Vocab flashcards with furigana based on WK level: Does it exist?

Hi everyone,

I’m wondering if anyone knows of any services that let you create vocab flashcards that display or hide furigana based on your WaniKani level. I’m happy to use a paid service and/or to put some effort into configuring cards to achieve this. Thanks!

Here’s my thought process and context:

Like many of you, I make flashcards to cement vocab that I encounter outside of Wanikani. I use furigana for the flashcards because I can’t read very many kanji yet (it is my weakest skill) and I don’t want that to hold back learning new vocabulary. However, showing furigana for the vocabulary that’s made from kanji that I have already learned seems like a real missed opportunity. Much better to hold back the furigana and reinforce my kanji acquisition for these ones.

I have come across a couple of text reader services that use my Wanikani level to determine which words to show (or hide) furigana and I find it very rewarding, but I haven’t been able to find anything like this for creating vocab flashcards.

Do you know of any programs or hacks to create flashcards to do this? Thanks!

My Least-Worst Anki Setup:

For reference, and in case anyone is interested, the closest I’ve been able to manage so far is a 3-step Anki card generated by Yomichan. Not ideal, but … maybe okay if I can’t find a better solution.

(1) Vocab without furigana → (2) Vocab with furigana —> (3) English meaning



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I’m not aware of any services like that. I would argue that it’s more valuable to learn the kanji first as it’s often the case that you can guess the meanings and readings based on the kanji. Why not just add the individual kanji to your deck first and then the vocab later once you’ve learned them?

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If you’re happy with using another system, I believe it should be possible to have kanji decks/study schedules in Renshuu.org and then having those kanji marked as known means that they wouldn’t have furigana in vocab decks/study sets. You can make custom vocab decks in Renshuu.

I’ve set mine so it shows that I already know N5-N3 kanji only. It’s a little difficult when there’s an odd word, but otherwise works well in my experience. You do have to manually mark the kanji as known, but at level 11, there wouldn’t be that much of a backlog for you imo and then you could mark as you guru or burn.

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My only suggestion (because it’s really the only one I know about / have tried yet) is the BunPro vocab feature – which is currently in beta version, and can be accessed by opting-in to the beta features if you have an account there – but it is not a perfect fit for your use-case. Still, it may be a helpful option if you can’t find a closer fit to what you want. Here’s the most recent announcement/update about it, and I’ll describe it below:

So, first off, you cannot (currently, anyway) add your own vocab, so that might rule it out for you right away, depending on your needs for learning vocab.

Second, it is based on the JLPT levels, and currently it only has vocab for levels N5 and N4.

Third, although it will eventually synchronize with your WK kanji knowledge (which is already a working feature for BunPro grammar reviews), since it is still in beta, this is not working yet. In the meantime, the furigana is hidden by default, but you only have to hover over the word with the mouse to show the furigana if you need it (not sure how to do it on a mobile device as I don’t have any). So, at least the furigana is available (but hidden by default), but it is just not (yet) synchronized with your WK account.

So, personally, I find it useful because, though I can’t create my own vocab cards, there are 1100 available for N5 and another 1100 for N4 (and very likely more to be added in the future, as they are actively adding new features to BunPro all the time), and so far I have been benefiting from just adding them in batches from the N5 and N4 vocab ‘decks’.

Currently, the ‘decks’ feature only has a default ‘alphabetical’ ordering, which is not really ideal, but since I really just want to learn a bunch of vocab and for me the order of vocab doesn’t really matter, it’s not really a problem.

However, if you do care about what order you do them in or, for example, want to just add vocab items a la carte so to speak, then it is quite easy to use the site’s vocab search feature to find the words you want to add and just add them to your vocab Review queue.

So, basically, it would cover any vocab you wanted to add that happened to coincide with their existing decks of N5 and N4 vocabs. But you can’t create your own cards (yet!, although they are also in the process of developing this feature).

Not a perfect solution, but it might be enough for what you want, and I can guarantee that it will only improve in the future, as I have consistently been impressed with how the BunPro team continues to develop, work on, and overall improve their site and its features and content. They are quite responsive to user feedback, as well.

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Thanks Dorgengoa! Your suggestion makes sense, but in my case the sequencing is off. My conversational skills are well ahead of my kanji skills, so I want to be learning, reviewing and using a much wider variety of vocabulary today and don’t want my piddling kanji to hold me back. I do however look forward to the day that my kanji catches up and I can follow this advice more easily. Cheers.

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Thanks DIO-Berry! This sounds promising. I’ve just registered and will give it a try. Cheers.

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Thanks wct! Appreciate the really thorough response. You nailed it right off the start though - adding my own vocab is important to me. So I will try to following along Bunpro’s development and perhaps try it out once that feature is available. Cheers.

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Oh, I see. That’s understandable. I envy your conversational skills.

Having a lot of vocab committed to memory like that might actually make your WaniKani experience more enjoyable now that I’m thinking about it. Like when I encountered 先輩 for the first time in WaniKani and everything connected in my head.

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Perhaps a good way is editing out Anki-Yomichan Furigana along the Anki reviewing.

I believe Anki has batch editing add-on, based on Regex.

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