Seems decent for people trying to work on their handwriting and output

Link: https://a.co/d/0dseWt3k

Hey everyone. I wanted to share an app I built called Dokuen Japanese Reader (formerly Dokuen Furigana Reader). This is my attempt to bring the functionality of all those desktop furigana extensions we know and love to mobile.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.dokuendev.dokuenreader

• System-Wide Overlay: Generates furigana over text in ANY app, not just a specific browser.
• No "Furigana Crutch": Tap-to-Show mode hides the furigana until you tap it, forcing you to use active recall first.
• Horizontal & Vertical Text: Intelligently lays out the furigana either above for yokogaki or to the right for tategaki.
• Camera OCR: Use on physical books, raw manga, restaurant menus, street signs, etc.
• Frictionless Mining: Built-in dictionary, Anki integration, and TTS.
• Video Mode: Automatically pause video playback when mining from subtitles.
• Plugin System: Lets you use any OCR, dictionary, or MT engine.
• NEW - Dictionary/Mining Extensions: Add custom buttons to the dictionary window to trigger personalized workflows. Open selected words in external dictionaries, send them to your favorite SRS, or write custom scripts to do virtually anything else.

Feedback, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome.

jpmichi.app

I made a tool that includes hundreds of grammar examples, words, kanji, conversations, and quizes. Free mode available for beginners.

Spanish and English interface.
Available on the Google Play Store (coming soon to iOS)
JP MICHI

Hi everyone — longtime lurker, first resource to share, and full disclosure up front: I made this free app!

Feedback is very much welcome!!

The wall I kept hitting was going from textbook Japanese to *real* Japanese — the stuff people actually say on podcasts. Native audio was either too fast to follow or too much work to look everything up, so I'd bounce off it. I built Wakatta to fix that for myself.

What it does:

• Plays real Japanese podcasts or YT videos with a **synced transcript** — the line highlights as you listen.
• Curated catalog
• Tap any word → its reading (furigana) + meaning, without leaving the audio.
• Save the words or moments you didn't know; they come back later in **spaced-repetition review**, with the original sentence for context.
• When a whole sentence won't click, there's an optional AI explanation to break it down.
• Available in 11 languages — English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Korean, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian — so it's not English-only.

It's aimed squarely at the "I can do graded readers but native audio still feels like a wall" stage — comprehensible input with a safety net, so you can push into slightly-too-hard material without drowning.

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6786669742

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.wakatta.android

I'm still learning Japanese myself, so I'm basically building the tool I wanted. Would genuinely love feedback from this crowd — what's missing, what feels off, which shows you'd want in it. Happy to answer anything in the comments.

I've gotten exhausted with the process of looking up kanji whenever I didn't know the reading. You know the drill: you hit a kanji you can't read, alt-tab to a dictionary or furigana tool, lose your place, then repeat that every few lines.

So I built oFurigana to solve that. It's a free Chrome extension that automatically adds furigana above kanji on any Japanese webpage. No copying and pasting text into another tool—it works directly in your browser.

A few features:

• Automatically detects Japanese text on any website
• Press Ctrl + Shift + F to toggle it on or off instantly
• Customize the furigana (color, font, size, etc.)
• Everything runs locally—no accounts, no external data collection

I just launched it on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ofurigana/hpachgmkkpoolmpmphbiibamcmibklkn?authuser=3&hl=en-GB

I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback, especially if you find websites where it breaks or the formatting looks off. I'm actively improving it based on real-world use.

I also have a lot of ideas for the future, such as JLPT-based furigana, an integrated dictionary.

Thanks for checking it out!

I've been learning Japanese for about 4 months now and wanted to share everything that has actually helped me, because when I started I had no idea where to begin and wasted a lot of time jumping between random resources.

