Wanikani Integration Overwhelming

Bunpro
#1

Bunpro was recommended to me by a friend, partly because Wanikani integrates into it. I’m almost done with Level 8 on Wanikani.

The default Wanikani integration makes the learning experience on Bunpro dreadful for me.

I’m currently working on the Genki I and the N5 Grammar Bunpro decks. These decks are not really the problem. The problem is that I used the default settings for the Wanikani integration. This leads to multiple issues:

  • I get dunked on with hundreds of WK reviews that all get set to the same level, and an insane amount of them appear at the same time. There’s no “Just add 10 cards a day”.
  • Some of these cards I will fail repeatedly. While I can recognize kanjis or vocabulary, it’s not the same as outputting it. Especially not in some patterns that Bunpro proposes. Sometimes the meaning taught on WK wildly differs from what Bunpro asks.
  • The default Bunpro settings (Random order) make the WK cards dilute the pool of cards I ought to be studying.
  • Being stuck with 500 reviews is demoralizing. You clear 50 reviews and get whacked with additional WK cards.

Are you intended to use this integration at all? Especially if you’re further into Wanikani?

Working through Genki is already a slog (I find Genki insanely boring). While I clear my WK reviews daily without a hitch, Bunpro has become unmanageable. I’m wondering about how to remove the WK cards entirely and just leaving the Furigana removal feature.

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#2

I don’t have a solution but I did experience the same issue… I ended up feeling constantly demoralized by the large review number. Trying to clear some of them but got hit with a lot of failure. In the end I stopped using BunPro for more than a year. I recently managed to return and am able to stay consistent because I reset my progress and erased the connection to wani kani.

3 Likes
#3

Welcome to the community! Thanks for your post.

I think a lot of users share your frustrations with this.
I’ll offer my 2 cents with the issues/potential solutions.

First some context:

  • I get dunked on with hundreds of WK reviews that all get set to the same level, and an insane amount of them appear at the same time. There’s no “Just add 10 cards a day”.

Currently, the integration is implemented in a simple manner.
It’s a simple equation of:

  • Is the item Guru or above in WK?
    • If yes, then set the BP equivalent to Mastered or add to queue, depending on setting

There is no staggered/paced introduction of items.

This is an issue that we should probably address better in the future, as a lot of our users use the WK integration.

Some of these cards I will fail repeatedly. While I can recognize kanjis or vocabulary, it’s not the same as outputting it.

This is almost by design. WK tests simple JA ↔︎ EN translation.
The default setting for studying Bunpro Vocab is Fill-in-the-blank (Cloze) style sentences.
That is a huge difference in the amount of required thinking to answer a question.

Our WK integration was created at a time when our Vocab system only offered the JA → EN question style.
As we added more and more sentences, the time taken and difficulty of all the default Vocab questions increased

The default Bunpro settings (Random order) make the WK cards dilute the pool of cards I ought to be studying. Being stuck with 500 reviews is demoralizing. You clear 50 reviews and get whacked with additional WK cards.

You can split Reviews by Deck and by Grammar vs. Vocab.
Although a bit manual, this would help you differentiate between your 3 sources (BP N5 Grammar, Genki, WK).
There is this Community Deck, that contains all the WK Vocab – add that to your Learning queue, and from your My Decks page, you can Review on a per-Deck basis (see the “Review [1]” button in the screenshot).

Screenshot 2025-11-15 at 12.27.11
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As for what to do, you have a two options as far as I can tell:

  1. Separate out the WK Reviews (mentioned above)
    • Can take the individual WK vocab at your own pace
    • Your Reviews due on the Dashboard will also be a big number
    • Both a pro and con of this is just getting more practice with the Vocab
      • Albeit with diminishing returns (doing the same thing in 2 SRS systems)
      • More SRS (and study) fatigue
  2. Don’t use the WK integration
    • WK tests Vocab for the sake of learning Kanji – meaning less meanings per word, and no context
    • Bunpro teaches Vocab with context, and a wide variety of meanings (albeit sometimes rarer meanings)
    • WK also teaches really weird rare words, just for the sake of teaching Kanji (I passed N1 without ever remembering the Level 8 word 君主国 – monarchy – for example)
    • You’ll also be doing more targeted study, learning from more targeted Decks (e.g. our Core 2k/5k/10k Decks)
    • You will sometimes get the same word in both WK and BP, but those can just be “lucky” moments – a “yay I already knew this from WK!” type of affair

If I were to have my time again, I would definitely go with Option 2.

Unless you’re a 500 Review-a-day sadist (we have a few users like that) that enjoys/has the time to do that many Reviews, you’re gonna probably burn yourself out while getting diminishing returns doing the same words over and over again.

Regardless, It seems like you’re doing a good amount of study.
Just gotta keep it up!

As an aside – if you’re not doing Genki 1 for school or something, I personally recommend switching to Tae Kims Guide to Grammar as a textbook.
There are no excercises or anything with it, but it’s free and it treats Japanese as more of a set of equations that you learn to build yourself, rather than stitching together phrases.
I didn’t like Genki either.

Sorry for the wall of text.
Helped me think about our current WK integration a bit more.

Interested in hearing your thoughts and any the thoughts of any others that are unfortunate enough to read my essay

14 Likes
#4

I’m a Wanikani user who didn’t really enjoy Bunpro vocab when I first tried it. It looks like it has been expanded quite a bit since then, and I’m curious where you source the “Bunpro Summary” section of the vocab entries from. Some of them seem pretty useful, but others are lacking in quality and are just repeating the words from the dictionary entry.

