Claude Cowork + Learning Japanese

WaniKani
1

Ok, like maybe many of you - I’ve had my oh sh*t I need to learn this stuff for work with claude cowork, so doing a lot of experimentation there.

But then I thought! Hmm, I wonder if there’s a fun way to use this with Japanese. Has anyone set this up and played around with it?

This is what I’m currently doing:

  • I have a notebooklm with some pdfs of grammar points (that I got from Miku’s shadowing audio - I MASSIVELY recommend that)
  • then I got Claude to create me a script (that I have to manually run in Terminal) that pulls from my API the Kanji and the vocab I’ve covered and saves this in a file locally
  • Then I can run a Skill that makes a reading based exactly on the kanji I’ve covered + the grammar I know

I thought this was pretty neat. It’s probably better to use something like Bunpro for the grammar points of course.

What is everyone else doing?

2

Pretty similar! I’m running it in Claude Code Desktop. Mine has

  • my current Wani data via API
  • an MCP connection to a coda.io table I keep of the current grammar I’m learning from my textbook (I find this crazy table the easiest way to think about how Japanese sentence structure works so I have all my notes organized in a similar way)

I have instructions for a workflow in my claude.md, which is basically:

  • generate 5 sentences in English using a structure from my grammar table plus vocab from wani
  • I do my best to translate
  • Claude corrects and advises
  • Claude updates my Coda table to note which structures I made mistakes in and prioritizes drilling those in future. It’s nowhere near a real SRS, but it’s not a bad quick-fix system.
3

Oh wow! That table Is wild I’ve not seen that before. Sort of thing where the more you look - you’re like oh yeah this totally makes sense.

That’s a nice workflow. It’s definitely way harder (personally to go English > Japanese).

I hadn’t thought about a correction/drill workflow either, so thank you! As I’m just passively reading.

But there’s a lot of cool things you can do with artificats (as well as making it look pretty lol) - maybe I could have a quiz at the end. Or check the grammar points I found hard.

Nice set-up!

4

Both sound amazing. I’m definitely going to try something similar when I have time to play around with it. I use AI but in a lot more of a standard way. I take a photo of my text book, then get AI to transcribe and translate. Then I paste the sentences into anki, either as normal cards or cloze. I also insert any audio into anki into the same card then SRS to death. This saves so much time in typing to create the cards… I could download from AI into a spreadsheet and load up that way, but I am not normally doing a very high volume, usually 10-ish each time.

5

I also love that crazy table! I have created my own N5 version to help with revision.