Update 11/6/19 - After a much needed vacation, I’m back with some new stuff! I decided to change the name from Crabi-Cram to Kani-Cram. Easier to pronounce. Same crab. Same cram. I also added a bunch of new filters, sorting options and a level progress indicator and fixed a bunch of bugs. Check out the details below with items marked with Updated.
Greetings fellow language learners!
Wanted to share a little app I’ve been working on: I made a custom WaniKani dashboard that gives you a little more control over how you study your subjects. Check out my latest creation, Kani-Cram: https://www.kanicram.com. Just add your WaniKani API key to get started (I don’t store your key or modify any of your data).
Only See What You’ve Actually Studied
Kani-Cram is a customized, searchable version of the WaniKani subject directory that only shows the radicals/kanji/vocab you’ve seen during the course of your WaniKani lessons. If you’ve seen it in your lessons, it’ll be there. If not, it’s hidden until you have your first lesson containing the item. This differs from the WaniKani website, which highlights items you’ve “unlocked” but may not have encountered yet in the course of your lessons.
By default, Kani-Cram displays items in order of what you’ve most recently started. In other words, the most recent items you’ve seen in your lessons will always be at the top of your list. By default it will show everything (Radicals/Kanji/Vocabulary) together, but you can also view each grouping individually using the sidebar filters.
Filter-Driven Design - (Updated 11/6/19)
The new design puts more emphasis on the filters and there’s a lot more of ‘em now. In addition to Radical/Kanji/Vocab and Level, You can now filter subjects by Text Search, Subject Type, Levels, Current SRS ranking, and Part of Speech. Want to only see verbs? We’ve got checkboxes for that. Proper Nouns and な adjectives that you’ve Guru’d? We got you covered. If you hate filters because you and love extra space, it’s easy to show and hide the filters on both desktop and mobile.
Level filtering is pretty robust. By default it will load up all the subjects you’ve viewed for your current level, but you can also enter something like 2-6 in the level selection box and get all the subjects between those levels. You can also enter groups of levels individually, (ex: 2, 4, 6) or even a combination of the two! (ex: 1-3, 5, 8).
Text searching works in both English and 日本語 so it’s easy to look up something like こう or 人 or 学 and quickly see all the items that use that character group in the same place.
Sort by Most Missed - (Updated 11/6/19)
You can now instantly see which items you’ve been missing the most during your reviews. Simply click on “Frequently Missed” at the top of the search area and Kani-Cram will arrange your subjects in order of the ones you answer wrong most. Just look at how bad I am at remembering 付 and 主に!
Kani-Cram Still Your Phone
Kani-Cram is mobile-optimized and should function nicely on your phone or tablet. Progressive Web App (PWA) support is coming soon, so you’ll be able to install Kani-Cram as an app directly on your mobile device!
Minor improvements
- New Progress Indicator - Whenever you advance to a new subject type for your level, Kani-Cram will now let you know how many more subjects of that type remain for that level
- Cards are now clearly broken down and arranged by level
- Background color now auto-adjusts based on which section you’re viewing. Scroll and watch it go from purple to pink to blue!
- Mobile filters are a little more convenient to close now. Just click anywhere outside the filter box to instantly close them. This is great if you’re like me and simply can’t be bothered to drag your thumb all the way to the top of your phone’s screen.
Bugfixes
- Fixed a super annoying bug that would log you out constantly on mobile Safari causing you to need to re-log in with your API key periodically when re-visiting the app. No more! Kani-Cram now remembers who you are and what you’ve done. Or more accurately, he remembers your last session cookie.
- Radicals with images now load properly. No more blank cards!
- Cards now show the most common reading by default
Known Issues
- There is a limit to the number of levels you can search at one time. At the moment, Kani-Cram loads up all the items based on the levels you’ve selected and sends it to the browser before applying any additional filters. This allows filtering to be a bit quicker because it doesn’t need to make a new server request every time you check a filter box or type something into search. It does however, mean that it sends over all your data without filters (other than level), so if your initial query is too large, Kani-Cram will notify you. There isn’t an exact number of levels as the cutoff is determined by # of subjects returned rather than individual levels, but generally it should be around 10 levels at once. This is something I plan on revisiting in the future so that it’s possible to filter across the entire dataset, but right now it’s a bit of a challenge to implement
- Some of the longer vocabulary items (仕方がない) are occasionally breaking out of their containers
- Characters are sometimes mis-sized after filtering
As always, please feel free to report new issues!
Error Screens And How To Escape Them
If you ever get stuck on an error screen, please refresh the page. If that doesn’t work, try clearing your cookies for https://www.kanicram.com and refreshing again.
Thanks!
Hoping some you will give it a shot and let me know what you think! I have plenty of ideas for feature development but would love to know what you all believe would be most useful for your studies in an app like this. Thanks for giving Kani-Cram a look!