1 Like
#5

and I’m curious where you source the “Bunpro Summary” section of the vocab entries from

They’re handwritten by our content team.

Some of them seem pretty useful, but others are lacking in quality and are just repeating the words from the dictionary entry.

Are they 1:1 matches with the main definition?
^If so, do you have any links?

I think their may be a few of those still lying around. They were kind of placeholders until we got the final versions written.
I should be able to hide them tho.

2 Likes
#6

Maybe it’s the N1 vocab in particular, but when I pull up the Bunpro N1 deck, a good chunk of them look like that. Here’s some right from the start of the list

1 Like
#7

Hi Veritas,

With pleasure. You do bring up some interesting points. I’ll try elaborating a bit more. I apologize if this gets a bit long.

The lack of a staggered introduction of cards is a problem. Even if I manage to get through the deck of 500 (Which I’ve done before), I have so many items that I fail by attrition that it’s difficult to focus. Thus in your next session, you get a lot of these cards wrong again. There’s some kanji I’ve struggled with so far in WK, but that’s made easier because my reviews are manageable and a few cards stick out.

In terms of cards failed, I do want to bring attention to something that happened often to me. I don’t have a solution, but I do want to explain.

Let’s take 方 for example. In Wanikani, it is introduced as “Direction” and “Way” in both kanji and vocabulary. The Bunpro page for it is proper, 方 can also mean person, and most of the Bunpro examples use it that way. When we mean “Direction” in the sense that I mean “Direction”, we mean 方向 which Wanikani also introduces as “Direction”. It is impossible to get these cards right if your only knowledge is from Wanikani.

I would still like to keep the hide furigana feature, but without clumping a bunch of cards. I know that’s a bit of a weird ask.

As for Genki. I’m not using Genki for a class. I happen to own Genki I and II Second Edition along with the work books and the answer key, bit of a sunk cost fallacy issue. And I like the idea of having a thing I can see tangible progress through My issues with it are, among other things:

  • Their explanations of conjugation and how some particles work don’t gel with me
  • Timing is weird. Te-forms are introduced in Chapter 6, but ~たい is not introduced until Chapter 11. Which takes a good while to get to. I get a better sense of conjugation by putting everything together
  • Once I’m done with a chapter, it’s hard to get back to, and that’s how you forget things

I did look at Tae Kim (And I don’t mind paying for things if they help me move along), but looking online for good advice on learning Japanese is tenuous. You get a huge amount of lip service given to immersion, a lot of “Just watch Cure Dolly” which I also don’t gel with, and many people who make their dislike of Tae Kim known.

I do interact with native Japanese speakers on a daily basis. They’re a large part of why I’m learning the language in the first place.

Edit: I deleted the Wanikani vocab from my reviews, and it seems like it completely broke my Genki deck. The deck shows that I’ve “learned” a certain amount of items, but looking through the deck, it’s clear that instead of hundreds of items, maybe only a hundred is tagged properly. I should probably look to do a hard reset, as much as this sets me back a lot.

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#8

We did an initial batch of ~50% of N1. The remainder are still being worked on!

N5-N2 have all been completed, however given the thousands of words we wrote hints for, there is always going to be some room for improvement on some of them. If you come across any that seem they can be improved, feel free to let us know using the feedback feature and we can look into it!

2 Likes
#9

Is there much overlap between the Core decks and the N level vocab decks?

Also, by not using the WK integration, wouldn’t you still study the same thing in two SRS, not just at the same time? But maybe that’s what you meant.

As for @Tachi
I feel you on the integration, it’s much harder to produce the words than recognize them which creates a lot of ghosts. I’m trying to find a good balance as well but for now I’ve set vocab ghosts to be created on Seasoned 2 which at least doesn’t create a ghost the first time I’m reviewing a Wanikani word.

1 Like
#10

@aPaincake It’s not just producing the words, but that sometimes words can have different meanings which Wanikani doesn’t do a good job of teaching. Being ahead on Wanikani just flooded my deck with cards so I ended up with these gigantic 500-600 card reviews, where a lot of the cards are dumped at the same time.

Keep in mind, I try clearing Wanikani and Bunpro 2-3 times a day, on top of practicing my own output and engaging with the language.

I reset everything and I’m starting over with the N5 Bunpro Vocab and Grammar decks. I’m going at a faster rate on both, because I know 80-90% of the cards already, but I also don’t want to throw in hundreds of cards in one day, especially with that 10-20% of cards that actually need review.

The grammar itself I could always use some extra work though. As I mentioned previously, Genki bores me, so I’ve been trying to find ways to mitigate that by doing my own output and shadowing when I go through Bunpro grammar points.

1 Like
#11

Yeah that’s a little frustrating when you get marked wrong due to differences between Wanikani/Bunpro…

I semi recently reset and found that to help grammar retention as well

2 Likes
#12

I simply switched mine back to JP → EN translation. I use SRS mainly for grammar and kanji so I just like the little bit of extra exposure.

I think if one felt inspired to, they could switch all their WK vocab to JP → EN and then have other vocab they study be the cloze reviews. Perhaps that would help it be less overwhelming and still allow you to not double dip on vocab studying.

#13

I don’t know how/why but my Bunpro hides furigana based on my wanikani progress only, without adding any vocab (which is how I want it). Are you able to do that in the setting somewhere?

#14

I also just started using bunpro and synced wanikani becuase i’ve been using it for a bit, but some of the translations being completely different plus no synonyms make it much, much harder

#15

In the general settings, there is a sync with Wanikani option. If you go into update settings from there you can enable it to import vocab data daily