I re-started my WaniKani adventure in January and have been doing my reviews every day like a good turtle. I’ve exclusively been using my iPad with the Apple Pencil and found that the process of actually “writing” the answers has made a big difference with memory retention.
I’m at the stage now where I’d like to start incorporating my own custom items into the WK structure. The WaniPlus add on (WaniPlus - Add custom vocabulary words & decks to WaniKani) looks right along what I was searching for: having the ability to add custom content and have these as a set of reviews to perform.
Does anyone have any recommendations on how to achieve something like this on iOS?
If possible, I’d like to avoid Anki unless recommended otherwise; found it to be really cumbersome to set up and ugly.
What kind of items do you want to add and how do you want to add them?
There are a bunch of SRS applications out there. I definitely understand your objections to Anki, it is undeniably clunky to set up but unfortunately it terms of flexibility and efficiency (once properly configured) there’s not really anything that comes close in my experience. It’s also supported by some 3rd party applications to add a new item automatically with the click of a button which I use quite a lot (with Yomitan in my case).
By the way there is another, more recent project aiming at adding custom items to WaniKani through a userscript but I don’t remember what it’s called. I think it may be annoying to get to work on Ipad however.
Right now, I’d love to add a variety of things that I’m picking up outside of WK (e.g. names of towns/cities; additional vocab words) but would be especially interested in adding sentences/phrases to review over time.
For example, one thing I’d love to add to a review deck would be extracts from business emails that I get – either whole sentences or some expressions. I’m guilty of throwing things into Google Translate and going “huh, just another formality expression” without actually learning or revising it.
Indeed, I suspect almost anything script-based will be a pain to get working with iOS. Only moved to the dark-side of Apple products this year but have found the iPad + pencil combo to be really neat (far better than Surface Pro or Galaxy Note devices which I’ve tried in the past).
Idk about an srs app for iPad, I have anki and just like you I well blech? yep… There are all kind of srs apps there you can check for yourself but in the meantime there’s the apple translate tool/app itself which you can when you use add the translated sentence and its translation to favorite clicking the empty star sign.
If you are familiar with using macros in windows it’s the same idea.
Not exactly what you asked for, but a start so you can at least mine all those sentences the moment you encounter them.
You can read more about it here Translate text, voice, and conversations on iPad – Apple Support (UK)
Coming back to share something that’s been working really great for me recently: RemNote (https://www.remnote.com/). It works very similar to Notion; if you’ve used that before, you should be able to pick this up really quick.
The best bit is that it’s got unlimited flashcards for free. There’s an app on the App Store and you can access via the browser, too. This is a neat way to be able to load content using desktop and then can complete the flashcards using Apple Pencil on iPad.
It’s very easy to set up. You can start creating notes (just like Notion). Then, for specific bullets, you can elect to turn them into flashcards with a few clicks. It’s nice you can take one specific bullet and turn it into a two-way flashcard with type-in answers. There’s also some machine learning which sits behind to check/match your answers.
It’s very impressive.
I can’t speak to the SRS yet since I’ve only started using it but this seems like a very robust way to structure notes and to generate flashcards that you can access via any device.