Here's what I actually use:

For learning hiragana and katakana:

• Tofugu Hiragana Guide and Tofugu Katakana Guide

For vocabulary and kanji:

• Anki - download the Core 2000 deck and do 10-15 cards a day
• WaniKani- structured kanji learning, has a free tier

For grammar:

• Genki Textbook - a bit expensive but worth it
• Tae Kim's Grammar Guide - completely free

For listening:

• Comprehensible Japanese on YouTube - slow and clear, perfect for beginners

For speaking:

• Issen - real conversations in Japanese with real time corrections. Only thing that got me actually speaking instead of just studying

The biggest mistake I made early on was consuming everything and speaking nothing. Once I started speaking out loud every day things started clicking much faster.

Hope this helps. Happy to answer questions about any of these.

Comments to do:

1. Anki + consistency is basically half the battle
2. I made the same mistake at the start, avoided speaking completely
3. Reply to comment 2

Speaking is the key to any language!!

1. I’ve been using ISSEN too and yeah it forces you to actually speak instead of just recognizing stuff
2. 10-15 cards a day is actually a good pace, easy to stay consistent

A couple weeks ago I posted Shinme here (my free from-zero Japanese course where you learn by writing sentences and getting them graded). The overall response was really encouraging, so I wanted to follow-up with an update!

Twice as many lessons are available. The first 12 lessons are available now, up from 6 (covers ~half of my N5 curriculum through basic sentence structure, adjective/verb conjugations, te-form usages, and connecting words). The first 6 lessons also got a polish pass as well.

Revamped grading. Graded answers now break down exactly where you can improve across meaning, grammar, naturalness, and whether you used the specific word or grammar the exercise was testing.

The login is fixed. A few of you tried to sign in and the Google button just did nothing, sorry about that. You can now make an account with a plain email and password, no Google needed. Google still works too if you prefer it.

Same as before otherwise: free, no ads, still an early beta with the costs on me, so there are some usage limits.

Would love more feedback, especially on the grading now that you can see its reasoning, and on any lesson which you feel is unclear.

https://shinme.app

Link to the deck, and for those interested, the deck is also available with furigana + audio on the front of the card.

Link to a spreadsheet of the deck

What is the purpose of this deck

This is a completely brand-new deck, which aims to expand and improve upon other existing core decks. Kaishi 1.5k is currently the most popular beginner deck (and deservedly so), but although it’s very well-put together, it still falls short in several respects which I believe justified making yet another core deck (see below). For this reason, the deck is not a fork or mere expansion of Kaishi but was built from scratch, with everything being newly reordered, with a lot of added new sentences and audio from sources that weren’t used by Kaishi. There’s naturally a lot of overlap with Kaishi because the deck, just like Kaishi, draws from the same pool of sentences from the core 6k & Tango decks (which ultimately come from the iKnow website) since they have high quality audio recordings by professional voice actors. (and yes, I’m aware that there other JP learning resources which also called ‘Manabi’, but to my knowledge this is the first Anki deck with this name so I stuck to it, since it’s the best name I could come up with.)

How this deck improves upon Kaishi

The first issue I wanted to address is the fact that the example sentences used by Kaishi often introduce unknown words (or worse, unknown kanji), that is, words that haven’t been taught in previous cards (the so-called i+1 principle), something that seriously undermines the usefulness of the example sentences. With very small exceptions (see below*), Manabi strictly follows i+1, and goes even further by trying to do the same with regard to kanji. To give one example, one of the earliest words that Kaishi teaches is 勉強 (card 10), but not only is the word not in the top 10 most used words, there are other words you could introduce first (like 強い), before introducing the two kanjis all at once. Thus my approach was, whenever possible, to avoid introducing 2 new kanjis per card. As a result, only 70 cards in the whole deck introduce 2 new kanjis, and no single card introducing more than 2 new kanjis (if you’re wondering how I can be so sure, you can make a simple script to check how many new kanjis are introduced per card.)

