Hello everyone, maybe this has been asked before, but I couldn’t find anything about it.
What I would like to do is incorporate items above my level into my WaniKani sessions. For example, if I were to read Attack on Titan and become interested in the word 進撃, I’d like to add this as well as the items it depends on (進, 撃, scooter radical, turkey radical, …) to my next WaniKani lessons if I haven’t learned them already.
This would make mixing WaniKani and reading immersion more effective. Currently, I’m experiencing the problem that I’m not learning words from outside WaniKani as effectively as I could because I won’t know the Kanji and radicals and any mnemonics for them. And even if I look these up, I’ll easily forget them unless I manually add them to a separate SRS, which I don’t want to do.
Does such a feature already exist?
If it doesn’t, would the WaniKani API have the required interfaces for me to develop this feature? I just skimmed the API definition, but it wasn’t clear to me if the corresponding fields such as level are writable or only readable (I have SW dev experience but no REST, JS or web dev experience).
If not, could this feature maybe be popular enough to be requested from the official devs?
Something that’s worked for me a little bit is just what you said–using another SRS. having anki on my phone handy as I’m reading and entering the unknowns as they come up with cards as simple as they can be with just 3 fields
Front- Kanji
Back- hiragana and english
Type it into google translate and copy paste the english into anki…trying to make the process as quick and painless as possible.
This seems pretty normal to me! If possible, I’d suggest not worrying about it.
For one thing, assuming you reach level 60 on WaniKani, you will not have learned every kanji there is: according to wkstats, only 82% of the 2500 most common kanji are on WK.
For another, try and remember when you were learning to read English. For years after you got pretty good at it, maybe even to this day, you forget words. I know I do. Some memories I have around this include: misremembering “encroaching” as “enroaching,” much to my family’s amusement, trying (and failing because I was like 10 years old) to work “au contraire” naturally into my vocabulary in order to retain it better, etc.
Even the act of having forgotten a word is a good thing and not a bad thing, because when you need to remember it and cannot, you’ll send a strong signal to your brain that this thing is important and should be built into your model of Japanese.
If you forgot a word, no biggie, look it up, keep going. If you keep trying to be able to read it, eventually you will.
Au contraire, I really believe this is worth worrying about. You are right that looking up words manually is not that big of a deal, but it is still needlessly inefficient when I could just adapt my WaniKani studies to synergize better with my other studies. If learning Kanji and vocabulary through WaniKani wasn’t much more efficient than manually looking them up all the time, none of us would be here in the first place.
I’d also like to note that, for a Kanji learning app that costs several hundred dollars, allowing the user to choose which items they’d like to learn next is a really basic feature. Bunpro allows this, Marumori allows this (AFAIK, I haven’t used it myself), Anki allows this (via repositioning).
(@Gaol Since you seem bothered by creating cards yourself, if you happen to be a Bunpro user, consider if looking up the word inside Bunpro and adding them to a deck or review pile there could be a solution for you. This is probably what I will end up doing.)
But I do agree that consistently following the process is more important than optimizing it It’s just that, ideally, I’d like to do both.
Thanks for the info, but WaniPlus seems to be for adding completely new items, rather than prematurely learning items that already exist at a higher level in WaniKani.
It’s just that, ideally, I’d like to do both.