I’m also a big fan of Kitsun. I like the interface, integrations, and the 10k deck is excellent.
They have also had Christmas season discounts, during which I bought my membership at one point. Probably not so exciting considering it’s February, but if price is the only thing holding you back it’s something to consider once that time of year comes by again.
Amen. Kitsun is easily worth the money when you consider all the features it includes and the active development.
I meant for BunPro too (& Kitsun)
Never mind the onboarding experience, just the sheer number of hours we all use these systems…actually, I’d rather not look at that number!
But ‘value’ is all relative and respect to the Anki wizards out there. Money-wise, cost is different for everyone; from cash-poor students to weaker international currencies that don’t favor well and makes it a big expense, that is entirely understandable. It would worth considering for platforms to keep the affordability a bit more level (eg. student discounts or scale to currency a bit…of course it’s a business too, not everything should be free or pirated when someone put earnest work in to make a product that has value).
If you decide to give it another go, it could have just been a settings issues like ‘allow typos’ or ‘give typo warnings’ would need to be enabled. Generally, I have found the misspelling forgiveness to be around the same as WK…and certainly no reason to redo WK words you already know, that can be filtered out in your decks as well.
If it’s a custom deck then you can add answers in there. I added ‘such that’ in for そういう as there was a mismatch between BunPro and Kitsun that was starting to erode what little sanity I have left.
If you don’t use WK, yes, it is a good vocabulary learning app also not only for vocabulary, also for grammar or japanese expressions.
I don’t think I will give it another go to Kitsun, it is okay that they fixed my issues and I would recommend for other people, but in my case I the only learning tool I am missing now is one to practice Japanese speech.
Thanks to everyone for the replies. As a long time Anki user I find it hard to make the transition. You regular Kitsun users really seem to like it though, and find the steep price tag justifiable. I have no doubt of it’s usefulness.
Heard about Anki for years but haven’t looked into it yet. I use Kitsun because I joined in their beta phase when it was free and enjoyed the decks people made. I’ll probably look into Anki when I get a chance since I’m only on monthly Kitsun. My biggest hurdle now in communicating efficiently in Japanese is vocabulary so I’m digging up every resource I’ve used in the past to keep learning. However I’m already running into some issues with community-made Kitsun decks, such as people leaving out the “vocabulary” field for kana words but not kanji words, so sometimes the card literally shows nothing and it asks you to enter the reading so you have to skip it. You either have to submit fixes or turn off that type of quiz which is annoying. A deciding factor for me to switch to Anki though would probably be whether the katakana deck is as good as the Kitsun one.
Edit: This is a creator issue, but right off the bat I can say I strongly dislike how many decks are configured as traditional honor system flash cards. When learning a language, I want to learn how to pronounce the word, spell the word, and what the word means – practicing all those aspects individually.
Many decks just focus on meaning and don’t require any input. For some of these, I can create new card types and convert them to input cards if the creator properly segregated the data into fields. However, for example, there’s a katakana deck with ~4K words, but the back side is all one field with the part of speech, meaning, and romanized pronunciation. To convert that to a typed card, I’d have to either segregate all that data myself or be forced to type all that data exactly as it is on the card for Anki to consider the input correct. Otherwise, I have to leave it as just a flash card and click a button to say, “Yup, I got it right” which doesn’t help me learn anything whatsoever.
This should be an easy fix, which deck is it? Most decks can type if preferred so not sure the reference.
“100+ Vegetables”
It is not possible to change the layouts for specific katakana cards since it is a community deck, and I do not want to be forced to disable layouts deck-wide due to bad deck design (I usually use all four layouts), so I made my own deck instead from an Anki import.
How do you think you’ll integrate the new bunpro additions in youre learning flow / kitsun?
I like what they try to do with the 10 examples sentences with increasing difficulty.
The author didn’t set it up right. If this were my deck, I would fill all fields regardless of kana only or not. For anything I publish that is kana-only, I will disengage the ‘Reading’ layout as there is no kanji and this way reviews can mix with Kanji words and Kana words without issue. Happy to help author, should be easy, especially given such a small deck. Otherwise, I highly recommend the 500+ Japanese Food deck. Its got full pictures with explanations and by @Buscadon tailored for Kitsun for input or flip (and yes it has vegetable s 
)
Yeah, good question!
I will likely continue to use Kitsun as a home base for vocab. For English recall, deck tag filtering capability, full dictionary synonym builds and ‘known’ word tracking (and reading parsing) and splitting content in different decks to control my review pace are still highly important to me and reason why I stopped continuing vocab on WK all together…it just didn’t have these learning tools I now find a necessity. The majority of what I use in Kitsun are decks I built myself as well which is an extra degree of freedom. 8 levels of SRS on the WK-scale makes more sense than using the existing 12 level like the grammar points…especially when the content is repeats. Also I like Kitsun’s native mobile experience.
