I am also still not in favor of Kanji Input, and have actually come up with even more reasons to oppose it. However, I am still not opposed to showing answers in Kanji and think this could add value without any drawbacks.
The arguments against Kanji input have already been discussed at length in this and the other thread, so I’ll just summarize them, and add a few new ones below:
- Correct Kanji are often independent from the correct reading, so allowing Kanji answers would produce unnecessary false positives (answers with incorrect readings but correct Kanji)
a) If you forget the reading but remember the Kanji compounds, you could write the Kanji out individually, in a disjoint manner (e.g.: なか + こころ instead of ちゅうしん（中心）).
b) There are many ways to unintentionally produce the correct Kanji, but with the wrong reading, no matter how hard you try to avoid this. (e.g.: のしたで instead of the correct のもと（下）で)
c) Adding on to my old argument from 1.b), sometimes it’s not only easy to unintentionally produce wrong readings, but (nearly) impossible to avoid. Consider when the Kanji is directly attached to the noun, but the answer field is only the Kanji part (e.g.: N上、N下、N中). If the answer field only had the Kanji part, the user trying to input answers with Kanji would basically be forced to write out うえ、した、なか instead of the correct じょう、か、ちゅう/じゅう. So the user would in these cases have to intentionally write out the wrong thing to produce the correct Kanji. - Marking answers with incorrect readings (whether they be intentional, unintentional, or required) as correct reinforces bad habits.
- IMEs would be required to input the Kanji, but IMEs’ auto-complete features make it impossible to grade your answers without bias
a) As you type the answer, if the Kanji don’t show up, you now know that you typed in the wrong reading, which gives you the ability to revise your answer instead of getting marked wrong and letting the SRS do its job.
b) Adding on a new argument to 3.a), after writing the same grammar pattern a few times, autocomplete options based on your typing history start popping up, so if you start typing out the answer correctly, the full answer based on your typing history would promptly show up before you are finished. Therefore, you would only really be practicing the beginning of the pattern, rather than the full pattern.
- Implementing Kanji input would be time consuming and diverts efforts that could have otherwise been put to use elsewhere.
To put my perspective bluntly, I am against implementing a feature that creates unnecessary false positives, undermines the efficacy of the SRS, makes unbiased self-grading nearly impossible, and reinforces bad habits, especially when implementing this feature takes time away from other projects that would definitely add value to the platform instead of potentially degrading it.
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