I have recently developed a small site (www,kaniwani.com) which is meant to help you with your actual vocabulary recall. I made this tool primarily for me and my girlfriend to use to help our learning, and it has really helped us! I didn’t mean for it to really go public yet but it’s been picking up some steam so I figure I should make a post about it.
I found while doing Wanikani that while I could recognise Kanji and Vocabulary when they were presented to me, I couldn’t come up with the words on my own without the visual aid. To that end, I created Kaniwani (A quick search seems to show that somebody has already made a similarly named service!).
However, I am not a web developer, and as such, there will undoubtedly be bugs, problems, and general ugliness (If you are a front-end developer willing to work with me to make it pretty, drop me a line!). Onto the interesting stuff:
Features
Start at your current Wanikani Level so you don’t have to trudge through the 10000 vocabulary below your current level.
Manually unlock old levels.
You unlock new Kaniwani vocab as you unlock new Wanikani vocab.
Your synonyms are automatically imported from WaniKani (still kind of in-progress).
Keyboard Shortcuts: during reviews, press P to show the Phonetic reading, and K to show the actual Kanji in the vocabulary. Hitting F shows both (a la Wanikani).
Vocabulary conglomeration: Words in Wanikani that have the same meaning but different readings get combined. For example, when you see “Father” you can answer either “ちちおや” or “おとうさん”.
Full SRS system: The algorithm is identical to Wanikani’s SRS, in that the more often you correctly answer a review, the less often you will see it, until it is burnt. Unfortunately there are no visual cues yet to show you what level each word is at. SRS operates every 15 minutes, but if you’re impatient you can hit the little refresh button to see if there are any new reviews for you.
Changelog:
Patch 0.2
We now show the user when the next review will be.
You can now press the “f” key on the keyboard in order to show both the phonetic and Kanji readings.
Whenever you discover a new piece of vocabulary, any synonyms of it are automatically imported.
All previous synonyms should also now be imported.
Fixed a server error that prevented use when a vocabulary hadn’t yet been imported into Kaniwani.
Added more robust logging(You’ll thank me for this later).
Coming soon(ish):
Re-lock levels that you’ve previously unlocked.
See which items are in danger(a la Wanikani Critical items)
See English words -> Type in the phonetic Japanese. e.g: When “Cat” shows up, you type in “neko” in english(the site will turn it into hiragana)
After inputting the word, if you got it right, it will convert the characters to the actual correct Kanji for the vocab.
If you have any suggestions or(especially) if you notice any bugs, please let me know. This is a side project while I’m in school, but I’ll work as quick as I can to fix any issues.
Absolutely awesome work! This is why I love WK. While WK itself does only certain things (but does them well), you can rely on the community to provide supporting services to help on those areas that WK doesn’t cover and that’s just awsum. Thanks m8!
lolillo said...
I'm trying to sign up but I do not know what an Api key is and that field is required.
It should be a long string in your settings page. If you don't already have one, click the button that says generate and you'll get one. :) Link : http://www.wanikani.com/account
I’m not hating, I think your utility is well designed. The reason I mentioned it is because I hope you implement the filter by item level feature from the other kaniwani. The ability to start with only your enlightened list and then, once that’s cleared, move down to master then guru or back up etc is really helpful.
All in all though, I always wished for a level-separated kaniwani. Thank you for making it!
lolillo said...
I'm trying to sign up but I do not know what an Api key is and that field is required.
It should be a long string in your settings page. If you don't already have one, click the button that says generate and you'll get one. :) Link : http://www.wanikani.com/account
Thank you very much. I didn't have the faintest idea.
iggy said...
Excellent app! Just had one question: How does one input the small tsu symbol?
If you don't have an IDE, you can always write something with a double consonant (kk, ss, tt, whatever) and delete everything but the small "tsu". there is a key for it though, I just don't remember it.
iggy said...
Excellent app! Just had one question: How does one input the small tsu symbol?
Currently I don't know if it works with an IME or not.. I type with US keyboard. For example, "to decide" is typed ketteisuru with a double t indicating the small tsu between the ke and the te.