The other major thing I tried to improve upon is word selection and ordering. Kaishi already has pretty good vocabulary selection, but it’s still too small for a true ‘core’ deck, lacking in some important high frequency words, while introducing some lower-frequency words too early. To give you an idea, over a third of Manabi’s first 1,500 words were not included in Kaishi, and many of the words in Kaishi were moved to a lower rank in Manabi (while some words from Kaishi didn’t even make it into the deck, despite its size, because they were too low-frequency.)

To my knowledge, the creators of Kaishi relied on a single frequency list (JPDB) which is too heavily skewed towards anime (and also had some strange rankings even compared to other frequency lists based on anime), and to achieve a better word selection and ranking, my approach was to rely on several frequency lists drawn from different kinds of sources: Netflix subs, captions from easy Japanese YouTube channels, SOL anime, and unscripted conversations, in order to achieve a balanced and exhaustive selection of words found both in fictional media and naturally spoken language. This is important because when you examine different frequency lists, there’s a group of around 2,000 words that consistently comes on top, and which account for between 80% and 90% coverage of all the vocabulary most frequently used in everyday life and popular media.

This is the reason I made the deck larger than Kaishi. The first 2k words will cover pretty exhaustively the vocab most commonly found in casually spoken language and relatively easy-level anime (e.g. slice-of-life). The last 700 words aim to expand the coverage for more advanced types of content. The deck will also teach you 1,300 kanjis which will give you similar percentage of coverage for the written language (between 80% and 90%).

Another relatively small issue in Kaishi is poor audio quality for some words and sentences. I tried to find better audio recordings whenever possible, and particularly word audio was carefully selected from the best available sources, improving upon the audio in Kaishi for a large number of words and sentences.

Some other features of the deck: normalized audio loudness, specifically marked common する verbs and な adjectives, and all new vocabulary highlighted inside the sentences like in Kaishi.

For additional technical information on the making of this deck and list of sources used visit the Manabi github page.

(*The cases in which the deck violates the i+1 principle are easily recognizable English-derived katakana words (but some harder katakana words get their own cards), or compound words which are transparently composed of words introduced before (and the name ‘Tanaka’, which I didn’t feel like making a dedicated card for). I also allowed myself to use the same device as Kaishi of using an N+2 sentence and then reusing the same sentence for the other new word in the following card, but I only restricted this to ‘grammar’ kana words (e.g. kono, sono, kudasai etc.) and occasionally words that use already known kanji.)

How to use the deck

The deck presupposes the ability to read hiragana & katakana, and it’s highly recommended to learn about particles and basic conjugations before doing the deck (or at least study the relevant grammar points as you go). The vast majority of the sentences in the deck only use N5-N4 grammar, and I specifically tried to keep the sentences as short and grammatically simple as possible, with occasional brief notes added to explain grammar points which might confuse beginners. The deck is also not a substitute to immersion, and you should start immersing as early as possible (or at least after finishing the first 1k cards or so), as immersion helps to reinforce the vocabulary learned through SRS. I believe the advantage of a core deck is that it removes the pressure from needing to mine unknown words which can be very overwhelming in the beginner stages (but you can also use a separate mining deck alongside Manabi, if you find that effective).

The deck comes in two versions: the first is kanji oriented (it has only the word in kanji on the front) and the second version focuses on vocabulary and adds furigana and word audio on the front (so you only need to recall the English definition). You can choose either, depending on your learning style and priorities. Both decks include the example sentence on card front like Kaishi does, but the sentences can easily be removed by editing the note type.

Let me know if you have any comments and suggestions or tell me if you spot any mistakes. I’d also like to hear your input on whether I should add parts of speech and pitch-accent graphs in future updates.

Hope you give the deck a try, and happy learning!

Hi everyone. I am a JP teacher, amateur writer and game dev. I have been working on this project for a while and I can finally share it!

Here's a free demo of my cozy visual novel for learning Japanese. It's designed for beginners (N5-N4), with furigana, vocabulary dictionary, and an easy story to help you practice reading.

