“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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Haha, fair enough. Though a great excuse to get real life exposure 
, I may had that at a ryokan 
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To be honest, I don’t know. I’m still wanikaniing and wasn’t able to switch to kitsun, yet.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Thank you for the feedback, glad they were helpful ^^
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Another +1 for jpdb.io. It is free unless you want to Patreon for a few extra dollars. The SRS algorithm is far superior to Anki in my experience. It accelerated my vocab learning by a significant degree. I went from learning 20 words a day on Anki with to learning a 100 words on jpdb.io with not much increase in reviews and only a small drop in retention. Typically, learning more words with a lower retention is more efficient than small words with high retention but Anki’s algorithm will drown you in reviews if you try it, in my experience.
The admin of the site is constantly adding new content and features, such as more pre-mined content as well as updates such as the planned enhanced audio (if I recall correctly). The pre-mined and frequency based content can save you a ton of time, but you still can build your own decks.
I vastly prefer it over Kitsun (tried and found their decks to teach a lot of useless words) and Anki. Highly recommend.
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My apologies for reviving an old thread, but the lifetime sales for Kitsun and Marumori are live right now and I’m just starting to explore whether this would help me on my Japanese learning journey.
In terms of Anki and UI, the current version doesn’t look like Windows 7 anymore, it does have like rounder buttons, and I have extensions from Glutanimate for streaks, and @EdBunpro I’m interested about your experience with Migaku, since a potential differentiator for Anki is like quick capture (immersion tools) of vocab.
I do like that Anki is free and open source, if I don’t need to spend money why would I?
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My experience with Migaku is probably not the norm, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt hahaha. When I used it for a bit, it was still free to use their dictionary add on. You could load any dictionary into it, and it had features like audio and images. So it was pretty simple to mine a word, then use the dictionary to select an image you liked and also an audio you preferred.
I didn’t use it very long since yomichan was still superior. The Google image function of Migaku was kinda cool to help you remember stuff better if you’re a visual learner, but it very frequently didn’t work properly. (This next section may be incorrect, just speculating) After I stopped using it for a few months I decided to see what was up with it and noticed a lot of it no longer worked. I think the dictionary got moved entirely behind a pay wall, and I didn’t believe it was worth money. I haven’t really thought about it for awhile so I’m not sure what the current state of affairs is.
Legality aside for a second in this paragraph, if you’re mining from visual novels there is a reallly amazing text hooker page and application that makes mining SO easy because within 6 seconds you can pull the sentence text, image, audio and definition(s). Same applies to anime mining. All of that stuff is found on the animecards website. If you’re mining from Netflix or YouTube then language reactor is amazing to use with yomichan. And that’s all free.
There may be features behind the pay wall that are worth spending money on, I genuinely don’t know. I’m not saying all this as a knock against the guy because he might be a potential competitor or whatever for our vocab program. Probably has some cool stuff inside but again I have no idea. But people initially gravitated towards his service because it made anki a lot simpler - from having pre-made card layouts to making the functions of yomichan ‘easier’ and more in depth (like pitch accents, images, etc.)
I’d be curious to hear from anyone who’s a current user how the current state of things are.
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Thank you for your quick and thoughtful reply @EdBunpro~
I also look forward to hearing from current users, since the lifetime is a pricey $200 USD rn.
Looking into yomichan, I saw that it got sunsetted, and a community fork yomitan is basically its successor (also free), so I’m looking into that.
Language Reactor looks really interesting~ how is migaku even competing with language reactor lol.
It seems that Migaku is becoming more ambitious and expanding its scope, from its origin as an Anki dictionary extension to like, I saw pitch trainer and some stuff…
Personally I think services I would use would be compatible and interact with each other, since its so improbable to find a single service that does everything for me.
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Current users of Kitsun?
I’m a lifetime subscriber for kitsun, have been for over a year now. I use it because it works out of the box, I didn’t enjoy the tweaking and twiddling involved in using Anki. Because it’s more of a framework, Anki seems incredibly powerful if you invest the time into setting it up to your preference.
Kitsun doesn’t have the mining addons that anki does but at the same time, it does have a decent dictionary lookup. I don’t tend to do lots of vocab mining so it’s not an issue for me. I use the 10k deck and my own deck I’ve made for words not in the 10k deck. I use forvo to add human voices to those cards. There are 2 killer features for me with kitsun; first is the sentences in the 10k deck, as you get some listening practice, second is that you type in the answers (for the non-sentence cards). I’m sure it’s possible to set-up anki in the same way / find some decks that do the same thing.
$200 seems pricey though, I don’t think I paid that but it might include kitsun and marumori. I just bought kitsun lifetime. Marumori looks quite good but just doing BP and Kitsun is enough for me (dropped WK) as I don’t want to spend all my japanese learning time doing apps/SRS.
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I had shared a chrome mining extension on Kitsun.io but had to retire it. I do use Selection Search and you add any website (Bunpro included 
) quite actively to mine LOTS of cards that has served me quite well. Some have commented that it exposes search history so a heads up if that is a concern. Using Kitsun’s Reader is another method of mining as well.
There is said to be a yomichan-like native extension that is more complete to MaruMori that is getting tested now and that will translate to Kitsun to get a complete dictionary re-vamp at some point w/ similar extension (basically having an internal dictionary and getting off the jisho API calls like MM) and that will open more possibilities of what the Anki-verse can do but out of the box (MPV mining). You can do it now in Kitsun but you have import into Kitsun’s player rather than extract it.
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tbh I never knew yomichan was sunsetted, that’s strange. looking into it now i guess makes sense, will be interesting to see if Moe actively develops yomitan or not. but yeah, i think it’s a tool that every japanese learner should have. i cannot imagine life without it. it’s integration with Anki was a gamechanger, so many cool things it can do.
language reactor is neat for sure! used to be called Language Learning with Netflix but it’s tentacles have spread far and wide to include so much more, all for free.
super agree on using things that interact or compliment each other. which is why i first started with Anki for vocab and Bunpro for grammar. with our own vocab getting better and better, I think it would be awesome for new learners to just be able to use us for both instead of juggling 2-3 other apps. can’t control what people use ofc, just continue to innovate and add new features to areas that others aren’t offering.
the world of japanese learning tools is ever expanding and is sometimes headache-worthy for sure, especially just compared to ~3 years ago or so.
yeah you can set up that feature in anki, but like you mentioned it’s not often straight-forward. but like you mentioned, anki (probably) has 2x the features but it doesn’t matter much if it’s not presented in an easy-to-use manner. people usually gravitate towards the path of least resistance, life’s already confusing no need to add more into it hahaha.
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