Is There a WaniKani for German?

If you have learned Japanese with WaniKani and are now starting German, you go looking for the same thing and find a gap. There are German courses, and there is Anki, and neither feels like what you had: a system where you show up, do what is due, and watch items climb from Apprentice to Burned without ever opening a settings page.

The short answer is that WaniKani itself does not teach German and has no plans that we know of. The longer answer is that its design carries over well, with a few changes that German forces. This guide goes through what that design is, what does and does not transfer, and how merke.me - which was modelled on it on purpose - handles the differences.

What WaniKani actually is

Strip away the kanji and WaniKani is five decisions.

• A fixed curriculum in a fixed order. You do not choose what to learn next. Radicals come before the kanji built from them, kanji before the vocabulary that uses them.
• Fixed intervals. 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 4 months. Every item, every user. No algorithm tuning itself in the background.
• Named stages. Apprentice, Guru, Master, Enlightened, Burned. A burned item is finished and never comes back.
• Typed answers. You do not rate yourself. You type the reading and the meaning, and the system decides.
• Lessons separate from reviews. New items are taught first, quizzed once, and only then enter the schedule.

People who love WaniKani usually love the absence of choice. The tool decides, you execute, and progress is visible as items moving up a ladder.

What transfers to German and what does not

Mnemonics. Kanji are arbitrary shapes to a beginner, so a story for each is essential. German words are spelled as they sound, and for an English speaker a large share are relatives: Wasser, Haus, trinken, Finger. A story for Wasser is wasted effort. Mnemonics are useful in German for the stubborn tenth, not for everything; how to use them is in mnemonics for German vocabulary.

Gating. WaniKani makes every user start at level 1 and unlocks content by progress. For kanji that is defensible, because nearly everyone starts from zero. For German it is not: many learners arrive with school German or a year of Duolingo behind them, and forcing them through Hallo and danke for six weeks loses them. A German system needs open levels and a way to place yourself.

What German adds. Kanji have readings and meanings. German words have gender, plural and case behaviour, and German has a grammar that has to be produced in real time. In the Japanese world that second half is a separate product, Bunpro. For German it makes more sense to have both in one queue.

How merke.me maps onto it

merke.me is our product, and its scheduler is modelled directly on WaniKani's timings. If you know one, you will recognise the other.

A few of those rows deserve a sentence.

Decks, not levels. Each CEFR level has several decks side by side: core vocabulary by frequency, everyday spoken vocabulary, collocations, grammar. You switch on the ones you want. Inside a deck the order is fixed, so the "just do what is next" feeling is there, but an A2 learner can start at A2. The decks page shows all of them.

An account level from 1 to 99. The WaniKani level is a gate. Ours is a measure: it rises with every entry you move up the ladder, and level 99 means you have mastered all the grammar and the 10,000 most frequent words. Nothing is locked behind it.

Ghosts. If you used Bunpro you know ghost reviews. When you miss an entry you had already carried up a few steps, an extra copy of it appears at the bottom of the ladder and has to be walked up through the short intervals again, while the original only drops a step or two. Stubborn words get dense repetition without losing all their progress. More on that in why you keep forgetting the same German words.

Typing is optional. WaniKani purists will prefer typing, and it is there, with three levels of strictness up to exact capitals and real umlauts. Reveal-and-rate exists because many people review on a phone on a train.

Vacation mode. Same idea, same reason: two weeks away should not cost you 900 reviews.

What a day looks like

For someone coming from WaniKani the routine is familiar.

1. Open the dashboard. Reviews due are counted on one card, lessons available on the other. 2. Do the reviews first. Words, collocations and grammar are mixed in one queue. 3. Then take a lesson: five to ten new entries from one deck, each with article, plural, example sentences and audio, followed by a quiz on exactly those entries. 4. Close it. The next reviews are due in four hours.

The pace advice is also the same as on the WaniKani forums. Keep the number of items in the Apprentice stage under about 100. If it climbs above that, stop taking lessons until it comes down. In numbers, that is 10 to 15 new entries a day for most people; the arithmetic is in how many German words per day.

How long until everything is "burned"

An entry that never fails takes just under six months from lesson to mastered: the eight intervals add up to about 175 days. With normal accuracy, count on seven to eight months for the average entry. At 15 new entries a day, the B1 vocabulary (about 2,400 words) is fully started after five and a half months and fully mastered around month twelve. German to B1 in a year of 25 minutes a day is a realistic WaniKani-style plan. WaniKani's 60 levels take most people between one and two years; the scale is similar.

If you want the other WaniKani things

• The community. WaniKani's forum is part of its appeal. For German, the busiest places are the German learning subreddits and Discord servers; merke.me has a community forum for questions and feedback.
• An API and userscripts. WaniKani's ecosystem of add-ons is unmatched, and if tinkering is what you enjoyed, Anki will suit you better than any closed course. That comparison is in Anki vs merke.me.
• The grammar side. If Bunpro was your second tool, read is there a Bunpro for German.

Try it the way you tried WaniKani

WaniKani lets you do the first three levels for free, which is enough to know whether the system suits you. merke.me works the same way with a different cut: 100 words and 30 grammar points from any level are free, with no time limit, so you can test it at your real level and not at Hallo. The vocabulary and the grammar library can be read without an account, and the rest is on the pricing page.