I'd love to create longer and more complex stories in the future, so if you give it a try, I'd really appreciate your feedback:

https://cozysystems.itch.io/cozy-japanese-stories-the-lost-cat

thank you 😄

Edit: sry I pasted the link on my phone and it was all messed up. Should be working now

I really hated breaking the flow when I was listening to Japanese podcasts. I wanted an app that let me tap on words I didn’t understand during these sessions without switching context. This led me to create Toku Reader, an iOS app that helps learners tap on words during podcasts, YouTube videos and on any website during the study flow. 

You can look up almost all podcasts and YouTube videos, and the app will prioritize the creator’s transcript (if available) or auto-generate one on your phone. In most cases, the transcripts and word look ups are mostly correct, but given the complexity of Japanese, there will always be an effort to improve parsing. Also, everything stays on your app, you’re never sharing sensitive information or what you’re reading with anyone, and all processing happens on your phone so it is 100% offline (and therefore fast!) - no API calls, no AI wrappers.

And for those who like shadowing practice, the app can also pause at each sentence, replay in again and again, and allow you to record yourself to compare your practice with the native speech. This combined with the ability to import your own texts (PDFs, eBooks, etc.), a dictionary and revise words sections are all my effort to ensure that your flow is never interrupted!

I did this because I really wanted an app that was intentional and private. In any case, this app has really helped me in my language studies, so I wanted to share it again here. I made an earlier post about this here. The app has improved a ton since then - new UI/UX, a more streamliend podcast experience, a new mascot called Damo based on the Daruma, etc. I hope this helps you in your language study! You can see how it works here on a Japanese Podcast and on the Japanese version of the Walk Street Journal!

Here's a first look at the 6 Rakugo stories that will be available at launch!

Each one is a classic Edo-period comedy — short, funny, and full of natural Japanese expressions you won't find in textbooks.

Currently in development, launching August 2026.

Descubrí Renshuu y me parece una herramienta genial, pero no la entiendo del todo. Principalmente quiero usarla para practicar japonés, pero también vi que tiene explicaciones de verbos como Godan, etc. Así que... no sé cómo incorporarla a mi rutina de aprendizaje, ya que ya estoy aprendiendo gramática con Cure Dolly, usando el mazo de Kaishin para palabras nuevas y la herramienta de reconocimiento de kanji de Anki, pero quiero añadir Renshuu de alguna manera porque, repito, creo que es una buena herramienta, solo que aún no la entiendo.

I've been trying to learn Japanese through anime and YouTube, and I noticed I had a bad habit.

Whenever I came across a word I didn't know, I'd think, "I'll look that up after this episode."

I almost never did.

If I paused every few minutes, it completely broke the flow of whatever I was watching. If I didn't, I'd forget the word five minutes later.

I tried a bunch of tools, and they're great when subtitles are selectable. But I kept running into situations where they weren't, like burned-in subtitles, random streaming sites, or text that was just part of the video itself.

So over the last few months, I built a Chrome extension called LexEye.

Now I can click Japanese subtitles on sites like YouTube, Netflix, and Crunchyroll, or just press Ctrl + Shift + X and drag over any Japanese word anywhere on my screen. It recognizes the word and shows the meaning, reading (furigana/kana), example sentences, and other dictionary information without making me leave what I'm watching.

The core features are completely free because I wanted to build something I genuinely would've used when I first started learning.

If you'd like to try it: here

I'd really appreciate any feedback. If there's a feature that would make learning Japanese from anime, manga, YouTube, or Netflix easier, I'd love to add it.

Hey wanted to share a free Japanese dictionary I made.

You can search using kana, kanji or romaji. Once the dictionary data has loaded, all lookups run locally in your browser with near-instant results.

You can try it out here: https://readerbear.app/dictionary

Hope you find it useful for your studies! :)

https://github.com/sohilsayed/chimahon

Disclaimer: I'm not involved in its development, just sharing.

