WaniKanify 2.0 - Chrome Extension

[ThePieMonster]

WaniKanify 2.0 takes the vocabulary you’ve studied on WaniKani, finds the English word on a webpage and substitutes the kanji character. As you learn more kanji, your webpages begin to fill up with kanji! This extension can find words anywhere on a webpage and replace it for kanji characters. It is a great utility for practicing and recalling vocabulary you may have forgotten.

To get started, install the extension, and go to the options page. Add your public WaniKani API key, which can be found on the WaniKani website, and hit save.

Navigate to your favorite webpages, hit the Crabigator and read as normal. As you read, you’ll come across kanji characters you should know. Do you remember what the mean? How to pronounce them?

You can test the extension out by installing the Chrome Extension and viewing this simple pastebin page.

Have a suggestion, want to contribute, or found an issue?
View the GitHub project page for WaniKani 2.0.

You can download the Chrome Extension by visiting the Chrome Web store.

[ThePieMonster]

Q: What happened to version 1.0?
A: Version 1.0 stopped being supported long ago and was no longer maintained. Due to the increase in users looking for a replacement, I decided to revive this extension with a few new features, modernized store page, and uploaded to GitHub so others can make contributions to the project without having to re-create this again like I did.

Q: What kind of API token do I need?
A: Just a simple read only token is required. See here for the options to select when creating your API token. Hint, leave all the boxes empty to make a read only token! When pasting the token into the application settings page it should like this.

Q: What does the PasteBin page look like after WaniKanify 2.0 is run on it?
A: Like this! Keep in mind I have “yes” to numbers being removed from the JavaScript dictionary.

Q: I like the extensions, how can I show my appreciation!?
A: Rate the extension 5 stars in the Google Web store!

[Pep95]

I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong?
I added the API and tested it on a new chrome window.

[Lewby]

Thank you so much for this, I found WaniKanify 1.0 a few weeks ago and was very devistated when such an amazing extension was no longer being supported.

For those with issues:

I had to open the extension settings and change it to “automatic” to make it convert words to Kanji:

I then clicked clear cache + there was a few spaced before my API key in the box so I removed the spaces and clicked save.

This is what I get.

Viewing this post after installing:

[Pep95]

Ah burned words are not turned on by default it seems.
That might be the issue here

[Pep95]

Hm I changed it to Burned and automatic, but it still doesn’t work. I’ll restart the computer at the end of the day, maybe it will work then

[Lewby]

A few things worth checking:

1. Does your API key have the correct permissions?
2. try clearing cache in the WaniKanify Options.
3. Press Ctrl + F5 on the pastebin page (hard-refresh).
4. Did you hit save (At the bottom of the page) after changing it to Automatic in the settings?
5. Do you have any other chrome extensions installed that may be conflicting with it? (try disabling your other extensions).

I’m sure you’ve done all of this or thought of them already, but just trying to help .

Another thing worth noting: sometimes my forum page refreshes certain parts of itself (I think it’s a javascript thing). It happens after you edit posts for sure. IF this happens, any translated text reverts back to English, so keep that in mind if you’re editting posts and think the extension is broken. @ThePieMonster.

Another thing. You might want to disable Wanikanify on certain WaniKani pages, because this really isn’t that useful:

You can disable it on your Vocabulary pages by adding this line into the blacklist:

https://www.wanikani.com/vocabulary/*

And you can disable it on the Level pages by adding this line:

https://www.wanikani.com/level/*

So it should look like this:

Don’t forget to hit save!

[sakaijin]

I was waiting for this. Thanks for the bringing it back to life. Unfortunately, it’s not working for me either, even after all the suggestions

[Lewby]

Are you using the correct version? Wanikanify 1.0 is still up on the Chrome store, but does NOT work.

If you are using 2.0, I’m not sure what to suggest I had an issue with mine at first, there were spaces before the API key like this:

So I deleted the spaces before my key, hit clear cache then hit save and it worked fine.

I’m not sure what else to suggest right now sorry.

[sakaijin]

Yep, I deleted the old WaniKanify v1.0 and restarted my browser. I checked for spaces before and after copying the API key.

Thanks anyway. I’ll keep checking every few days, or so, and see if someone has the same problem.

[Artimdal]

It appears to be working for me at least, can’t tell if it includes every vocabulary or not, but it does replace a fair bit of things. Was about to comment on “can you add an option to turn off numbers”, but it appears you’re several steps ahead.

Cheers

[ThePieMonster]

@Lewby Thanks for helping out.
@Pep95 If you don’t want to set it to automatic you can click the Extensions icon in the browser, and then left click the WaniKanify 2.0 name and it will run once on the webpage you currently have open.

Of course there are improvements that can still be made, and I myself do not have as many items as say, someone who may be level 60 so the experience may differ a bit.

@sakaijin Are you having the same issue as Pep95 ?
@Artimdal Ya the numbers feature was one of the first things I added, I greatly disliked having my numbers replaced!

[Bapbap]

Yo, this is such a great idea!
Thank you for your hard work with this. I am very excited to use it.

[sakaijin]

@ThePieMonster

Are you having the same issue as Pep95 ?

It looks like. No amount of fiddling with all the browser extensions (disabling them all and running only WK v2.0), with new API keys, removing the old WK v1.0 app, restarting my laptop, browser, etc. worked for me. Btw, I have javascript allowed in my browser, too.

Still, I appreciate the hard work you put into it and it seems it’s working for some so that’s good👍

@Lewby

Does your API key have the correct permissions?

What do you mean by that? There are some boxes to be checked when applying for a new WK API key. I never needed those to be checked to work with other websites, and they don’t even seem relevant to this app. Do any of those need to be checked?

[Lewby]

I actually ticked a bunch of the boxes for it, but you’re right it shouldn’t make any difference now I have read the API stuff again.

[sakaijin]

Tried that too. No luck.

Like I said, definitely appreciate all the help and advice but no worries guys. If it works for you, use it and enjoy it. I thought it might be a great app to reinforce and get more exposure to kanji, especially now as I’m at lvl20 and close to starting to burn lot of them and they keep getting mixed up. But alas it’s not meant to be and I just got to spend more time reading native materials

[Lewby]

it’s a little bit frustrating that it doesn’t seem to be working for everyone, I wonder if there is something really obvious we are missing :l!

I’ll try and have another think, it really has made a huge difference for me already, because it’s helping me to remember alternative meanings to Kanji.

I’ll add a few extra things I can think of here:

More attemps to fix it

This?

Press “F12” on a page with Wanikanify enabled, what does your console say, does it throw up any errors?
Here’s what mine looks like:

This one is maybe dumb, but are you using incognito mode? because there is a seperate option for that:

Check there isn’t anything auto-translating pages into english, maybe a setting in your browser?

[4183R7]

Not working for me either, disabling all extensions except WaniKanify didn’t work, checked that my API key doesn’t have spaces, etc. I noticed that on the Extensions page in Chrome it shows the Errors button on the extension card:

These are the errors shown:

Expanded errors

[jmaher16]

I am seeing similar errors to what @4183R7 posted. I have tested the extension on my home PC, work PC, and a VM that had a fresh copy of windows 10 and a clean install of chrome that was not signed into my google account.

[Vikestart]

It doesn’t convert simple Kanji, right? Only vocabulary?