Hello, friends!
Long winded rant about why I made this and how I suck at studying Japanese
I have been on and off this website for over half a decade now. I have reset once (maybe twice, not sure), and every single time, I get to around level 15 or so (like I am now) and then completely burn out and stop using this application.
I’ve been living in Japan for almost 2 years now and have recently started really feeling the burn of not having my vocabulary be where it should be (despite getting really lucky and passing N2, I still feel like I only know enough to do decent on the vocab section of N3). I have been telling myself that I was going to start studying vocabulary again for like a year now and have simply not done so.
I managed to get myself to open WaniKani recently and was immediately reminded that I had a huge mound of reviews to slog through before I’d feel comfortable starting new lessons, and even just looking at the number of reviews made me feel burnt out, and I hadn’t even studied vocab in forever.
I started thinking, “What if I just did like 50 reviews a day or something?” which was quickly followed up with, “I’d probably forget to do them on time again and then end up with another huge pile and get burnt out again.”
Finally, the other day, I thought to myself, “Man… I sit at my computer for work and for pleasure for multiple hours throughout the day. If only there was something that would automatically pop up, bug me to do like 5 reviews once an hour. I feel like that would be such a small amount that I could knock that out in about 30 seconds and go back to what I was doing. That would be like between 40 and 50 reviews a day, and it probably wouldn’t even feel like it.”
So I started digging into the API again and bugging ChatGPT to brainstorm using Tauri to build it out (I also decided to try to use React instead of Vue like I’m used to and greatly regret doing so. I don’t doubt at some point I’ll end up just redoing the UI part in Vue). I’ve been using it over the past couple days and am pretty happy with it.
That being said, I think it’s about time that I’m just real with myself: I hate studying vocabulary. I like all the other parts of language study so much more than studying vocabulary, but I hope that this tool will finally help me get past this hump and start making my way through to fluency. However slow of a crawl it may be, a slow crawl is better than no crawl, and after 10 years of Japanese study, while I am great with conversations, I need to get better, and I’m hoping this helps me do it.
So without further ado:
WaniPOP!
An application that runs in your system tray and automatically pops up every now and then to bug you to do a few WaniKani reviews.
Note: To find the installers, click on “Releases” on the right hand side of the GitHub page.
Note: The API key will need access to be able to get and submit results on your behalf!
About the app & Screenshots
If you get something wrong, it will reappear at the end of the list to go over it until you get it right. Getting it correct here will allow you to finish the study, but the review is marked wrong since you got it wrong the first time.
The Flip button can be used to flip something from correct to incorrect and vice versa. For example, here, I made a typo. I’m ok with marking this as correct, so I’d hit tab to swap to Flip and then press enter. Use this button responsibly! You’re using this to learn. If you double tap enter and miss this, don’t worry! The next screen has you covered!
Once you’re done with the review items, a confirmation screen will appear. You can make a final set of edits to things in case you made a typo and moved forward to quickly or something. To change something to correct or incorrect, simply click the switch. Again, use this screen responsibly!
To finish the study session, scroll down (or tab down) and click submit!
At the end, a small overview pops up to let you know how things changed and what SRS stage the items are.
From here you can simply close the window, and then the program will pop back up in however many minutes you have set in the config, defaulted to 1 hour. Defaults to 5 review items at a time. Both of these settings can be changed (as well as hiding window decorations if you want, which I do because I hate titlebars).
Settings menu:
Known Bugs
- Radicals that do not have unicode characters, such as Creeper, do not appear
- WaniKani will occasionally give 500 errors (causing the application to freeze at “Submitting to WaniKani”). If this happens, just close the window and it should work the next time WaniPOP! comes up
I think this is the highest I’ve ever been on this website before.