WaniKani Sentence Practice Tool

WaniKani API And Third-Party Apps
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I quickly mocked up this “WaniKani Sentence Practice” browser-only tool. It…

  • Uses your WaniKani API key to fetch vocab with reviews due in 1–7 days (probably should make this adjustable, I just wanted some limit)
  • Shows one random context sentence per vocab word
  • Lets you press Space to reveal English and continue, or 1 to mark “didn’t know”
  • Skips sentences you’ve already seen today
  • Randomizes the vocab order
  • Randomizes the Japanese display font (would be great to be able to turn this off. Or say “don’t use this font anymore”.
  • Tracks progress and review history in localStorage (although this progress tracking isn’t utilized in any way at this point, tbh I’m not sure I care. I just want to read sentences, so I’m just smashing the space bar).

No server or install needed — just open the file in a browser. But, I don’t know how to share an html file on here. lol.

Here’s what it looks like stepping through a sentence, hitting space to see the answer, and hitting space again to go to the next card…

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I wish I could include the Common Word Combinations, but they’re not available in the api. :frowning:

14 Likes
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Maybe put it on a github page and link to that page?

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Ok, I changed things a bit. There’s now a settings panel so that you can specify the window of time you want to review. So, for example, in this screenshot I’m saying “I want to review vocab where the next review is over a month from now…”

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Whereas the following settings would be “Everything in the next week not including today”

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… and then I added a “next” button because I thought maybe that’d be necessary for on the phone, but I haven’t tried it on my phone at all.

Also I added more fonts, and made it so that the handwritten font is used less…

  const weightedFonts = [
    { class: 'font-kosugi', weight: 0.22 },
    { class: 'font-mplus',  weight: 0.22 },
    { class: 'font-noto',   weight: 0.22 },
    { class: 'font-zen',    weight: 0.22 },
    { class: 'font-boku',   weight: 0.12 }  // handwritten
  ];
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This is great. I was just thinking about doing something like this. That’s for doing it.

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I’ve made a few simple changes to make the experience better/easier/possible on mobile and also updated the readme with more instructions/explanations.

Previously, you had one chance to enter your API and that was it. Now you can change/correct it in the settings popup. I’ve successfully been using this tool on my android phone with both chrome and firefox.

I really like using this tool. It’s great when I’m out and need to waste a minute or two waiting for something, and I don’t want to use something that needs audio. Depending on my mood, I can easily set it to study stuff that’s going to come up soon, or stuff that I’m not going to see (in WaniKani) for many weeks. I’ve only been using it for a few days, but being tested on the kanji/vocab in sentence contexts feels really helpful to me.

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I’ve added a little speaker icon. This hack opens (in a new window) google translate with the sentence pre-populated so that you can listen to the sentence if you want. It’s not the best solution, but I only rarely want to hear/use this feature. Mostly when there’s katakana that I’m struggling with.

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Just a quick note… I noticed that it works in vacation mode, which I think is nice. So you can get in a quick reading/study even on vacation.

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This is cool, thanks for sharing it!

1 Like