Hey folks!
I spent a few hours this morning playing with the API and implemented a small Google Chrome Extension. Check it out here!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wanikanify/dbnpfdbkecfgaffopefhalliecehhkhj
The basic idea is to take the vocabulary you’ve studied and inject the kanji into your everyday reading, blogs, news, reddit (get off reddit and study your Japanese!). So, click the Crabigator and for all the vocabulary you’ve studied, the english words are replaced with the kanji you should know. It’s not entirely accurate, the substitution is a raw match, so sometimes a noun is replaced where a verb is, but the goal of this isn’t to be 100% accurate. It forces you to recall meanings and pronunciations as you scour the web. The best part is that as you learn more and more Japanese, your webpages will start to fill up with kanji!
To use it, you’ll need to add your API key which can be found on this page: http://www.wanikani.com/account Update the options of the extension and you’re ready to go!
Let me know if you like it, hate it, or have ideas to make it better!
This is awesome!
It’s making me read random Wikipedia articles, just so that I can try to read them =P.
Edit: suggestions (if possible)
- Can’t get rid of the kanji unless you refresh. Maybe there should be a way to clear them one-by-one as you read, to see if you’re correct or not.
- Or maybe mouse-over could reveal what the word meaning is?
- Maybe, instead of me voluntarily choosing to Wanikanify my pages, the extension should surprise me every some time or so.
This is really incredible.
Wow, dude! Checking this out for real.
EDIT: I love it!
Amazing.
O.O
that sounds awesome, definitely gonna try it out asap
Cool idea. Would a Firefox version be possible anytime soon? Some of my I-can’t-use-the-internet-without-'em plugins don’t have Chrome equivalents…
You finally made managed to get me to install an alternative version of Chrome you dog you.
Sounds good but how does this handle synonyms?
Wow thats really really awesome! 
piderman said... Sounds good but how does this handle synonyms?like piderman said here: Because of synonyms I won't use the extension.
I think it's to dangerous to use words in the wrong context. For example: In a text it said "終わり the world". Do you really use "owari" for "the end of the world"? I don't think so. And I could give you many more examples.
I liked your idea, but I think you have to be careful.
For some reason, it won’t let me install it… any idea why? I did refresh the page and restarted my browser a few times…
http://imgur.com/je5ax
Downloading!
Hello again!
Thanks for the feedback, everyone!
@duuj2391: Those are great ideas. I want to avoid having “tooltips”, but click-to-reveal is cool. I’ll add a feature that allows this to run automatically, randomly or on demand.
@Kimura: I’ve never made a Firefox extension so there’d be a learning curve. Maybe in a few weeks? I’m a developer by trade so I try to avoid doing too much development on my free time 
@piderman, @r0pe: Synonyms are a issue, and I appreciate your concern. Personally, my goal when using this is not to read phrases or pretend like I’m reading Japanese. The idea is to see the Kanji, out in the wild, outside of the comfort of WaniKani. When I see the Kanji, I ask myself 1) do you recognize this Kanji? 2) what are the possible meanings? 3) do you remember the pronunciation? SRS is great, but I like to see old Kanji I’ve learned daily, just to jog my memory.
“I think it’s to dangerous to use words in the wrong context”
Using kanji within English is already the wrong context. I’m not trying to learn words in any context; I simply want to see kanji more often.
@Jdduq: I’d love to help. Can you send me some information about your computer, what operating system, what version, what version of Chrome?
I totally understand the reservations people could have over this,but I think as long as we don’t fool ourselves into thinking this is a replacement for actually reading Japanese (which is exactly what chedkid seems to be saying he isn’t using it for) then it’s just a nifty little tool. thanks chedkid!
Not to derail the awesomeness of this tool, but it gave me an idea for a not-so-what similar extension…
How about an extension that would lightly highlight Japanese vocabulary (learned from WaniKani) on any webpage… Like on a Japanese website per se. It gives a visual on how much you’ve progressed on your WaniKani studies. Kind of cool to see how the vocabulary learned on the WaniKani is used out in the wild.
If someone can figure out how to parse it, it would be fun to see what percentage of the kanji on the page you know too.
viet said... Not to derail the awesomeness of this tool, but it gave me an idea for a not-so-what similar extension...Ohh, I really like this! A real-world graph to see what you've learned!
How about an extension that would lightly highlight Japanese vocabulary (learned from WaniKani) on any webpage.. Like on a Japanese website per se. It gives a visual on how much you've progressed on your WaniKani studies. Kind of cool to see how the vocabulary learned on the WaniKani is used out in the wild.
If someone can figure out how to parse it, it would be fun to see what percentage of the kanji on the page you know too.
viet said... Not to derail the awesomeness of this tool, but it gave me an idea for a not-so-what similar extension...This.
How about an extension that would lightly highlight Japanese vocabulary (learned from WaniKani) on any webpage.. Like on a Japanese website per se. It gives a visual on how much you've progressed on your WaniKani studies. Kind of cool to see how the vocabulary learned on the WaniKani is used out in the wild.
If someone can figure out how to parse it, it would be fun to see what percentage of the kanji on the page you know too.
Brilliant.
Jdduq said... For some reason, it won't let me install it... any idea why? I did refresh the page and restarted my browser a few times...if you happen to be getting the issue where you hit the install button and it sits at checking for a while before giving that error, I ran into this to and searched around a bit for solutions, turned out it was a problem alot of people had with the google webstore, the most common recommendation i saw was to check your download path, as many people seemed to have an issue where it tried to download to a nonexistent drive. That actually didn't work for me though as my chrome was already set to download to the right folder, but oddly enough the issue seemed to fix itself when i logged into my google account to look at a post on google groups, after that I tried to re-install and it went through immediately =/ weird stuff.
http://imgur.com/je5ax
if that wasn't the problem then I got no idea, hope you get it fixed soon.
On another note, I'm digging the extension quite a bit, i like seeing the random vocab out in the wild, just for the extra exposure, even if it's out of context, its like having a handful of mini reviews as I'm browsing
also viet's idea seems pretty spiffy =)