WaniKani Blog

Or, at least, “closed beta time.” There’s still a lot of work and testing to be done before we open things up for any old kanji-learning Joe. So what does Closed Beta mean?

• We’re going to start letting in all those people who signed up to join the beta. Probably about 100 at a time, starting with the person who signed up first. Hopefully one set of invites a day. If you signed up for the beta list via the homepage this is you. If you haven’t signed up, you should do that.
• We’re opening up the “premium levels” as well. Beta members will get a 20% discount for signing up during the beta period. It’s still a work in progress, so we wanted to make it up to you.
• We’ll continue working on WaniKani much like we did in the Alpha. Basically we’ll be working on new features, making fixes, and seeing how you use the product. Of course your feedback will also shape how WaniKani is developed as we moved towards the “1.0 version.”

I also wanted to take a moment to look back at how far we’ve come! It was a great alpha and a lot of fun working with all of you. A lot has changed since day one (which was May 14th, when we let 13 alpha testers in).

• New reviews page design.
• New lessons page design.
• New dashboard design.
• Added a forum.
• Added a public profile page.
• Fixed a lot of issues.
• Adjusted the SRS spacing.
• Added keyboard shortcuts.
• …and did a huge amount of small fixes. Too many to list here!

I’m sure there’s other things that I’ve just forgotten as well, but all-in-all I think a lot has happened and changed in the last two months. It also sounds like a lot of you learned a good amount of kanji and vocabulary as well, which of course is the ultimate goal :)

In the beta moving forward, I think we have a few goals (very subject to change).

• Redo the admin (our backend) so that we have more stats on items / learned as well as problem items (so we can make changes to mnemonics, lessons, etc., based on this).
• Continue to add a lot of kanji to the site. What’s added up right now is only part of the planned amount, and obviously we have to stay ahead of the fastest person.
• Work on some of the more “social” features of the site. Not so much Twitter / Facebook or anything like that, but more like interaction between WK members and the things we can do to motivate you to study more as well as things that will help you to learn more effectively. I think we have some unique ideas about this, more details later on.
• Continue to work on and work out the kinks you find. It’s still beta, after all! :)

Thanks again to all of you who were alpha testers. We really appreciate it! And, thank you in advance to all of the beta members who will be joining us over the next month or two.

(Source: wanikani.com)