WaniKani Blog

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.

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)

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)

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

Viet pushed out some small backend updates that should fix a couple of issues some people have been having:

Items Not Getting Unlocked

Sometimes items weren’t being unlocked even though you got the parent items up to Guru. This issue should be fixed now, and if you had any supposed-to-be-unlocked-but-didn’t-get-unlocked items, you should see them in your lessons now.

Gravatar Updates

Some people were unable to update their avatars over on Gravatar (or it just took a long time). Now we’re forcing Gravatar to update the images more often, so let us know if that fixes the avatar issues if you’re having them.

Next up, if everything goes right, should be message boards. Would be nice to be able to talk to each other, yeah? You can be all like “I don’t like that kanji… it keeps looking at me funny…” and someone else will be like “Ikr, such a creepy look.” And then 目 will all be like “…”

(Source: wanikani.com)

We don’t want you to have to take your hands of the keyboard while doing your lessons/reviews (much faster that way) so here are keyboard shortcuts to make this possible! They are:

W or ←: Move to the previous lesson section.

D or →: Move to the next lesson section.

SPACE: Move on to the next lesson section.

ENTER: Submit an answer. Hit it again to move on to the next review / lesson.

We’ll be adding something into the actual lessons and reviews pages telling you what these are with the next (large) update. In the meantime, though, you can use these shortcut keys and know that you’re shaving minutes off each review session. Think of how many Dorito Tacos you could eat with this saved time.

(Source: wanikani.com)

Viet’s been working hard on a lot of changes (thanks for all your feedback!) for WaniKani. An update just went out that does the following things, some of them pretty big!

• New profile page that matches with the rest of the site (and has a fancier header bar). Not much to put here now, but it’ll get more useful in the future.
• Radio buttons are more clickable!
• Time required to get Level 1 Radicals to Guru reduced. It is now possible to unlock the first set of kanji in 38 hours instead of ~5 days. All radical levels above level 1, and all kanji/vocab will stay on the regular spacing, though. We decided that level 1 radicals were easy enough to accelerate them.
• Images added to the explanations for Apprentice, Guru, Master, and Enlightenment levels.
• Fixed the issue where your dashboard says you have reviews available now right after finishing all your reviews.
• Better explanations on the above levels.
• Added a white background for avatars that have a transparent background.
• Changed progress bars to be smaller when they’re at 0%.
• Added in Audio for all Level 1 Vocabulary. Go check out the individual Level 1 Vocabulary pages to try it out.

Of course, there’s plenty more to be done, but hopefully some of these things will be enjoyable for you and your studies! Coming up sometime in the future is updates to the reviews/lessons pages, adding an about us page, and then after that a forum for all of you sophisticated people… I don’t really have a specific timeline for these changes and updates, but that’s generally what we’re thinking is coming next.

Any must-have features / changes you folks are thinking about right now after using WaniKani for a bit?

(Source: wanikani.com)