[App] KaniLeap (Alpha) - Study ahead in WaniKani

[StayBlue]

This is a third-party app and is not created or maintained by the WaniKani team. By using this, you understand that it can stop working at any time or be discontinued indefinitely.

You can visit the website here. Be sure to join the Discord server if you are comfortable doing so!

I am launching an application I had planned to create for roughly two years, but I finally got the motivation to sit down and turn it into a reality! Introducing KaniLeap. The goal of the application is to let you study beyond your current level without compromising anything.

How it works is that you can do lessons and reviews, just like you would in WaniKani. Once you reach the level required to unlock a particular subject (a kanji, radical, etc.), the KaniLeap system takes over and does the reviews for you automatically whenever they are available. You can also mark subjects as known, so you don’t even have to do any lessons or reviews. You can learn more about how the system works on the FAQ question page that is visible when you visit the website.

Disclaimer

Do bear in mind that KaniLeap cannot be used to circumvent the need for a paid WaniKani subscription. If your subscription expires, all lessons and reviews beyond Level 3 will be paused, and all subjects will be hidden in the UI. This is not only for legal but also for ethical reasons, as the WaniKani team spends a lot of time curating the data that makes WaniKani what it is. For more information, please refer to the relevant section of their API documentation.

Timeline

If all goes well, it should be in beta by February, but no guarantees. Once it’s in beta, I’ll release an API that lets developers interface with KaniLeap. I hope this is how most users will end up using the app, but I won’t be certain until I get there.

There are other features I’d like to work on, but I want to prioritize the features that people actually care about.

Showcase

Here are a few screenshots of the application’s interface:

Settings

Search

Dashboard

Lessons

Quizzes

Motivations

I was frustrated by encountering specific vocabulary in my immersion and not being able to learn it in WaniKani. I’ve always wished someone would come along and make this application, but since no one has, I’ve decided to give it my best shot.

[StayBlue]

A couple of changes were pushed yesterday to KaniLeap, including, but not limited to:

1. You can now see the SRS level that a subject changes to after you submit a correctly answered meaning and reading. This is effectively an implementation of Item Exact SRS Stage Indicator, but it’s the default implementation that’s embedded into the app:

   

2. Importing logic has been vastly improved, allowing multiple tabs to be open without potential conflicts and continuing an import if the tab is closed midway through. You can also change the API key tied to your account in the settings, which previously wasn’t possible:

   

3. A myriad of bugs and other issues have been fixed. For example, the knowledge growth graph works again:

   

Planned features:

1. Sync your progress to and from jpdb.
2. Choosing an SRS system other than WaniKani’s, such as FSRS.

[Kurafutekkusu]

Awesome work, this looks great!

And glad to hear the SRS indicator came in handy

[StayBlue]

I’ve decided to open registration for KaniLeap for a bit, since the application has no users besides me at the moment. If you run into any issues, you can either join the Discord and report it there or send a forum message here, and I’ll take a look.

KaniLeap

[StayBlue]

Another day, another set of changes being shipped to KaniLeap! These changes include, but are not limited to:

1. The addition of an “Include sub-components” toggle in search. If a radical just so happens to be a kanji as well, there are instances where you would want to learn the kanji before the radical, so this allows you to do that:

   

2. A key consideration for this update was improving search performance. Since searching has to render thousands of items at once, performance can take a massive hit, as one (and currently my only) user posted this video to demonstrate the issue. Across my benchmarks, these optimizations have yielded huge wins, with one metric showing nearly a 200x improvement.

3. Trying to register multiple accounts linked to the same underlying WaniKani account can be confusing. This is because you can try signing in, only to find that all your data seems to be gone. We now deal with this conflict by prompting you to resolve this yourself:

   

4. Implemented Katakana for On’yomi directly into KaniLeap as a setting.

   

5. Added a homepage for KaniLeap instead of immediately redirecting users to the login page. You can check it out on the main website or the FAQ page when you are logged in.

Interested? Check the application out here!

[Tobata]

@StayBlue It seems the discord invite link is expired. Can you publish the new one, maybe even link it on the app itself?

[StayBlue]

Sure thing. Sorry about that. Here you go: KaniLeap

[StayBlue]

It has been a while since I’ve posted one of these, but an update has just dropped with really good progress! I have a feeling that I’ll be able to get KaniLeap out of alpha status this month. Here are some changes that I thought were interesting:

1. As has been the theme with many previous updates, getting search to feel right has been tricky. The sticky bar on the bottom of search would prevent you from seeing certain subjects if there weren’t that many elements on the page. In this latest update, that is fixed:

   

2. You can now export your progress from KaniLeap and WaniKani. This can be useful for syncing your progress with other apps, such as Migaku:

   

3. You can now get subjects out of your KaniLeap reviews after they reach a certain SRS stage:

   

4. On the topic of auto-retirement, there is also an auto-burn setting for WaniKani as well if auto-retirement is enabled. Also, for those who just want to use KaniLeap to study ahead without syncing your progress, you can now enable study mode. This setting will also automatically enable itself if your WaniKani API key that you link with KaniLeap doesn’t have the required permissions, as shown in the screenshot:

   

5. Parts of the UI have become more friendly for mobile users. For example, you can now touch individual days on the heatmap to view their information, and the virtual keyboard’s “done” key (or equivalent) lets you go to the next review without hiding the keyboard.

I want to prioritize features that people actually want, so if you have any suggestions, please leave them in the forum post or send a message in the Discord server linked in the post. Until next time!