WaniKani Blog

Probably the most common request on WaniKani from the last millennia or two, Viet added forum search. So now instead of asking things like “can we get forum search?” or “Why isn’t there forum search?” you can say things like “huh, okay, now I don’t know what to search for” or “Why does level 1 take so long?” (without actually using the search before posting your level 1 slowness request).

Forum search is very simple at the moment, with improvements in mind for the future. So, go ahead and look deep into the past. Where was that meme post again? Oh, thank you search, there it is.

In terms of radicals, kanji, and vocabulary that have been “Guru’d,” we now have a million of them. We’re still in closed beta, which means we’ve been limiting how many people can use WaniKani, so those of you who are part of the inner Crabigator circle have been studying quite a bit.

Just a congratulations to all of you for putting so many things inside of your throbby brains. Looking forward to the next 9 million or so, then we’ll probably request that you quit learning so much and calm down already.

More product updates coming soon. We just got back from a month in Japan, so it’s time to get back into the swing of things… just as soon as this jet lag wears off :(

It only took you folks 24 hours to start making things with the API. The Crabigator is very pleased. I just wanted to highlight the ones that are out there right now since we don’t (yet) have a way to feature or show off the things you’ve made. Soon… soon.

WaniKani OSX Notifier:
This native OSX app will let you know when you have reviews to do. Of course, the notification is awesome (♬♪REVIEW TIME), and it is very helpful if you want to catch your reviews as soon as they’re ready. Future versions will include the ability to choose a minimum number of reviews before getting notified as well as the option to not get review notifications all the time. I use it to make sure you people don’t catch up to me too fast… but then again you can use it to catch up to me faster. OH NO WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

Yet Another Chrome Extension:
This is a work in progress that will take the kanji that you know and highlight it on screen in your browser. So, if you’re reading something in Japanese it will tell you what kanji you’ve learned on WaniKani, giving you an idea of how far you still have to go. I look forward to seeing this one when it’s further along. Would be a lot of fun to see what kanji I’ve learned!

WaniKani + Geektool:
Geektool is an app on OSX that lets you put information on your desktop. So, with this you can add how many reviews / lessons you have plus how long until your next review. This way you can have WaniKani data right on top of your WaniKani desktop wallpaper. Obviously awesome.

WaniKanify:
WaniKanify is a Chrome extension that takes the vocab you’ve learned on WaniKani, compares them to English text in your browser, and replaces them with the Japanese vocab version. This is an awesome way to study your vocab all the time without having to really think about it. It can be set to always be there. I’ve found it’s just perfect too. It doesn’t take over too much so you aren’t slowed down but I also feel like I’m solidifying a lot of vocab while using it.

WK Real Numbers:
This userscript replaces the 42+ with actual numbers on WaniKani.com. So, if you’ve always been curious about how many reviews you actually have, this is one way to do it. Be careful, though… sometimes it’s better not to know. You know who you are.

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We’ll eventually have a page up to highlight the things you make, too. If you’d like to join the Community Github for WaniKani, just contact Viet. Only stipulation for this is that your app must be open source to join the group.

But, I hope you find something cool here that you can use! Or, maybe some inspiration to build your own little apps to make WaniKani better for you and everyone else? Which apps are your favorite?

Wow! What a big slew of updates. Or, maybe they’ve happened over the last week and we just never got around to writing about them. Who knows? I don’t.

The fact of the matter is, though: many updates.

First off, 5 new levels have been added. That means a new section has opened up too: “DEATH.” It may sound bad, but just remember that there are two more sections coming after this, so apparently it gets worse. Anyways, 5 new levels for those of you who were closing in on level 20. Now you have until level 25 (that is until next month, anyways).

Second, the design of WaniKani has been updated. Did you notice? It’s pretty snazzy now. We took a lot of suggestions from you guys and put it into the design. New things include a way for us to put alerts on your dashboard, information on how many reviews are coming in the next hour / next day, as well as a breakdown of what you’ve guru’d, mastered, enlightened, etc. We’ve also added a new section: “burned.” This is for when you really know an item. Once something is burned it won’t show up in your reviews anymore unless you unburn it. Last, we added a “community” section. This isn’t very busy right now, but we hope in the future to start adding “community” features here that will help you to learn kanji / vocab even better.

Third, (and this is the best one), we added an API! Wutttt? This means you can make apps that have to do with WaniKani. For example, you could use the API to build an iPhone app that tells you when you have new reviews. Or, you could build something that suggests “enlightened” items you should use in your other studies (like on Lang-8, or something). Although the API is fairly simple now, we really look forward to seeing what you guys build! FINALLY, your wish to be able to see how many reviews you actually have is possible now (not 42+!), you just have to build it.

That’s about it for the updates for now, so go back to your 42+ reviews so you can hurry up and get to the DEATH section and truly learn what it means to study kanji.

Are you constantly hitting refresh on WaniKani so you can inject the crack cocaine that is your lesson reviews? Kaerigan made a Chrome extension that will notify you if you have any reviews to be done!

Download Wanikani Notifier for Chrome

I’ve been using it for the last day and it’s pretty sweet, especially considering we haven’t even released an API yet (it uses magic!). If people can do this sans an API, I can’t wait to see what you do with an API (iOS WaniKani Notifier app with push notifications pretty please!).

Ever have that one kanji or vocabulary word you couldn’t find on WaniKani? We’ve just made it a little easier for you. Now in the top menu bar area you can search for the items you’re looking for. It’s a very simple search, but does its job well.

When you type something into the search bar, it’ll show you the radicals, kanji, and vocab that contain your search term. It even orders the items within each category in a way that should put better results near the top. This is like Google 2.0, here.

