I wanted to let you know about an app I built. Benkyou helps you study WaniKani via tinder-like swipe flashcards. You can check it out here: https://benkyou.cards/
Originally I built this because my friends and I needed to cram for the JLPT, and we wanted to study vocabulary for levels we hadn’t reached. I finally cleaned it up and released it
With this app you can:
study Hiragana and Katakana
study your recently unlocked/critical WaniKani items
study levels you haven’t reached
study items in groups of 5, 10 or 20.
And my favorite feature, when you finish studying a set of cards, you can study just the ones that you got wrong. This way you can quickly narrow down your focus to the difficult items.
I’ve found it very helpful to focus on critical items, and the radicals and kanji for the next level. It’s made my reviews go much smoother.
If you want to access the WaniKani features, you need a full subscription and a v1 API key.
This app does not do your reviews for you. It’ll help you prepare for you reviews
Just trying it out now…
it might be nice to specify whether you need to enter API v1 or v2 (I felt confused as to which one it wanted and ended up inputting the wrong one at first).
@dslounge The look and feel of it is really nice - very polished!
For those, like me, who have never used Tinder or don’t understand what is meant by ‘tinder-like swipe flashcards’, here’s what I’ve figured out about how it works:
-Touch or swipe down to show the answer
-Swipe right to mark correct
-Swipe left to mark incorrect
It seems really useful to people who want a quick way to study on-the-go, but if I were to suggest any improvements, here are some things that I think would be great to add:
More visual cues to distinguish between meaning and reading on kanji and vocab cards.
I found myself thinking of the wrong one and not noticing until I checked my answer. Here’s how WK does it:
A way to set a custom threshold for critical items.
I very rarely have anything on the critical condition items list (and if I do there’s only one or two), so having a feature that lets me study these specifically isn’t very useful. However, I know I have leeches, because there are certain items that do come back again and again, and I would like to identify and study those. I don’t know how easy or difficult it would be to implement something like this…
Ability to create your own cards.
(I see you do have this on the planned feature list - it would be really great to have!) What I really want to do is make sets for Genki vocab, but I hate Anki because it’s ugly and difficult to use, and paper flashcards are so cumbersome…
Thanks for pointing this out. I can fix this on the next version.
There’s a way to set a custom threshold for critical items, the API allows to set that threshold. I’ll see if I can add this for the next version, if not it’ll definitely be in the version after that.
That’s super on my todo list, that one’s going to take a bit more time. I want to add a dictionary or an intergration with jisho.org and let you create your own cards from that. As a matter of fact, I made this app because I was having issues with Anki and I wanted something nicer. Before I do this I need to implement accounts (sign-in with Google) and set up a DB, so that I don’t lose your custom card sets.
I really appreciate the feedback! I’ll add these to my todo. If you want to know when these are released, I recommend signing up for the mailing list on the link.
I just adjusted the card setting in the app to show both the meaning and the reading when you turn the card over. There isn’t a text input so why separate them?
Thanks for making and sharing this. I personally find it most useful for the critical item reviews. I use the self study script + additional filters (Leech training) on desktop but I’ve noticed fresh critical items don’t always show up in the review.
If you could figure out a how to get critical items plus leech training into a review that would be amazing.
I don’t think WaniKani shares the audio in the API but if there was a way to get the audio on card turn over that would as well be icing on the cake!
This looks good! I’ve been looking for a way to reinforce my recognition of katakana (which I still haven’t completely memorized yet). From a quick look, seems like this will be very useful for that.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll see if I can incorporate those features at some point. WaniKani doesn’t share the audio API, but I wonder if there’s some other service that provides it.
I’m not familiar with leech training. What makes something a leech?
Thanks! Let me know how that works for you. Because I’m way past learning hiragana and katakana, I’m not sure if I built the best UI for those sections. I would love to hear your feedback on that. If you find anything annoying let me know!
I downloaded a shared Anki 10k katakana deck. I plugged in a script that makes it look like WaniKani too. All I have to do is add the audio files from forvo as I study.
The audio isn’t even really that necessary for most words. It helped me dial in my katakana pretty quickly!
Hi! The app looks great! Just gonna double down on the leech training suggestion. If I understood correctly, leeches are items the you keep getting wrong on the srs but not enough that they’re included on the critical items list.
There are scripts for training them but I don’t think there’s any app at the moment, unless you make your own anki deck or something.
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