Learn hiragana & katakana in the dead time while Grok thinks.
kanthropic is a macOS menu bar app. Click あ for a flashcard; type the rōmaji. While Grok Build is working, the card pops up on its own — same idea as the old Claude/tmux pane, without any of that wiring.
Two modes, that's the whole product:
- Learn — the next row, one character at a time, with the reading and a mnemonic. Then those glyphs enter your deck.
- Revise — FSRS-backed drill of what you've learned. Due cards first; when you're caught up it keeps going on the set you're still learning, then the whole deck. No check-in menu, no
/f/r/s.
Progress lives in ~/.kanthropic/progress.json and is shared with the CLI.
あ ← menu bar
┌────────────┐
│ learn revise あ / ア │
│ │
│ き │
│ │
│ ki │ ← type, return
└────────────┘
git clone https://github.com/ProximoBinks/kanthropic.git
cd kanthropic && npm install
npx kanthropic app # builds ~/Applications/Kanthropic.app, installs Grok hooks, launchesNeeds Node 18+ and Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) for the one-time Swift build.
Look for あ on the right of the menu bar:
- Left-click — flashcard
- Right-click — pop while Grok thinks, open at login, quit
- Escape or click away — dismiss
- Return — grade (revise) / continue (learn)
- Drag a window corner — enlarge the content with sharp text; dismissing resets the size
Drill all → pick a set saves each character's practice streak and your score for the local calendar day, separately for each script and set. Reopening a set or restarting the app resumes that progress. Characters with three consecutive correct answers leave the practice pool. Daily practice resets at local midnight; learned characters and FSRS review history are preserved.
Grok hooks live in ~/.grok/hooks/kanthropic.json (one file; delete it to uninstall). They only write a tiny state file — they do not open tmux panes or edit a shared settings.json. The app pops on the idle→thinking edge, once per turn, so it doesn't yank focus on every tool call.
npx kanthropic grok-uninstall # remove the hooks; the app still works standaloneNew characters only enter the deck through Learn (the next unlearned row, in gojūon order). Revise never ambushes you with a glyph you haven't seen.
A correct answer is FSRS Good, a miss is Again. A character is mastered only after it has graduated to Review and been recalled on two separate local days (≥ 8 hours apart) — cramming in one sitting can't fake it.
Hiragana auto-advances to katakana once hiragana is fully mastered. Toggle あ / ア any time.
Progress can sync through Convex to a PWA you add to your phone's home screen. The menu bar app, the CLI and the phone run the same engine. Sync is per card: studying different characters on two devices merges cleanly, and when both devices graded the same card, the more recent review wins.
npx convex dev --once # deploy convex/ (first run creates the project, writes .env.local)
npm run web:build # PWA → web/dist (reads VITE_CONVEX_URL from .env.local)
# host web/dist anywhere with HTTPS (e.g. `vercel deploy web/dist`)
npx kanthropic sync setup --url https://<deployment>.convex.cloud --web https://<your pwa>sync setup prints a pairing link and a QR code. Open it on your phone, then Share → Add to Home Screen. The menu bar app syncs when you open or close the panel, and every few minutes in between. The PWA syncs live and works offline. kanthropic sync syncs by hand, sync link shows the QR code again, and sync off stops syncing on this machine.
The pairing key is the only credential, so anyone with the link can read and edit your progress.
The progress tab (calendar icon) logs how long you practise each day, across every device that syncs: today's time against a 15-minute goal, your streak, the last 7 days and all time, a month calendar shaded by time practised (tap a day for its answers, accuracy, and phrases built / heard / said), and how far through hiragana, katakana and the phrases you are. Time is active time, measured between answers: a gap of more than 90 seconds counts as a break, so leaving the app open doesn't inflate it.
The phrases tab teaches 517 phrases in 24 topics, in three groups: visiting family (staying with a Japanese family, including Hiroshima-ben to recognise), everyday, and travel & emergencies. You see a new phrase once, then each review moves through three modes as it sticks: build it from shuffled kana tiles while you're learning it, listen to it with no text and pick the meaning once it graduates, and say it out loud from the English and grade yourself (again / hard / good / easy) once it's stable (FSRS stability of a week or more and 80%+ accuracy). For extra practice outside the schedule, drill the shaky ones (phrases you've met but not mastered, worst first) from the top of the topic list or inside a topic, or drill now to run through everything you've met in a topic. A drill is a round of up to 10 that ends when each one is right; a miss comes back a few cards later as tiles. Drills count toward your practice time but don't move FSRS, so cramming can't push real reviews out. Every third review of a spoken phrase is a listening one, a miss drops it back to tiles, Hiroshima-ben stops at listening, and no phrase goes longer than a month between reviews. Answers are scheduled with the same FSRS engine as the kana, and phrases you got wrong come back first. You get 10 new phrases a day, and reviews are never capped. Each phrase is pre-recorded in four Google Chirp 3 HD voices (Iapetus, Orus, Rasalgethi, Sadaltager), and a random one plays each time unless you pick one in settings; the device's Japanese voice is the fallback.
The phrases come from the Japanese Phrasebook, which is built on Wikitravel's Japanese phrasebook and licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. To rebuild the deck (readings and tiles come from kuromoji, checked against the source romaji):
node scripts/build-phrases.mjs path/to/phrasebook/bin/markupThe same engine, in a terminal:
npx kanthropic learn # pick a row (or `kanthropic app` and click Learn)
npx kanthropic drill # revise; q quit · /n next row · /h /k script
npx kanthropic reset # wipe progress (asks first)
npx kanthropic statusLegacy Claude/tmux (session, watch, hooks-install) still exists if you want it. The menu bar app is the supported path.
Right-click あ → Quit. Then:
npx kanthropic grok-uninstall
rm -rf ~/Applications/Kanthropic.appProgress stays in ~/.kanthropic until you delete that folder.
npm testMIT