WaniKani Shadow Loops/Listening Lessons?

One of the things that helps me the most in WK is the userscript ([Userscript] Self-Study Quiz - #207 by seanblue) and its many options to customize your study session. It helps a lot with leeches and “older” itens.

But one thing that I miss the most in WK, and always thought that would be nice to have is some kind of Shadowing / Mirroring / Listening mechanism in WK. Perhaps something that would allow me to listen to each vocab of a chosen LV (or maybe only leeches or exceptions) and gave me a few seconds (customizable) to try and remember the kanjis that composes the vocab and its meaning. Something that i would be able to do with my eyes closed / taking walks / bath.

Something like that for an smartphone app would be really nice don’t you guys think? Perhaps it could display the answer (meaning + kanjis) in full screen while you’re listening, and you would only need to look up if you did not remember exactly the answer.

Something similar exists in NativShark, the tool is called “Shadow Loops”, in which you can listen to vocab/dialogue or even the lesson audios from the lessons. You can set how many times it repeats itself, the interval between and some other stuff. For me is not very helpful in NativShark, but i think it would be great for WK.

Is there any usercript/app that does that? Do you guys think that this “idea” would be something useful or im just a crazy WK addicted?

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Personally, I prefer to listen to stuff where I have the words in action. So either podcasts, story readings, …

So, instead of having audio files with single words / terms I have audio files with a whole story or dialog or something similar. I’ve been through the audio in depth once before putting it into listening loop so I know what the audio is about.

If you just want to have a playlist with the audio files from WK I’d suggest the following:

  • check the WK terms if you are allowed to download the audio files
  • download the audio files
  • put them into a playlist on your phone

In case you want some seconds of a break between each track record a track with couple of seconds of silence and include it between each of the other tracks in your playlist. Safe your playlist so you don’t have to do the setup steps over and over again :slight_smile:

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I thought about listening to podcasts and other stuff, but, because my grammar is only around N5, i cant really understand most of what i hear yet. I dont know if there is a way to download the audio files.

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Yes, it takes time. I’m pretty sure you already know about them but just in case:

  • Nihongo con Teppei
  • Japanese with Noriko

Both are very beginner friendly podcasts.

Not understanding everything while listening for the first time is totally fine. Let each episode sink in and go over it again a few days later… and again… and (you get the idea) :slight_smile:

Another option would be JLPT stories which are podcasts graded by JLPT level. I’m quite confident there is a way to get the transcripts for each episode but you may have to subscribe or simply send them a message.

What I like to do is going through stuff that has text and audio. One option would be the free Tadoku web readers (just search for them with the search engine of your choice). They have text files as PDF and audio files as well. So you can read a long, go through the text in detail to understand what it is about and then listen to the audio files over and over.

Same same but with folk stories is hukumusume. They have different folk stories, Japanese ones or international ones, in a simple version as text and audio files. A bunch of international fairy tales you can find with this subpage of hukumusume, e.g. click on the month February and then on the second entry for ジャックとマメの木 to read the story of Jack and the magic beans.

Wasabi also has short stories with easy Japanese. Again, they provide audio files and the corresponding transcripts :slight_smile:

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I suggested for a similar development in the extension section:

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