TL;DR: WaniKanify spiritual successor, available for Firefox, Chrome, and more (soon)
I’ve recently released Vocabify, a browser extension inspired by WaniKanify / WaniKanify 2.0, which helps you study kanji and vocabulary from WaniKani by translating text on webpages.
Here’s a short clip of it in action:
Features
You can customise what Vocabify translates by setting:
Which SRS (spaced repitition system) stages to translate
Which subjects types to translate (radicals, kanji, vocabulary, and/or kana vocabulary)
If translated text should be styled differently
By default Vocabify will translate text on every page you visit, but this can be customised by:
Disabling translation by default
Toggling on and off translation for a period of time (for example if you want to disable it during work hours, or conversely, if you only want to enable it for short durations to study)
Marking websites to never or always be translated (e.g. you might not want it to translate text in your email client of choice)
Vocabify supports multiple browsers. Versions are currently available for:
Vocabify is open source, and the source code is available on GitHub. If you would like to contribute, please feel free to open issues to report bugs or request features, or raise pull requests with your own changes. If you’re interested in building Vocabify yourself, or making changes to it, you can find some developer documentation here.
I’d appreciate any and all feedback that anyone has to offer
Thanks, this is a really cool project. I do think it needs a lot of tweaking if this were to be a tool for daily use though. It takes no time at all to find odd things like:
Yeah, it’s pretty much some kind of slightly cryptic substitution cipher. Which, ya know, is kinda fun in its own way, but… not really awesome for learning correct Japanese.
Yep, it will do that Like WaniKanify 2, it’s replacing vocab word for word, and so you will get odd replacements. Currently I’m seeing ‘second’ (as in time) replaced by ‘二番’ quite often. It’s definitely not going to be useful for practicing proper sentence structure, though hopefully a little useful for practicing vocab recall.
I personally have set it to only replace vocab that’s currently in apprentice to reduce how much is translated on one page. It makes the result slightly less of a riddle to read.
That’s a good call. I did the opposite and only set guru+ items to show. It might work a lot better for the apprentice items where it’s more of a ‘puzzle’ anyway to learn them and any extra engagement with them is a positive.
edit: yep, this is a lot more reasonable of a setting. And might actually be useful. Especially if you want to learn the non-obvious meanings. Who knew 電気 meant ‘light’ ?
Unbelievable how well this works, thank you so much! I use Edge and just installed the Chrome version. What a genius idea; with some experimenting and tweaking to show roughly 5-6 words per page, this turns any doomscrolling activity into a review session. Not suitable for learning grammar or sentence structure, of course, but I feel like it was never the point. Only the good old-fashioned recognition training, which I believe goes a long way if done in moderation. I’ll be using this regularly! Thank you!
That’s useless for grammar but it does work to some extent for vocab, especially if you’re just beginning and can’t meaningfully engage with native text yet. I remember briefly using a similar add-on for Russian ages ago and found it somewhat useful (I couldn’t find the specific add-on at the moment, it seems to no longer exist, although I found a whole bunch of similar ones for various browsers).
I certainly wouldn’t recommend long-term usage though.
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