Would you consider the Wanikani Anki deck to be an OK thing to use? Not in terms of quality, but rather in the fact that it’s basically just using Wanikani but avoiding paying for it.
Yeah of course. It would actually be way faster and cheaper to use that. But the more you learn Japanese you’ll find very quickly that you don’t need mnemonics like, at all!
I’d argue that when you’re getting something for free, regardless of ethics, it’s gonna be hard to stick to it unless you have high discipline (which most people don’t). When you however pay for the thing you’re using, you feel more pressure to use that tool, which means there’s a chance you’re gonna stick to it or come back to it at some point.
I personally paid 200 euros for lifetime wanikani in 2021, and stuck to it for around 7-8 months. Before that I used to use Anki decks, but never continued any of them. However i paid for wanikani, a lot of money, so after a year of having to deal with personal stuff in 2022, the pressure of having a lifetime wanikani made me go back to it. And now since December I went back and I’m sticking to it and I’m progressing pretty well, and enjoying it a lot.
In the end it’s about the resources you have. Do you have 5-10 euros / dollars a month to contribute to something you want to do? If you’re a student or living in a 3rd world country and don’t have the resources, then yeah it’d be hard to pay for WK, but if you’re a working adult with enough resources to pay for another subscription that is more productive than netflix or co, then you should probably pay for it.
I’d say ethically it’s piracy, but practically a much better system. Wanikani recently made large design changes for developer convenience that destroyed user extensions that made the website usable for a lot of people. They were aware that these features were important to much of their user base but chose to destroy them. As a result, wanikani as a platform is now just a very unfriendly SRS app, and anyone who wants to use their curriculum would be better off taking it to anki.
I don’t want to say stealing the content is ethically good, but the app itself is not worth paying for right now.
I guess ethically it’s not right.
I bought lifetime wanikani but after a while I switched to the Anki version. It enabled me to skip things like all the vocab, and learn the Kanji much faster. After finishing it fast I was able to stop using the deck and just use manga to learn Japanese and reinforce the Kanji through context. If you use wanikani directly it will take more than a year to finish it, when you could have used that time reading Japanese text instead
I’ve used the RRTK deck with great results, it’s pretty popular. Wanikani have a steep price for what they offer, if I’m not mistaken.
It’s so much better. You can see your stats, change your frequency, erase some cards, change the translation sometimes when the english is not your mother tongue, etc. I was on Wanikani, the paid one, until level 5 and switch to Anki because is way better.
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Yeah of course. It would actually be way faster and cheaper to use that. But the more you learn Japanese you’ll find very quickly that you don’t need mnemonics like, at all!
I’d argue that when you’re getting something for free, regardless of ethics, it’s gonna be hard to stick to it unless you have high discipline (which most people don’t). When you however pay for the thing you’re using, you feel more pressure to use that tool, which means there’s a chance you’re gonna stick to it or come back to it at some point.
I personally paid 200 euros for lifetime wanikani in 2021, and stuck to it for around 7-8 months. Before that I used to use Anki decks, but never continued any of them. However i paid for wanikani, a lot of money, so after a year of having to deal with personal stuff in 2022, the pressure of having a lifetime wanikani made me go back to it. And now since December I went back and I’m sticking to it and I’m progressing pretty well, and enjoying it a lot.
In the end it’s about the resources you have. Do you have 5-10 euros / dollars a month to contribute to something you want to do? If you’re a student or living in a 3rd world country and don’t have the resources, then yeah it’d be hard to pay for WK, but if you’re a working adult with enough resources to pay for another subscription that is more productive than netflix or co, then you should probably pay for it.
I’d say ethically it’s piracy, but practically a much better system. Wanikani recently made large design changes for developer convenience that destroyed user extensions that made the website usable for a lot of people. They were aware that these features were important to much of their user base but chose to destroy them. As a result, wanikani as a platform is now just a very unfriendly SRS app, and anyone who wants to use their curriculum would be better off taking it to anki.
I don’t want to say stealing the content is ethically good, but the app itself is not worth paying for right now.
I guess ethically it’s not right.
I bought lifetime wanikani but after a while I switched to the Anki version. It enabled me to skip things like all the vocab, and learn the Kanji much faster. After finishing it fast I was able to stop using the deck and just use manga to learn Japanese and reinforce the Kanji through context. If you use wanikani directly it will take more than a year to finish it, when you could have used that time reading Japanese text instead
I’ve used the RRTK deck with great results, it’s pretty popular. Wanikani have a steep price for what they offer, if I’m not mistaken.
It’s so much better. You can see your stats, change your frequency, erase some cards, change the translation sometimes when the english is not your mother tongue, etc.
I was on Wanikani, the paid one, until level 5 and switch to Anki because is way better.