This is a third-party app and is not created by the WaniKani team. By using this, you understand that it can stop working at any time or be discontinued indefinitely.
Hey everyone!
I’ve been using WaniKani for a while now and kept wishing I could take what I learn here and connect it more directly to real Japanese content - anime I watch, songs I listen to, news I read, etc. So I built Kakehashi (架け橋 - “bridge”) to do exactly that.
The main idea is bridging your WaniKani vocabulary with real-world Japanese. When you look up a word, you can see example sentences from actual anime. During listening practice, you hear clips from shows featuring vocabulary you’ve learned. You can read actual news with highlights and lookups for the vocabulary you’ve learned. You can point your camera at Japanese text and instantly look up words. It’s about taking kanji off the SRS cards and seeing them in context.
Some of the features
Camera OCR to scan and look up Japanese text with an image
Voice search - speak Japanese or English to find vocabulary
Song lyrics lookup with music player
NHK News with audio, translation, and Wanikani vocabulary highlights
Kanji Writing and stroke order practice
Analytics
Listening practice with anime clips
Dark mode
Multiple Japanese TTS voices for context sentences
Of course, lessons and reviews
User scripts I couldn’t live without
I’ve baked in several popular user scripts that helped me on the website:
Jitai - randomizes fonts during reviews so you don’t just memorize one typeface
Anki mode - shows the answer blurred, tap to reveal, then mark correct/incorrect
Critical items first - prioritizes current-level apprentice radicals and kanji
Context sentences from media - real examples instead of just textbook sentences
And many more
This started as something I built for myself, but it’s gotten to a point where I think others might find it useful too. I’d really appreciate any feedback - there’s a lot more I want to add (offline support, more content sources, better analytics, more user scripts).
Please leave bugs and feature requests in the app’s feedback section!
And, if there’s enough interest, I can port this to Android as well.
Just wondering, for listening practice I’m asked to select anime sources. When I go into the list and select a few I know, there doesn’t seem to be a ‘confirm’ option or anything like that, but if I go back, it still shows that I have not selected any sources. Not sure if I’m just being silly though!
Thank you!! This was built using react native, that’s why I mentioned that should be fairly simple to port it to Android. It’s just a bit more work because I don’t have an Android device and testing is a bit of a hustle.
And it is currently not open source, if people are interested I’ll do some cleanup and open it.
Thanks for flagging this! There is a “Save” button on the top right corner but it is not visible in light mode. I just pushed a fix with the change. If you fully close the app and open it again you should be able to see it. If you don’t want to edit this every time you want to do a test, you can set your anime preferences in the settings screen.
Just a side note that I can now see the ‘save’ option top right as long as nothing in the list is selected, once I select anything it disappears (but it’s still there so if I press the area it proceeds).
Thank you so much!! I’m glad you’re enjoying the app. And about the stroke order, I think it’s a great idea. I’ll add a setting to be able to view the stroke order during lessons or in the details page, and maybe in the future a way to draw them in the reviews.
I just updated the app with stroke order for kanji. It’d be cool to have a setting to make reviews of kanji by drawing them, but since this will take some more time I’ll add it to my backlog.
I’ve worked with React Native, so I might be able to help, although I don’t have a Google Play account to upload apps, so I’m not sure if that would be an issue.
Wow this looks amazing and very fun, The anima integration is when syncing with my MAL.
A few questions:
Is there a way to automatically switch to my Japanese keyboard like Tsurukame does? I find this very useful. The new apple keyboard already sucks su this may be a welcome addition.
I am also more of a fan of entering what I am typing, and not on the left. makes it more easier.
its also easier that when you have to guess either vocabulary, radical or kanji, you also mention this.
instead of just saying: ‘meaning’, every time. even more so for beginners. sometimes only the colour doesn’t help
It is also not accepting my own user synonyms or not even letting me create them ( only notes) (I make them for my own language so I am very dependent on them) without that the app is not very usable and is messing up my review score very hard so far. so I won’t be using it until this part is available or fixed sadly.
When I typed something wrong it cleans the board, it is easier to show me what I typed wrong so I can see if I made an unfortunate mistake or was just very badly wrong, now I have no clue and the next review comes up.
All in all a very good app for English users so far!
Downloaded it and love the look and all of the options!
It sometimes does seem to crash on me a little bit. For example, if I try and go to the songs tab, the app will crash and take me to my home screen. It does also sometimes have the sporadic crash now and then. Was wondering if there is anything I can do on my side to help overcome it.
I’m using an iPhone 11 Pro Max with iOS 26.2 and I have also given the API Tokens all of the permissions if that helps.
Oh no! I just added some observability on the last update, so any crash will notify me with what’s wrong. If you’re still having the issue, maybe try uninstalling and installing the app again. Sometimes if the WiFi cuts off while caching the subjects it gets to a weird state. If that still doesn’t fix it, hopefully I can now see what’s going on really.
This one is going to be a bit tricky, since this app is not native iOS and I have less control over stuff like the OS keyboard. Will try to do it though!
These three are great ideas and I can easily add these. Will work on those and have them available soon
This is a third-party app and is not created by the WaniKani team. By using this, you understand that it can stop working at any time or be discontinued indefinitely.
