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?

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)

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

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)