Hi, sorry if this is a repeat question - I’m enjoying WK (level 7), and it’s doing a good job teaching me to read in Japanese. I thought I could make some more progress on vocabulary if I had an Anki deck that showed me the English word first and I had to remember the Japanese. I know there are many Anki decks out there but I’d love one that aligns with the WK vocab. Has anyone used anything like that or should I make my own?
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I think it’s possible to do this in anki with a deck you already have that’s JP to Eng. I don’t know the anki settings well enough to give a great answer, but there should be notes and cards as separate things in settings and you should be able to create cards that test Eng to JP from those notes you already have. You may have to google for an anki guide that can explain that a little better than me. I think the option is there somewhere in a menu.
Another option is kaniwani, which is a website for srs that uses your wanikani account to give you Eng to JP production cards. I don’t use this but I’ve heard of it being useful.
You didn’t ask, but I think it’s helpful to start reading with graded readers or something sooner rather than later. Even if wanikani feels like it’s teaching you to read, it’s not a bad idea to try real written material.
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If you want to get into using userscripts to modify Wanikani then Self Study Quiz can make reviews using readings, in English or Japanese, or the audio.
You’ll need the framework script to run it. Guides on setting them up are in the links:
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I made something like that a long time ago but quickly gave up because too many WaniKani English meanings could map to multiple Japanese words and it was tricky to figure out what I was looking for.
I could see if my script to generate the deck still works though, you could decide for yourself. I’ll check tomorrow.
If you are willing to use a web site instead of Anki there is www.kaniwani.com that does what you want.
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I’ll second @proleau’s suggestion - I’ve been using KaniWani and it unlocks the vocab as you unlock them in WK, so it’s a really nice reinforcement. There are some times where the English to Japanese is uncertain (I’m looking at you, 中 and 内, and some others that have vexed me to no end). Fortunately, you can ‘x’ out the notification of an incorrect answer and try it again later if it’s truly a case where you typoed or if it’s one where the version of inside they’re asking for isn’t the one you put in (上手 and 上手い being another frequent violator).
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KameSame provides the same functionality as kaniwani (and some other things) and does, in my opinion, handle those cases better.
With kaniwani, I do believe/remember (been a while) that you can augment the English prompt yourself to help with those cases. E.g. instead of just mother for 母 and お母さん, instead of just the default “mother” prompt you can modify them to "mother (your own mother) and “mother (another persons mother)”.
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Ok my script still works, here’s the vocab deck: https://e.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZr7OtZz1peGkr1MIFesJer5ttyKkKdPAIV
Default front:
On top you have the meaning as picked by Wanikani, below the meaning in JMdict (which can be more precise/help with synonyms).
Default back:
The examples are taken from JMdict, not WaniKani.
Other example with a trickier word to distinguish in English:
Those example sentences are not the best I’m afraid, I could probably source better ones elsewhere…
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