To do your search, you’ll just need to click inside the search hole, type in your query, then hit enter. Down will slide all the results, ready for you to click on them.

There are a couple of limitations, though. The results only contain items that are currently up on WaniKani, so it’s not to be used like a dictionary. The search is for finding items you’ve studied, not to be used as a dictionary or something like that. Also, there’s no search up yet for smartphone sized devices. Tablets and computers are a-okay, though.

So, we hope you enjoy search. Let us know in the forums if anything breaks on you. It’s not going to be perfect, but I think it is simple and easy to use, which is what we usually go for when adding anything to the great Crabigator. Happy searching!

(Source: wanikani.com)

Just a quick FYI for you audio junkies out there. We’ve added in audio for nearly all the vocab up through level 7. There are still a few words missing (maybe 1 of every 100 words), but if you like audio this may be pretty nice for you.

Currently, to view audio you can visit any vocabulary item’s page. It should be right there next to the reading. In the future we’ll be putting audio on the actual lessons / reviews pages as well, making them more useful, but for now this is where you can go to figure out whether or not you’re pronouncing a word correctly.

Enjoy!

(Source: wanikani.com)

Or, at least, “closed beta time.” There’s still a lot of work and testing to be done before we open things up for any old kanji-learning Joe. So what does Closed Beta mean?

• We’re going to start letting in all those people who signed up to join the beta. Probably about 100 at a time, starting with the person who signed up first. Hopefully one set of invites a day. If you signed up for the beta list via the homepage this is you. If you haven’t signed up, you should do that.
• We’re opening up the “premium levels” as well. Beta members will get a 20% discount for signing up during the beta period. It’s still a work in progress, so we wanted to make it up to you.
• We’ll continue working on WaniKani much like we did in the Alpha. Basically we’ll be working on new features, making fixes, and seeing how you use the product. Of course your feedback will also shape how WaniKani is developed as we moved towards the “1.0 version.”

I also wanted to take a moment to look back at how far we’ve come! It was a great alpha and a lot of fun working with all of you. A lot has changed since day one (which was May 14th, when we let 13 alpha testers in).

• New reviews page design.
• New lessons page design.
• New dashboard design.
• Added a forum.
• Added a public profile page.
• Fixed a lot of issues.
• Adjusted the SRS spacing.
• Added keyboard shortcuts.
• …and did a huge amount of small fixes. Too many to list here!

I’m sure there’s other things that I’ve just forgotten as well, but all-in-all I think a lot has happened and changed in the last two months. It also sounds like a lot of you learned a good amount of kanji and vocabulary as well, which of course is the ultimate goal :)

In the beta moving forward, I think we have a few goals (very subject to change).

• Redo the admin (our backend) so that we have more stats on items / learned as well as problem items (so we can make changes to mnemonics, lessons, etc., based on this).
• Continue to add a lot of kanji to the site. What’s added up right now is only part of the planned amount, and obviously we have to stay ahead of the fastest person.
• Work on some of the more “social” features of the site. Not so much Twitter / Facebook or anything like that, but more like interaction between WK members and the things we can do to motivate you to study more as well as things that will help you to learn more effectively. I think we have some unique ideas about this, more details later on.
• Continue to work on and work out the kinks you find. It’s still beta, after all! :)

Thanks again to all of you who were alpha testers. We really appreciate it! And, thank you in advance to all of the beta members who will be joining us over the next month or two.

(Source: wanikani.com)

This is the last of the “big” updates before we start to think about beta-time. We’ll be squashing little bugs for at least the next week and then see what happens from there.

Changes for the lessons page include:

• Fixed some problems with the links to “related items” while you’re going through lessons. Decided to actually take out those links (though the related items are still there) because we felt like they weren’t necessary to know about in detail while you’re going through your lessons.
• Made it so you only go through each lesson item one time (that includes both meaning and reading). Going through the same item twice in such a short period is about as helpful as going through it once, so we’re going with once now instead of twice. You should be able to get through your lessons more quickly, now. This also fixes the issue with a single item showing up twice in a row.
• The page that comes after the lessons now has more useful info on it, including recent posts from the community chat.
• Responsive design for mobile devices, so now pretty much everything should work fairly well on phones or tablets.
• A new progress bar showing how far along you are in the current session similar to the one from reviews.
• Arrows on either side of each section. Now it feels like you’re moving around, zoom zoom! Use the arrows on your keyboard to feel even faster.
• Fixed an issue where when you wrote half of a character at the end of an item it would carry over to the next item. Now it doesn’t carry over, so no more messy ん jumping into your next kanji or vocab.
• And, of course, it’s been updated with a new look that matches the snazziness of the reviews. Everything matches! Yay!

If you run into any problems or issues with the update to the lessons (or anything), be sure to let us know!

Viet just put up the community chat for WaniKani. It’s filled with… well… nothing! That’s where you come in, I’m sure.

Now you finally have a place to ask questions, state opinions like “the pink… so beautiful!”, and just chew the fat while you’re waiting for your next review.

We wanted to keep things nice and simple. There’s only three different forums (or categories, or whatever you want to call them) at the moment.

1. Campfire - A place for “general chat.”
2. WaniKani - A place for WaniKani related things… questions, bugs, suggestions, etc.
3. Kanji & Japanese - For kanji / Japanese related questions. We figured we’d lump them into one category for now.

Right now everything is very bare bones (we like it that way), but it should do more than get the job done.

So, go in, say hello, and tell us all those things that are on your mind!

Visit the WaniKani Forum