[Userscript] WaniKani Burn Fusion — Randomly weave burned items back into your review sessions

WaniKani API And Third-Party Apps
1

Never forget your old vocabulary again

Once you burn an item in WaniKani (SRS stage 9), it disappears from your reviews forever. But research and user feedback shows that even burned items can fade from memory over time, especially for vocabulary you rarely encounter in the wild. Many advanced and level 60 users have requested a way to keep burned items in the rotation without resorting to manual extra study.

WaniKani Burn Fusion solves this by randomly weaving a few burned items into your normal review sessions. After each session completes, a configurable chance (default 10%) triggers bonus burned items to seamlessly appear as if they were part of the regular queue.

How It Works

  1. You finish your normal WaniKani review session as usual
  2. Burn Fusion rolls a dice behind the scenes
  3. If the chance triggers (configurable 1-25%), it fetches random burned items from the WaniKani API v2
  4. A bonus review round starts with those items
  5. Your accuracy on burned items is tracked separately in localStorage

The script avoids interrupting active reviews - it only activates after a session is fully complete.

Features

  • Configurable trigger chance — Set from 1% to 25% per session (default: 10%)
  • Configurable bonus count — Choose 3 to 15 burned items per fusion (default: 5)
  • Dashboard widget — Shows total burned reviews reviewed and your accuracy on them
  • Separate stats — Accuracy tracking via localStorage, independent of your normal WK stats
  • WKOF Settings panel — Fully integrated: toggle enable, adjust chance, change item count, toggle notifications
  • Optional notifications — Get an alert when fusion triggers, or disable for silent operation
  • Zero configuration — Works immediately after install with sensible defaults
  • Compatible — Works alongside all other WK scripts

Why Burn Fusion?

The most common feedback from level 60 users is the desire to keep burned items “warm” without breaking their normal workflow. Existing solutions require manually running extra study sessions. Burn Fusion makes it automatic and random, simulating the natural spaced repetition of encountering old vocabulary in the wild.

Install

Install from Greasy Fork

Requirements

  • WaniKani Open Framework (WKOF)
  • Tampermonkey or Violentmonkey

Source Code

Available on GitHub: bimapopo345 (Bima Prawang Saputra) · GitHub

More Scripts by the Same Author

I also created these WaniKani userscripts:

  • WaniKani Meaning Translation — Auto-translate meaning text into your native language (100+ languages supported)
  • WaniKani Review Analytics — Dashboard charts for accuracy trends, SRS breakdown, item type analysis (v1.1 with monthly + cumulative charts)
  • WaniKani ColorFlow — Color-coded review inputs: blue for onyomi, green for kunyomi, neutral for meaning

Feedback

v1.0.0 release. I would love to hear your experience with different chance percentages. Does 10% feel right? Too often? Not enough? Let me know in the comments!

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Interesting idea! I’ll be curious to see how it’s received. Personally, I think the approach of unburning specifically desired items may have been more useful for me (though I never used that feature, either).

I know I started forgetting some burned items even before I finished (much to my annoyance). It’s been so many years since I’ve done a review, I hesitate to even thaw out my account to see how many items I remember in any stage, now.

But as @pm215 pointed out in another thread a long while ago, WK definitely seems to target beginners and doesn’t strive to be a “forever tool”: they seem to want you to leave the nest eventually, so to speak, and use your Japanese in the real world. Otherwise, why does stage 9 burn forever? Users wanted more so they extended lessons to level 60, added kana vocab, and continuously curate (quite well imo) but they do seem to gently encourage (rather than force) users to move along eventually.

Speaking for myself, WK was PERFECT for finally getting me to the point where I could actually read a bit of Japanese. But vocabulary I pick up from conversations or everyday Japanese reading[1] is far more useful to me than whatever random stuff is in my queue or burn pile after “graduating”.

I’m curious to see if randomly resurrecting burned items after level 50 or so seems useful or annoying. I know some (but definitely not all) of the items I burned I was happy to see go, because they seemed pretty obscure/useless (to me) or so well ingrained that seeing them more than 8 times was akin to putting the letter “e” in my SRS.

I do sometimes wish for an SRS “forever tool” that let me “burn” arbitrary items, otherwise progressing them to ever increasing spacing. But, if I’m honest with myself, I think just forcing myself to USE my Japanese EVERY DAY for some fixed amount of time (with Yomiwa or whatever at hand) would work just as well in practice. As it is, I use my Japanese as my needs and desires dictate

  1. Most of my Japanese reading is in X these days, though I do occasionally pull out a dead-tree book in carpentry or whatever. Adding Japanese as well as English to my profile in X was one of the best things I ever did! It turns out that seeing bite-sized posts or tweets from Japanese users in their native language was near-perfect daily practice for me. I can comfortably ignore the post without feeling guilty, or if it looks interesting I can force myself to read the Japanese (it’s trivial to lookup any unfamiliar words, right on my phone). If I’m really feeling lazy, the grok translate button is right there, and it’s amazingly good. Highly recommend WK users at any level add Japanese to their profile in the X app. ↩︎

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I really wish I could just set burned items to reappear 6 months or a year after they were burned, and then have them level down if I get them wrong.