Exactly this. I’m a sorta “WK is not really for me” person. But with various scripts I’ve made it work out for me. Until the last update broke some of those scrips. If I can’t rely on a site fully functioning the way I need/want it to I really don’t feel like staying subscribed to it. (Certainly not with that price tag at least.)
And seeing that without scrips I (and probably several others) wouldn’t have subscribed in the first place… yeah, those script writers made Tofugu some money, and it’d certainly seem fair if there was some option for people to get some compensation, if they wish.
Yeah, that’s why I think they also concentrate mostly on the 1-30 experience with the content updates.
That’s a fair point.
I wouldn’t have been able to use WK at all without Tsurukame, so while I don’t think they should roll script functionality into the main website, I really, really wish they would add official apps.
But I also realize that minority use cases like ours are unlikely to get looked at given their team size.
What proportion even uses the forums? The scripts/apps and community go a long way to making this platform useable, so much so that I wouldn’t be using this product now without them. However, there’s pretty much no way to even discover these options exist without getting here first (hidden in a menu or the bottom of the page ) which is something of a problem in itself.
I don’t really see this topic as “officially integrating popular scripts” as much as “looking at scripts to make the service more likely to attract and retain users”. I guess that’s a waste of effort when you’ve got the only product of this quality in the market, but it’s a real shame given how many QoL issues have been pointed out and even fixed by the community.
Something as simple as having a default X lessons/day ubiquitous in related learning apps and sadly missing here, but I’ve read a lot of comments of people struggling with pacing that could have been solved with that. Even better if they did something like this widget when onboarding new users.
We’ve had a few threads on it over the years and the most that the WK team has said is that forum users make up a small percentage of their total user base.
Which is why I think the number of people using scripts and apps is significant enough that they’ve been maintaining an API, but not big enough that they want to bring any of it in house.
This is a really good point. I think implementing something like this could go a long way toward helping new users with pacing and preventing a lot of the burnout and resulting review backlogs we see on this forum. There could still be a “go at my own pace” option, which lets you do however many lessons a day that you want (like default WK), but I think many new users would benefit from being presented with more of a study plan, first, instead of having to figure out scheduling completely on their own.
It’s a difficult issue, speaking as a very happy WK user and also a professional software developer.
If WK “supports and blesses” (my phrase) an add-on there are then questions around payment to the original developer of the add-on, and exactly what the commitment is that should then be required of that developer.
WK is not open source, it’s an open API. Individuals have invested time and effort and money to make this a great product, and they’re allowed to commit to whatever they want to commit to.
But maybe an answer is to have forums that, with input from paying WK users, work to review and improve add-on scripts. Alternatively developers of an add-on are free to market their add-on by themselves and sell it for profit.
Yes, WaniKani has to licence their kanji from various studios, such as Warner Bros. and Disney. Also WaniKani produces their own original kanji that have won various awards, such as Stranger Things and Squid Game.
Rather than No Cigar, “did you mean” should probably be followed up with multiple choices, with trick choices (from blocklist or from JMDict, or from unrelated vocabularies) - if you answer so, you are wrong.
This should be better for Romaji meanings as well, to check whether you really know.
Honestly, this may entails lots of addition to each vocabularies. Vocabulary meanings are better checked by phrase / cloze tests, rather English translations, anyway.
There might be options in settings to turn on Experimental Features.
Ignore / Double-Check might be a part of Experimental Features.
It might be possible to implement on mobile / third-party apps, even at this current state of API as well.
I don’t exactly how to calculate dissimilarity between words meaningfully.
I know it’s a super late reply, but that really echoes my impressions.
To follow up on my previous post, I only recently started to manage leeches decently thanks to the Item Inspector script. That one actually helped me to clean up numerous problematic vocab words so far. Huge thanks!
I work as a programmer too, and the “aw, but we have to support the feature later on” narration is oh-so-familiar but I’m not exactly fond of it in this case. I mean, it’s not like you’re building a completely new resource allocation app in a rigidly time constrained system. It’s not like you’re adding useless bells and whistles either. These are tangible improvements to the learning process.