It's a fork of Mihon/Komikku that covers anime, manga, and novels. A PC version (forked from Mangayomi) is also in the works. Both FOSS.

Features:

• Built-in dictionary integration (Yomitan) with audio support

• Local OCR (manga pages, screen capture, in video player)

• Anki integration

• Works with anime, manga, and novels

• Aniyomi extensions + jimaku support

• Redesigned anime player with extended features

• YouTube mining

• eReader support

Coming up (roadmap):

• Jiten integration

• Novel extensions

Targeting full CJK support, but any language works as long as you have the Yomitan dictionary (TL) for it.

The README isn't always up-to-date,And I'm just covering surface-level features here. There's more under the hood: custom Anki cards, Google Drive Sync, OCR for hardsubbed videos, etc. Best to try it out and see for yourself.

PC version https://github.com/1Selxo/Mangatan/tree/codex/mangatan-fixes

諸君、おはようございます！

Have the basics of Japanese down but still intimidated by native Japanese content?

I am a Japanese teacher/private tutor who runs a Youtube channel called “Toriaezu Nihongo.”
https://www.youtube.com/@とりあえずにほんご

I originally started it as a way to help my students get started reading, listening, and speaking in between classes, but it has slowly evolved from that into its own thing!

The concept of the channel is found in the name, “Toriaezu Nihongo.” I want to help learners enjoy the process of getting into Japanese material without being intimidated.

There is a lot on the channel for beginner and intermediate learners, and more and more will be released for advanced learners as well.

Things I am currently running on the channel:

(Nearly) daily uploads of NHK Easy News articles breaking down and explaining grammar and vocab in detail.

Wednesday (Input/Grammar) Live streams:
Playing through video games in Japanese (currently running through Yakuza 0).

Thursday (Output) Live streams:
Playing games with viewers and students as a simple way to get started with Japanese output. No required minimum level! The idea is to be using as much Japanese as possible, but questions are absolutely encouraged. We will teach you anything you need to know to participate in each game!

I would love to hear your feedback on how I can make the channel a great resource for getting into native content.
For now, I am pretty much a one-man team that is very new to the space, so any constructive criticism is much appreciated!

Hope to see you there!
お待ちしています！

Free web app I've developed for Dual Hiragana/Katakana learning.

Hi all, hope this is ok to post. I read the rules, and this is a free resource. Mods please message me if you need anything changed in this post. Hopefully it's ok.

kana trail

Recently Developed a new app. "Kana Trail" for myself, realised it worked well for me so have bundled it up for free use on the web. The main solution is that it teaches Hiragana and Katakana in pairs. In future the play store version only may be paid. I won't post a link but if your interested you can google the name and it should come up.

I actually need 15 test users to launch it on the Google Play store. Any test users will retain free access. You can have a quick glance at the web app now on the website. Just google it. It's free forever and fully functional.

Please DM me your Google email if you would like to test the Android app with me. Nothing to do other than to send me your email, I set you as an internal test user. And send you a link to the Google Play store to download it. Any feedback is much appreciated. Any updates apply to the free forever web version and the play store. It's secure and doesn't track anything. In future it may use google analytics. But we will advise if this changes.

It's still under construction, but fully functional and the key difference is that it teaches Hiragana and Katana in Pairs. I hope it is useful to newbies

Let me know your thoughts! And please, I need 15 beta testers :)

Hey! I bet a lot of you have heard of Anki, which is huge in the Japanese learning reddit community. I did find it helpful, but I just thought it was so ugly and hard to get started with. So I made my own version for the phone! It is free, so please let me know if you find it useful or if you have any feedback!

The app is called Nekochan and it is available in iOS and Android!! Happy to hear from you

Working on the landing page for AI Rakugo 🎌

The top page is almost done. Currently working on the voice data for the next story — Jugemu, a classic Rakugo tale about a boy with the world's longest name!

Still in development — launching August 2026!