WaniKani vs Anki

I may be wrong but Wanikani is for teaching kanji with vocab added to reinforce the kanji. The anki deck teaches only vocab.

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Literally :joy: .

Looking back at it I would’ve gone probably with one of the sentence-based integrated decks with audio like the core 2.3K deck which might be a reasonable alternative for an early learner. Perhaps later using one of the core decks with more words.

However, Anki won’t provide the steady kanji difficulty progression, tailored mnemonics, a transparent review schedule with counts of reviews per day, etc. which one gets by using the WaniKani app :slight_smile: . It would be a little challenging to replace that I feel.

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For sure. That’s why I said WK’s strength was its structure. That structure is certainly beneficial to a lot of new learners. The landscape of Japanese language learning is an unwelcoming frozen tundra strewn with stiff textbooks, test prep materials that aren’t necessarily the best for achieving fluency, game-ified apps that all park you just under the pre-intermediate level, grind-y flashcard decks, and conflicting and often bad advice.

In the face of all of that, a little structure goes a long way. WK is either the fastest thing you’ve ever used, or overly restrictive in the speed it allows you to progress at, with little in-between.

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Anki doesn’t force you to output so you can just hit “good” whether you were right or not. That’s why I ultimately came back even though that option existed.

Anki is great but the way wanikani does it is better and more effective.

You can create cloze entries for Anki. Also, it should be stated that Anki is only as useful as your honesty in using it. If you’re marking things as easy that you don’t actually know, you’re just wasting your time.

WK provides a lot of structure, and it’s certainly effective for a lot of people, but that comes at the price of efficiency.

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Wanikani for me is invaluable for learning kanji, it’s well worth as it slowly builds you up to more and more complicated kanji. Don’t undervalue their mnemonics either.

If you you have your own memorization techniques or like building your own mnemonics then
kamesame-a-fast-feature-rich-japanese-memorization-webapp

It works similar to wanikani and is free, has reviews (like wanikani) and space repetition, etc. Big plus is the general jpl lists they have defined and the ability to lookup and add words you come across to your study.

I have just started and it seems like a good mix, both wanikani and kamesame.

I am going for the lifetime subscription as others have mentioned here too.

If the deck contains any of the content developed by WaniKani that is associated with with any given Radical, Kanji, or Vocabulary, then no, it is not legal. WaniKani retains the copyright on all such material.

More info here WaniKani API Reference

If the deck only contains kanji and vocabulary, and the standard definitions therein as found in EDICT, then it is not illegal. as WaniKani does not own that material, but I’d say it is not ethical to clone their list, likely by scraping via the API, and then market it as a replacement for WaniKani.

WK is, IMHO, worth every cent. Especially if you buy the lifetime during the New Year discount. Tell your parents you want this for Christmas and then just slow walk the first three levels.

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I just took a quick look at the first deck that popped up on a Google search. Won’t link to it here because I don’t want to give them extra publicity, but it is a complete scrape of WaniKani’s database.

Definitely a copyright violation as it steals all of their intellectual property. I am not WaniKani’s lawyer, heck I am not a lawyer at all, but if I were I’d give consideration to filing a complaint with AnkiWeb via the instructions found here https://ankiweb.net/account/terms. The first bullet point under the Acceptable Terms section clearly identifies the deck as not allowed on the service.

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I’ve tried Anki for years before completely switching to WK.

What I found was that I was cheating and abusing the “good” button a lot. Whenever I was tired and just couldn’t bother I would just skip through the cards or say “well, I guessed it SOMEWHAT right.” or “I’m tired now, but I would have gotten that otherwise. I will just say ‘good’ and hope I’ll remember it next time.”

In the end, I got barely anything out of Anki in the years I’ve tried using it. I’ve made more progress on WK in the 4 months I’ve been actually using it than in 3+ years of Anki…

Just want to add that you came to a forum of people who actually already pay for WK, so answers will be biased. They are already convinced that WK > Anki in case of Kanji learning, I guess (I’m aware some users still use Anki too, but you get my point).

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I feel that WaniKani is better structured better, e.g. by levels and what level means, and radical>kanji>vocabulary ordering. [1] While it might be possible to make such structure in Anki, the users themselves become responsible for it; so the idealized structure would easily collapse.

