a crutch, as much fun as it might be. I personally don’t use scripts (well, one, actually, some drill script I use when I feel I’ve not paid enough attention during lessons) and I like my software to be lean and be able to do one thing but that properly. Expanding the range, even to incorporate some sort of kanji-look-up might look like fun at first but reasonably obsolete, as others have done just that.
I’d much rather spend my hours reading a book or manga than do anything WK related when I’m done here. But everyone has their own preferences and ideas what would make something even better. You seem to be at the start of your WK journey and I understand the excitement. I’m a bit closer to the end of it and I, for one, look very much forward to spending my time the way I mentioned above
This is a great point, and before you mentioned it, I took note of that. You are lvl 58, I bet the perspective from somebody like you is way different, as I have no idea what it feels like to look at, say a Japanese website, knowing as many kanji as you probably do. You may feel like you dont really need WK as much any more, but a more organic, natural process, like finding words you dont know, looking them up, and move on.
I imagine like, if I get to lvl 60, I would want then, something that helps me get from WK lvl 60, to being able to read native text fluently. Fast, and have it feel like, how I feel reading English. Which is my second language btw, but that being the point, I have no problem at all reading English whatsoever. Want to get to that point with Japanese.
WK as a learning environment is good and gives us a lot of stuff to play with. Seeing kanji, vocab and grammar in the wild is a bit different though, much more like when you first started to use English: a bit daunting, but you hung in there, persevered and suddenly, you notice things are a bit easier. Just a little bit, then it’ll plateau again and you see no progress. You’ll even feel you slide backwards until the next big thing happens and you know it’s the other way around. Have fun!
I absolutely, hard disagree; you’ve misinterpreted what I meant. By honed I mean that it has one clear focus it was entirely built around, not that it does that thing entirely. I didn’t mean to say Wanikani will exhaustively teach every meaning of every kanji, and you and I clearly fundamentally disagree that it even should. Your perspective is valid, but a very real concern when it comes to learning materials for a language is that people get stuck in comfort zones and never really move beyond their apps. What Wanikani teaches right now isn’t everything, but it’s (subjectively, and to me) enough, within the single realm of kanji. At some point, in order to actually get good at using the language, you have to use the language. And that’s not what Wanikani is about, it’s about preparing you to use the language. The idea of stories like you mentioned is more appealing because you’re practicing the language, but you can get that plenty of other places if native material is still too intimidating (Satori Reader, graded readers, etc), and those similarly benefit from being built around that single focus.
You’ll actually see a lot of people exiting this site before level 60, and that’s the kind of thing I’m considering possibly doing later, too. I mean, I already spend much more time reading real simple manga and the like than I do on here. At a certain point, holding people’s hands with learning material outside of the real language is more harm than good, and if you ask me, once Wanikani has sufficiently demystified the kanji learning experience and given someone enough of a foothold that they can learn more and more from striking out into real materials, they are best served by dropping it.
They’d have to add easily another literal 10-20K words. I can see how some would like WK to be a more comprehensive vocab source on top of a kanji source, but I wouldn’t have liked that.
Getting to 60 sets you up extremely well to be able to read quite a lot, and to teach yourself vocab through other means or exposure. If WK also had 25K vocab words, I’d never have bothered finishing due to getting sick and tired of SRS. The base price would also likely have been higher and there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have subscribed to begin with. I wouldn’t have wanted to pay for an expensive service while not believing I’d actually use it all by SRSing 4 or 5 years in a row.
That’s just me, of course. ^^ I may be wrong, but I sometimes feel like the idea WK having much more content is more appealing to newer members than people that are far along. But that’s not based on anything concrete.
WK was this safe coccoon of learning that was hard to step out of at times for me. I could do reviews and tell myself I was learning Japanese, but I was avoiding actually cutting my teeth on a proper novel. I’ve seen others express that as well.
WK having 60 levels meant I learned a lot, had something to show for my efforts by being able to say “neat, I managed to finish that!” and then being kicked from the nest to actually use what I learned.
But I agree with the sentiment behind it 
But that’s not based on anything concrete.