Kani-Cram -- Personalized WaniKani Subject Directory

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 :heart: 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! :memo:

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!

18 Likes

Looks beautiful!

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Well done!
Do you plan to expand the feature set?

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Oh my gosh, yes!

image

Thanks for thinking of us predominantly mobile users too! The little crab is too adorable. I can’t wait to use it.

Edit:

Just noticed this on the cactus radical when I was looking around…

3 Likes

Seems to be the same with these three radicals as well.


Oddly enough, these are also the ones that have trouble with any theming I’ve tried to apply to them.

EDIT: Oh, they’re images. That would explain why they don’t have a character!

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Ohh cool, thanks!

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Oh boy, this is amazing!! I like to recap my kanji from time to time and it’s such a bother (for me) to search them. But this is beautiful, clean and fast! Thank you so much for making this, you just made my learning process so much easier!!

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Thanks! Definitely gonna be expanding the feature set. One of the things I really wanted to get in here but missed was more options for sorting items by most-missed during reviews, but that’s coming soon! Lots of other ideas too that I’ll be posting over time.

@gojarappe @CalmBit Thanks for catching those! Oh man, images, that explains everything. Should be able to work around that though and I’ll work a fix for this into a release soon. Glad you’re enjoying the app, it should be even more mobile friendly once I can make it a PWA.

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Hi! i have a reco:
could you add a type-word filter? for example, searching by noun or intransitive verb. It would be really useful.

Also, while radical page was loading, i changed to kanji and the page looked good for a few seconds, but then appeared the radical section.

Your app sounds amazing, i hope that it’ll get more features!

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@nicoffee Great suggestion – yes it should be possible to filter by the same parts of speech that WK serves up in lessons, (noun, transitive verb, godan verb, etc.). I have to put some thought into the interface for filtering. I’d like to cover as many types of filters as possible.

Thanks for the bug report on the section switching. I’ve got a pretty good idea why you ended up on the wrong page so will add that to my list.

Glad you’re enjoying the app, lots of cool stuff planned. Would love it if we could have the community tell me what’s useful rather than the other way around, so keep those suggestions coming!

1 Like

Update 11/6/19 - After a much needed vacation, I’m back with some new stuff and a brand new design! 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 all the details in the edited post above!

A quick summary of some of the new features:

  • Filter-Driven Design: 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.
  • Sort by Most Missed: 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!
  • 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

Along with a number of other bugs, I also fixed a super annoying bug that was repeatedly kicking out users on mobile Safari (iPhone). When re-visiting the app, Kani-Cram now properly remembers who you are and all the horrible things you’ve done. More accurately, he remembers your last session cookie.

2 Likes

Hi there! Is Kani-Cram still operational? I could not get the web app to work.

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I had made a new API key and it is not letting me change it. The supposed place where I type in my new API token is not showing. Does anyone else have this problem?

This is probably my favourite web based API for Wanikani.

I just tried jumping on after a break and it says there is a application error?

Hey current and former kani-crammers, I had no idea this was still in use and am so glad to see it! A lot of life stuff happened over the years, so I apologize for letting this fall into disrepair. I think my hosting provider for the app may have changed their policy to make the app no longer cost zero dollars to run, so I’ll take some time and see if I can get it back up and running.

Ok, I’ve switched hosting providers and updated a few things and kanicram.com should be working again! Everything should be as it was before. However, one thing I noticed is that some of the images for the radicals are not showing up. I’m guessing this is because Wanikani likely changed their bucket permissions between now and the last time I looked at this. At some point down the line I may look into fixing this when I have a spare moment.

In the meantime, happy kani-cramming!