Yay! Now I can go back to using my phone only haha
To be honest, I don’t personally care whether or not any individual user is going full speed or going more slowly. That’s up to the individual.
What I’m saying is, the team is justifying removing these features by saying people should not prioritize leveling up. But the only way to do Wanikani in ‘just over a year’ is to prioritize leveling up. So, should people prioritize leveling up or shouldn’t they? I’m not sure Wanikani is being very clear in the messaging here.
Sorry if it wasnt clear but it was not aimed at you! I apologize if you felt the target of all this venting, boss 
I share the same sentiment, but all of this can be answered by “it’s just marketing”(fine by me) / they want to focus on people “learning” and using the kanjis through vocab (I dont see how having the hover tool stopped people from learning).
The messaging doesn’t really bother me if it’s keeping the business running. What matters is the program works as long as you stick to it. I don’t begrudge them bringing in the 
.
I like this change. I’ve never used scripts but I often use my phone to due reviews on the go and use Tsurukame to either do apprentice first (current level first) or try to burn things (Descending SRS stages). Those are basically the only scripts I’ve ever needed, as when I started Wankikani in March you could do lessons in whatever order you wanted.
The only feature missing for me is the ability to fix typos. I’ve missed a couple of burns now from typos and that sucks lol.
Hovering is not a mobile-friendly solution, so I’m open to the new approach personally.
Things tend to get harder over time. Not deterred. You should do your reviews as normal. The vocab is why you’re here so i think the gates should change from kanji to vocab. Make them guru 75% of the words to level up. This will also obliterate all the only kanji speeders.
Strongly agree with the points being raised/expanded upon between you and @sanshoo on this all.
I mentioned it before but I really think that the speed or content division of the individual user isn’t really a concern for the WK structure to put more restrictions or emphasis on since, above all else, broader options are only ultimately more encouraging and accessible. You make a really great point in that the fundamental, advertised identity of WaniKani is one predicated on the idea that learning this long and difficult task can be made considerably brisker and more user-friendly via this service, and alterations like this seem misguided under that perspective.
If the intention is to make it harder to run through for those ‘abusing’ the system or not properly letting it sink in meaningfully- my response to that would be… why bother? This is an educational tool (as opposed to entertainment or something) where there is a pretense of necessary discipline. If people are willing to sidestep it, it’s not anyone but their own fault if they refuse to take the learning with any sincere effort. Tailor the experience for those really trying above all else, or at least that’s the perspective I would hold if it were me under-the-hood- and good intention or not I struggle to feel like that’s been the mentality here lately.
Using the same “level up for the sake of level up” quote, as an example, is emblematic of this. I use Kanji prioritization because unlocking and getting to practice with new vocab is how I have effectively been learning the material- I’m not just trying to unlock stuff for the sake of powering through to the end. I can’t imagine anyone would label that anything close to an insincere or non-viable approach- so having structural change predicated on handicapping my ability to do it is a little lame.
Sitting on this all a little longer I also have come to be a little put off by the emphasis on slowing people down due to the fact that many (probably the vast majority) of WK users are using the service under a subscription model. I’ve seen people on these forums who have to be really mindful about how much they utilize the service because they can’t, for example, renew beyond the single year they have the resources to afford. If they want to get a good value on the product they have to be mindful about optimization- so it’s a little hostile in my opinion to un-streamline the previously available tools to do so.
Still trying to not be too negative on this but just a few weeks ago these issues weren’t something any of us had to even consider at all- so the tension feels almost entirely avoidable and most expressed solutions/desires are not unfounded on viability.
So if for exemple I would only pay monthly for wanikani, and going slowly would I be supposed to pay for 10 years in order to reach level 60 ? 
Same here. Thanks dracky for expressing things better than I can 
I want to add something quickly: it’s a bit sad that the “Dashboard Update” could have been about only the Dashboard:
If the esthetics and new features of dashboard were the only thing that had happened, I would have thought nothing of it but “kinda cool, I hope they get new widgets/features out of this. that’s a funny illustration.”, and moved on to do my reviews on time.
I hear you and understand your frustration - the hover function was always there, and it was fine, and now a lot of people miss it, so why not just put it back? But I can also see WK’s side in this.
Their job is to provide a baseline framework intended to help people use an SRS system to learn kanji effectively. It sounds like they casually removed the hover function without realizing how much it would be missed, and when they solicited feedback, they realized for the first time that a concerning number of people had been using it to pre-review words that they’d forgotten, immediately before the official reviews came up. That approach undermines the SRS process. I understand that everyone has their own workflow, and maybe someone wants to study this way. And I agree with you that, if someone wants to sidestep the process, that’s up to them as the student. But it also seems very reasonable to me that the devs might decide it’s not a behavior they want their system to easily enable. They’re trying to provide a framework that supports properly implementing the SRS process. If given the ready option, some students might engage in behaviors that hurt their learning without appreciating the harm. WK doesn’t want that.
I’m actually impressed with how hard the team seems to have worked to find a new solution that provides the functions desired by the people in Koichi’s first two buckets, despite making the careful decision that they don’t want to reenable last minute “cheat” reviews.