About typing in and computerized checking, I think it has pros and cons. Probably an idea is to allow double-check to change to wrong, but not to right? Being more strict is usually better.

Kitsun is almost akin to Anki, but also doesn’t have leveling up. UI and syncing is generally better, I think.

Also, Anki’s SRS algorithm and default settings are different from WaniKani. I would adapt to make it closer to WaniKani’s, but it’s impossible to be that similar, and has a few problems rather than what is intended by the creator of Anki. (Depends on the settings, filtered decks may break it.)


  1. I like (radical/vocabulary) => Kanji better, but oh, well. ↩︎

I spent $300 on a lifetime membership. I’m going to get my money’s worth no matter what. If anything, putting up that much money for just a hobby is kind of a commitment to myself.

Do Wanikani owe the kanjis ? Same argument can be heard with musician thinking one another stole a part of his creation. To say that you owe harmony, suite of notes, sound is just scary.
However the wanikani pretending their mnemonics are their property is fully understandable, but (I can be wrong) anki does not teach wanikani mnemonics.
I guess it is similar to bunpro giving some books route. It is just an indication, they can’t pretend to have intellectual properties on a grammar, but the way you teach may have some aspects to distinguish themself.
I’m hoping to have been understandable as my corrector was yelling me to change words to similar looking in my native language -_-’

This thread has a ton of links to Japanese-learning resources, including a dozen or so sites that are specifically for kanji. I think most of them are free?

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Of course not. And you are free to create an Anki deck consisting of all the kanji that WK uses.

What you are not free to do is steal WaniKani’s intellectual property. The mnemonics, the meaning explanations, the reading explanations, the audio, anything that is their creation is the sole property of WaniKani and has been illegally scraped and stolen for the Anki deck in question.

The reason this matters to the rest of us, is that WaniKani has gone the extra mile to publish an API that grants users with a subscription to their entire catalog and the community has used this API to do some great things that enhance our usage of the tool without stealing WaniKani’s property. If property theft became a problem for WaniKani, they’d be more likely to restrict API usage to only items that a user has unlocked, or even worse, turn off access to the API entirely (which would completely break the 3rd party mobile clients), which would be unfortunate for the entire community.

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Could I resume your post into “even if creating a anki deck following the wanikani path is legal, this may make wanikani apply restrictions on every account” ?
If I’m right you may know wk far more than I do, I can’t predict if that type of reaction would be preferred. I was just arguing about the legal aspect. I’m not sure but it seems to me that following the same path is legal. That said, intellectual property is sometimes inadapted (it is possible to claim that someone stole harmony, chord or melody in music) and it is quite possible for me to be wrong.

If understand correctly, here the problem is that someone scraped WaniKani’s item database (possibly via the web API) as-is. One could argue WaniKani doesn’t own individual words and kanji, but if the order of items is the same and on top of this the Anki deck contains WaniKani mnemonics, that’s ground enough for AnkiWeb to suspend or delete the infringing deck.

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Thanks you, I dont know anki that much, so I wasn’t aware that it was possible to copy the wanikani’s mnemonics (thought there was not enough space to put all that text).
As I said earlier, I fully understand that Wanikani own their mnemonics, and maybe the order is part of their intellectual property.
That said, it would be quite strange to copy the mnemonics too (I’m not saying nobody did), as there are intricated in wanikani level system. As for I know, and I can be wrong again, anki does only have the “review” section. It seems to consider you to have seen the content of the deck. Wanikani, on the other hand, make you learn new radicals before going in depth with associated kanjis.
I resume what I said (I writed too much) : the mnemonics being linked to wanikani level system, a deck using it in anki may be quite uninteresting. And I just realized someone said that higher, sorry.

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IIRC you can still browse the levels and all items without a subscription. So I don’t think this counts as stolen content.

Yes, Anki lets you do a lot with the design of individual flashcards - you can attach audio files, images, etc. (basically anything that’s supported by I think latex and/or HTML), but in the end it’s just a flashcard app - there is no strict level progression and content gating to make the learning process less overwhelming which I think WaniKani does really well.

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