WaniKani has audio files for vocabulary words.

There is no audio for radicals or kanji. Radicals have English names, no pronunciations, and we’re pretty sure you don’t want to hear those. Kanji have readings (usually more than one), but hearing them on their own without context doesn’t mean much. Once the kanji is inside a vocabulary word, however, it’s got a definite reading, which we do have audio for. You can hear all of the readings in their proper context with the vocabulary.

There are two voice recordings that we have for each vocabulary item. Both are Tokyo accents (the most well-known and widely-used of the accents in Japan). One is female (Kyoko) while the other is male (Kenichi).

By going to your account settings, you can change your audio settings to match your preferences. You can choose between the two voice recordings to be your default pronunciation voice, Kyoko or Kenichi. If you’d like to automatically play the audio clips during your Lessons or Reviews (after answering the item correctly), you can do so here as well.

Audio is Not Playing!

If the audio clips for the vocab aren’t playing, first check and make sure you’re using one of our supported browsers.

If it’s still not playing, and you’re using any third-party extension or app, try turning those off one by one, to see if one of those is the culprit. If it is, contact the creator!

If none of that is the cause, contact us and we’ll help you out.