[Web] Tangochou - Free WaniKani inspired Flashcards App

[DarioS]

Hello! From the creator of the [Telegram] WaniKani Unofficial Bot comes another completely free application that will empower your WaniKani and Japanese study journey.

Tangochou is an extremely versatile tool to help you learn and memorize Japanese radicals, kanji and vocabulary. Fundamentally it is a flashcard application but aimed at Japanese, this makes it more powerful than something more generic like Anki.

Now let’s go through some FAQs.

Why? Also, why another flashcards app?!
The answer is yes. I wasn’t really feeling Anki and most of the other alternatives that I tried felt incomplete or wanted money. So well, I decided to do it myself.

Is it free?
Yes, and it will be forever.
Donations are welcome if you like the application and feel generous of course, you can do so with PayPal.

Why should I use your application instead of something like Anki?
Well, there are multiple reasons.

• Anki will only ask you if you remember something or not, Tangochou will ask you to answer with the correct meaning and reading just like WaniKani does, which I feel is best for memory, also you are less tempted to fake your answers since you either get it right or wrong.
• You have to create everything from scratch or use premade decks with Anki, Tangochou supports multiple data sources including WaniKani to create reliable decks on a whim, of course you can also import premade decks on Tangochou.
• Anki is very generic so it doesn’t support the concept of subjects, something that Tangochou does very well and with several advanced features.

These are just the most obvious ones that come to my mind, but there are probably more.

Which data sources are supported?
All sources are credited and listed in the Data Sources page of Tangochou, in short these are the data sources:

• ichi.moe
• Jisho
• Jotoba
• WaniKani

How does the Text to Speech feature work?
There was a point in time during development where I didn’t have pronunciation audios for some subjects, finding them in the web was too much work so I decided to implement some kind of TTS.

You can setup the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API and generate an API key to always have high quality pronunciation audios for your subjects meanings and readings.

Once that is done it should work out of the box, you can also pre-generate the pronunciation audios for all subjects in a deck to avoid lag in your first run.

How good is the SRS?
Well, I’ll be honest, the algorithm is rudimental at best but it works.
You can find a more in-depth explanation in the About page of Tangochou.

Is this project open source?
No, not at the moment, I might decide to disclose some of the code in the future.

Is it safe to use?
Yes, this application is 99% client-side, this means that all of your data resides only on your machine and nothing is ever saved on our servers.
No analytics tools are used and there are no advertisements.

What does it look like?

Screenshots

Feedback
Any kind of feedback is appreciated, feel free to suggest new features and report bugs.
If you don’t like something don’t be afraid to tell so, just remember to be polite about it, negative feedback is good if done well.

How to use it?
Tangochou is hosted on Vercel and you can reach it from https://tangochou.dariosechi.it

Thanks for reading and hope you like this project!

[Matteogermanetto]

Looks great!

[XiaoAddict]

This is very unique! Thank you so much for inventing this!
Edit: just checked it out, it’s amazing

[DarioS]

Thanks for the kind words and for trying it out!

If you need help with something feel free to ask questions here or pm me

[XiaoAddict]

Ok, thank you!
(I tried some stuff from the WaniKani level 25 deck and failed miserably lol)

[XiaoAddict]

Welcome @Matteogermanetto !

[Raffuh]

Great work!

[DarioS]

Hello, version 1.0.4 has been released!

Changelog

• OCR has been implemented, you can now create decks from images
• OCR has 2 engines, one which is Tesseract.js and the other is Google Cloud Vision
• Analyse has been renamed to Transliterate which is more appropriate
• Fixed a bug where certain radicals were not visible
• Fixed some display-only math that involved radicals in the deck reviews
• Minor fixes and improvements

Screenshots

TLDR: OCR has been implemented and Analyse is now called Transliterate.

[RainbowBrite13]

Sounds interesting

[JamalLee]

Just came upon this and it seems powerful but I’m a bit confused by the layout and terms. I think I understand but, is “subject” the same as a “notecard”? Also, what file types are supported as I’m not really sure what I’m able and unable to import?

[DarioS]

Hey @JamalLee , yours are genuine questions! I will try my best at answering both.

• Like you said, a subject is very much like a notecard but with a structure more fit for a Japanese quiz, it can either be a radical, kanji or vocabulary
• Import works only with exported files from Tangochou itself at the moment, no other external import is available (like from an anki deck)

You can try the import feature with one of the decks I have made, this below contains all vocabulary nouns from Genki L8.

Genki L8 Vocabulary Nouns

Thanks for the interest and feel free to ask more questions if you have any more doubts!

[JamalLee]

Thanks for the answers! I kind of understood it from the context and messing around, but I’m glad I double-checked.

I’ll definitely give this a shot as I’m just getting into reading and I’ve been looking for something simple that I can just make a flashcard and learn/review it WK style on a separate SRS system.

[DarioS]

Thanks, what you’ve described is one of the use cases that my app tries to solve, so if I failed somewhere please tell me, I’d be eager to improve any aspect that can get enhancements.

Let me know if my app works for you in the end!

[Tantivy]

Wow, this is amazing!

[tdicorcia]

Dario, as others commented. It looks very good. I’m sorry, but just by looking at the app and clicking the various options, I have no idea how to get started with it. What I would like to do:

1. Try this as my WaniKani client. I went to the settings page. Generated a token at WaniKani. Entered the token in the Tangochou settings field. Clicked the “Generate Subjects Cache.” The little icon spins. Then. Nothing.
2. Import vocabulary lists from my Japanese class. I can create lists in MS-Word, MS-Word tables, Excel. How would I go about making a deck in Tangochou?
   Thanks.

[DarioS]

Hi @tdicorcia , glad you’ve tried Tangochou!

1. Mh yes, this flow has always been a bit counter-intuitive, you’ve basically cached all subjects from WK and can use them inside Tangochou now, in the create deck page for example.
2. To create a deck on Tangochou you can go to the page I just linked earlier or go to the decks page, and click on the green button with a plus, located in the center if you don’t have any deck or in the top right if you do.
   In the subjects field you will find a toolbar, there’s a button with a plus, click it to add subjects (radicals, kanji, vocabs), a dialog will open and you can choose from 5 different data sources, since you’ve cached subjects from WK I suggest starting from that, select WaniKani instead of Internal and type something in the Search field to find whatever you want.

Maybe I’ll make a video one day where I’ll go through all main features of Tangochou and explain them, might be useful.

Thanks again for trying my app!

[Jin-ki]

Forgive me if my question is stupid, I’ve never done any of this and I’ve absolutely no idea what works and what doesn’t.

Let’s say I have a PDF list of vocab, can I import this list? I imagine not as this is a PDF, or is this possible?

[DarioS]

Hey @Jin-ki, this is not a stupid question so don’t worry, at the moment OCR of PDF files is not supported, you can still try to convert the PDF to images and import those but it will be a boring process if it has many pages.

I will consider implementing OCR for PDF files too in the future, so stay tuned!

[Jin-ki]

Alright, thank you! I will just write all the vocab out by hand, is good practice anyway.