As for Bunpro comparisons, for one, I recently confused their API integration with Kitsun (which doesn’t have a direct one). They’re quick enough for me to think others have their stuff, while they don’t.
Generally, leeches is one aspect, but there is self-study, practice, jisho search, searching user synonyms, even silly overall progress bar. Then there are kanji similarities, transitivity pairs etc, etc.
Extra Study had me hopeful, and I was very happy to see it, but it needs to followed up on. To me, it’s not much on its own.
After having used WaniKani for around a year and Anki for much longer, I would pick Anki mostly due to its flexibility, but also due to the Quality of Life features which it offers, like cap on daily lessons/reviews, leech management and several scoring classes for each card. The only thing Anki is not very good at is review schedules and card scoring weights which are very personal anyhow and need to be tweaked.
WaniKani seems like a good, well-structured system (radicals → kanji → vocab), but from my experience tends to suffer from massive diminishing returns, because it’s too restrictive, punishing and distracting with the amount of extra information it loads the user with on top of kanji.
Here’s a couple of things which could be changed to streamline the overall user experience, some of which are covered by scripts:
Removing user keyboard input for answers. It takes time, is error-prone and opens up the system to way too many issues (keyboard layout differences, spellchecking, accidental typing errors, etc.).
Radicals reaching only Guru stage. They’re useful, but shouldn’t be forced onto users for months of study, especially that for much more complicated kanji they just add noise.
Replacing the partial spellchecking system with more meaning answers for kanji and vocab. What we currently have are mitigations - spellcheck accepts imperfect answers, we need blocklists for words which the spellcheck wrongly accepted, allowlists for new synonyms, etc. That’s a lot of periodic maintenance overhead and shifts the burden heavily on the user.
To the above, allowing user synonyms when learning items. Since around half of my initial WaniKani journey I had to add a user synonym literally for everything, because the kanji/vocab meanings were either too vague, too restrictive or sometimes simply wrong.
Configurable caps on daily reviews. Sometimes it’s very discouraging to see a massive review pile after an unintentional break.
I disagree with removing the partial spellcheck (it would be extremely annoying to get answers wrong due to minor typos), but the rest of this I agree with strongly. WK is way too narrow in what synonyms it accepts for most items, and especially for Kanji. It’s also very annoying that lessons don’t allow you to add user synonyms; that’s the best time to allow the user to add them, but for some reason it’s the only time you’re not allowed to do it.
After doing both WK and Anki style decks, I have to disagree with this one. I think keyboard input for short answer items like Kanji and simple vocab is better and Anki style is better for things like sentence cards.
As for whether it should be an option within WK, I’m on the fence. I can understand some people disagree and prefer it other way, and it’s good that there’s an API that allows that to be customized, but there’s definitely an argument to be made for it to be rolled into WK.
I think they should keep radicals going all the way to burned, but I think they should stop having radicals at all after level 30. Instead, just build on Kanji with radical components added.
They’ve actually been doing quite a bit of this over the last year or so. I can remember several discussion threads that results in changes to the white/black lists. Of course, it’s always going to be a work in progress but I think the Wk team has been doing a good job of addressing this.
1000000% agree. This isn’t even available via the API I don’t think.
I don’t know how this would work in practice and I think I would disagree with aspects of it depending on the implementation but I’m good with the general idea.
I feel that WaniKani is good on forcing you to type, even if it is English. However, I still stand strong on typo-checking + follow-up questions. (Typo-checking + forcing you to type English correctly [No Cigar] is just a mitigation.)
I totally agree with this one.
Another related issue is, whether Kanji and vocabularies should still be remembered with broken English, after months of study? Unless meaning quizzes are good enough, I won’t acknowledge.
Well but I think that’s a fundamental different expectation of what WaniKani IS. “WaniKani” isn’t the SRS. It’s the plan, the set of custom mnemonics and the order you should learn them. The SRS is just the method. You could “do” wanikani IN anki.
I kind of like that the WaniKani team maintains focus on the essential product. I also appreciate that they provide a bare-bones functional user interface for the “I just want it to work with no effort on my part” people, but also maintain an API for all the tweakers and customizers to go crazy with “nice to have” user scripts.
) which is something of a problem in itself.