And, for those who are still seriously stressed about losing the hover capability:
Hover still works there. It shows the kanji, meaning, WK level, SRS level, and next review timing, just like everyone is asking for. I know some people will find it inconvenient to go to a different site, but honestly, WKStats has so much useful info that I probably spend more time there than on my dashboard. I never really used the old dashboard except to do new lessons, because everything I wanted was presented in a better form by WKStats or Tsurukame.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness in your response and will +1 the general usage of WK stats as a resource as it has been a great tool my entire time learning here- though I take some issue with WK’s justification that you’re mentioning here in that the hover was being used as a cheating tool- as I think, as mentioned, that’s a problem of a user’s lack of discipline rather than an effect of the feature. The original hover tool exclusively just relayed the time of the next review for an item with no other context about readings, definitions, etc. Do people cheat the system? Sure, but in order to do so (including right now) it has been a manual process of fully clicking onto an item page and reviewing the content. Even if people were using hovering as a way to better ‘sort’ which items to click on- that’s still their choice, a choice that can still be done (just with less convenience), and never was a result of hovering in itself.
WK’s action here in trying to pin cheating on hovering (which makes some sense if people were directly saying that’s what they did) has created a new system that, while appreciated, still seems to lack the same level of specificity and planning for those trying to use the program earnestly- which I find to be kind of a bummer since that means objective function has regressed. The alternative of WK stats, as you have stated, “shows the kanji, meaning, WK level, SRS level, and next review timing" so it’s not a resource I tend to want to use since all I want is the next timing.
Ultimately I can’t help but feel like their decision making is predicated on some (arguably) misguided logic, and when it comes at the expense of a workflow that served me really well I ultimately just wish I didn’t have to be in this cycle of reinvention to begin with. I’m remaining optimistic, but in the end so much of this annoyance would be lifted if it was just addititve or an alternative option versus being the replacement.
Please just do away with the whole levels altogether and make the tool actually useful for people who need to learn specific kanji for their own purposes, like following along with class, for example.
WK is okay but needs to stop being a straightjacket.
Lol that would be a completely different product. Maybe kitsun.io?
Just more likely item types are batched up, and while interleaving is a very small version of representativeness, more randomness is more representative to real life and makes things slightly more difficult. Having to switch item types more, or recall things from different time periods next to each other just forces you to run into a little more variety of contexts. So, random is a little better for that. There are things we can and want to do that will make practice much more representative, but some is better than less, in this case.
Maybe that’s you, but there are plenty of people trying to go as fast as they can until they have too many reviews to deal with then end up quitting. Or falling behind on other reviews because they’re only trying to line up their kanji review timings. People who straight up said they were cheating, though I don’t think they thought they were cheating. Some “I’ll check the kanji meaning and reading when they are due for the guru level review so I don’t get it wrong.” And we’re like… “what!? you’re doing that!?” But, people just are prioritizing leveling up over learning. Trying not to encourage that. But, also want to encourage the good things people were doing with kanji hover, because there are some!
Dropping everything to get to work on that. 
Time is an illusion…
(and I just want you to enjoy your time studying, it’s okay if you don’t hit all the timings perfectly, I promise—and if you really want to, there are totally ways you can hit your timings perfectly—but I don’t think you should 
Stop to smell the kanji for rose, as they say)
I saw that post come up while I was writing this topic since it was similar and thought it was too funny not to link to it. 
I’m just trying to be nice here! I don’t think there’s much there for you to read into about the language other than that. My other option is to use a lot of these gifs, and it didn’t feel so appropriate this time…
I don’t know if I’d call it policing. It’s much more insidious than that!
But, we do certainly make a lot of decisions around how we think something will guide behavior. A lot’s going on all over the place that is… manipulative, I guess? That just sounds bad, but that’s basically what it is. Manipulating behaviors, discouraging behaviors—to make it more likely someone will do certain things the hard way, to not be tricked into thinking they knew something, to make certain choices over others, etc., something we think will be overall better for their chances of being able to recall something later. I’ve found a lot of these decisions come off as inconveniences / less efficient / bad UIUX, etc. (sometimes they actually are those things, to be fair).
I’m just of the mind that we as learners don’t really know what we’re doing but we’re very confident that we do know what we’re doing and that we’re doing the right thing. So, So WaniKani puts something in the water and…
And, just to clarify — the whole thing about being blindsided about this use case is all totally true. But, the conclusion is also along the lines of “oops, we were encouraging behaviors we don’t want to encourage.” So, that’s why the hover isn’t coming back there. And, at the same time I hear you about the disruption. So the solution(s) we’re working on are an attempt to a) not encourage certain behaviors while b) still pulling out some parts of the way people were using it and applying them in a way that won’t encourage “a.”
Anyways, I do appreciate you willing to give it a shot for a bit, once we get it out. Not everyone gives things a chance like that and thinks things through and talks it out.
one day, a thousand years from now, we will have to make an “old summary page” widget.
It shouldn’t change the review ordering you’re already set to, and if you want to switch to any of the new orderings you’ll have to do it manually.
It does makes sense. With widgets we were worried about any single widget taking up too much vertical space and stretching all the other widgets out. But, certainly have found that some people don’t really care and it’s probably okay to have variants of the widgets that are more vertically stretched (as long as there are some compact options too). It’s something we feel like we can do a little more of now that we have this initial set of not-so-tall widgets.