For BunPro, the 10 sentence buildup is a super great idea and logical. I think I will use it like how I use the platform, which is a reference tool. I think this is arguably one of BP’s greatest strengths…I’ve use the grammar dictionary heavily, and the N level reading passages are a real nice addition. And I will probably snoop around on the vocab sentence for the additional reading practice and context learning because they did such a nice job. I think it’s nice that platform than can be used several ways, not just to SRS or build avatar levels so I don’t really see it as a competitive service. I’m actually on a SRS break with BP, some different areas I want to address right now…but I have a lifetime, will definitely return to regular reviews at some point so perhaps will take a second look at that for additional practice.
How about your self? What are your thoughts?
I am also using the 500+ Japanese Food deck. Though it’s a bit expansive and I don’t feel like going through all the cards to prioritize them. Like one of my first lessons was 土瓶蒸し even though I’m probably not going to use that any time in the near future 
So I prefer to work on smaller, more specialized decks where possible.
Haha, fair enough. Though a great excuse to get real life exposure 
, I may had that at a ryokan 
To be honest, I don’t know. I’m still wanikaniing and wasn’t able to switch to kitsun, yet.
I found Anki too much of a “do it yourself” platform. I want a system with walls and boundaries, not a platform to make my own system in. Kitsun has a wide selection of user-created and a growing collection of first-party decks with a good built-in suggestions feature. I don’t have to think about it beyond logging in, doing my reviews and learning the cards it drip feeds me.
If you want to dial something in to do exactly what you want it to, Anki is great for that. If you want a WaniKani for vocab, Kitsun is the way to go, IMO.
Found this thread and I gave the trial a shot. The 10k deck is def MORE interactive than Anki, which is super beneficial for me. It reminds me of Iknow.jp - I just wish the prices were a little cheaper. $8/mo is kind of expensive imo
I used it for a bit and I must say that it is has great UX and UI, especially for beginners.
All features you could want already integrated, so no “jank” set up required like with Anki.
The big reason that made me crawl back to Anki, however, was Yomichan.
Kitsun kinda sucked for me as I use monolingual cards for quite some time now, and (at least when I used to use it) there was no easy/integrated way to create automatic J-J definitions for your cards (it only had a Jisho integration and the more you understand a language, at some point you kind of realize that most translations just really suck/are not clearly defined compared to monolingual definitions, especially in regards to nuance and usage hints).
Using a clipboard hooker with Yomichan is the most efficient way for me to quickly create monolingual cards outside of web sites, since it can also be combined with OCR from pictures and games (Game2Text e.g.) and sites like animebook.github.io makes it trivial to mine cards from anime subs). You can even use an epub-reader in your browser to quickly mine with Yomichan from that (ッツ Ebook Reader).
(@ Kitsun users, did they add some way to create monolingual cards easily?)
Another smaller thing keeping me in Anki now is the Migaku Kanji God add on that creates Kanji cards automatically whenever I see a vocab card with an unknown kanji (which even at 2.7k happens more often that I expected).
I learned to use Anki five years ago for when I was still in uni for Japanese studies, so I feel very comfortable navigating the not-so-cool looking interface, but I have to admit that if you are completely new to SRS systems/software, it takes quite the effort and time to create (and actually understand!) a set-up inside Anki that achieves feature parity with a pre-made solution such as Kitsun.io.
tl;dr
Kitsun is great, especially for beginners, but at some point there might be a wall that will limit you in your vocab mining.
Anki on the other hand is rather confusing at first, but can grow with your needs and modded to your individual needs + it’s free and open source software, if you care about that.
There are a couple of mining extensions for Kitsun. There is the Chrome one I posted a while ago and there is a Firefox version as well which returns to the Jisho dictionary generator which you can also switch to kanji cards as well in the dictionary feature. If you are doing novels, probably the Reader tool is the best option.
For monolingual, Yomichan or other extensions can still be used with Kitsun if preferred as uploading Anki material is pretty easy though if your are an experience Anki user, other may not bother for the UI. That said, there is mention of something that will replace the Jisho API calls (though I don’t know any specifics) but is said to have some added features for card generation.
That is sort of how I see BP in the N2/1 realm where using an English exercise is just getting in the way, so I get how this is important. But at the vocab level, I can say I feel limited by the mining on Kitsun. If anything, I avoid alot of repeat material by it tracking my known content.
I use another alternative called jpdb.io. Considering that Kitsun is a paid service when jpdb already has copious features for free (media decks, millions of example sentences (monolingual and bilingual) in the database, interval customization, wanikani add-on, etc etc. I don’t see why would pay for an SRS service.
Yeah the reader tool is really cool and I kinda feel like it is somewhat underrated? I don’t hear enough praise basically, haha. It reminds me of the reading tool of japanese.io, but with way better integration since it is a part of the kitsun.io tool set.
Something I did consider, but at that point I didn’t wanna bother with the hassle since I could just keep doing it in Anki and also I really like my current note types that I spent way too much time adjusting lol.
Now this sounds very promising; my best friend uses Kitsun, so I’ll try to stay up-to-date hehe.
On a side note, I recognize your name and profile pic from the Kitsun forums and just wanna say thank you for the great decks, I especially enjoyed the 180+ common expressions (can’t remeber the Japanese name from the top of my head).