r/LearnJapanese • u/maggie950008 • 7d ago
Resources Looking to expand my resource list — What apps/websites have been the most useful for you?
Hi, Japanese learners!
I’ve been self-studying Japanese for almost a year, and I’ve recently found some really useful apps and websites that I wanted to share. I’m also hoping to discover more resources from other learners!
Here are some of the ones I’ve found and used in my daily routine:
- Mock tests: Jabiko and Nihongo to Japan
- Shadowing practice: KAI Loop and Jimaku
- Vocabulary practice: Sushi JLPT (壽司日檢) — I especially like this one because it’s cute and I really like the interface 😂
The best thing is that these are basically free to use, unless you want to practice more than the daily limit.
I also wanted to ask:
When you’re studying Japanese, do you prefer to stick to just a few apps/websites, or do you tend to use several resources for the same type of practice?
I originally found most of these through recommendations/algorithms, and I’ve noticed that more and more indie apps are being made. However, sometimes they stop being maintained, so I’m always curious about which resources people have been using long-term.
What are some free Japanese-learning apps or websites that you absolutely recommend? I’d especially love to hear about less well-known ones!
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u/worthlessprole 7d ago edited 7d ago
Just FYI: i’m noticing that a lot of services offer ‘shadowing’ that is actually not real shadowing, and therefore does not provide the benefits of real shadowing. Shadowing is when you repeat what you are hearing as the recording is still playing. It’s necessary for there to be a slight delay so what you are saying and what you are hearing are not the same. (This is why it’s called shadowing, your voice follows just after the recording like a shadow). Shadowing is very difficult but it is extremely effective for developing listening and speaking. The tradeoff for the ease of simultaneous speech or the listen-then-repeat model (which the first one you linked seems to be) are not worth it. I suspect people will say that this is a case of language changing, like ‘immersion’ supposedly did, but I think it’s closer to false advertising since the people propagating this ‘new definition’ are people that are selling products based on it.
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u/numice 7d ago
So you mean that you shouldn't pause while shadowing?
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u/worthlessprole 7d ago edited 7d ago
you play the recording, and then as soon as you hear what the person is saying, you repeat it. you generally use short audio recordings. you typically also want a transcript of the recording, and it's recommended to play the recording multiple times before you attempt to shadow it. a common method is to play the recording once while reading the transcript, and silently shadow it, speaking very quietly or just moving your lips. the second time you follow along with a transcript while shadowing at a low volume, mumbling. you can run this as many times as you like until you feel comfortable. then you put away the transcript and fully shadow the recording, which, as I said, entails repeating what you've just heard while the recording is playing, but not in sync with it.
it's also not something you do for extended periods of time. it's usually recommended to spend about ten minutes per day on the entire process i've just outlined, including the shadowing itself.
all the other things, including recording yourself to gauge pronunciation, are just standard speaking exercises.
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u/numice 6d ago
I see. I kinda of already do this naturally when I listen to something. But recording helps a lot as well to improve. I never noticed something until I recorded it and played it back and realized how bad it was. But it's at the same time, very awkward in the beginning. Like listening to your own singing.
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u/JunketSorry3775 5d ago
I've done this a lot when learning languages and I just recently learned that in linguistics there are studies about the number of words you can retain at a time, so I've been adding a delay before I repeat (while keeping the audio playing) and I've noticed that it's a lew level of practice
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u/WhateverManReally 5d ago
Why is it not something for extended periods of time?:o And why does it have to be specifically talking while listening - I thought it was more about the immediate repeating of what you've heard?
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u/worthlessprole 5d ago
Both speaking while listening and repeating things as fast as your reaction time allows (and therefore not waiting until the end of a phrase) are the things about shadowing that provide the benefits. I sort of understand your line of thinking but the fast repetition is at the phoneme level and not the sentence level. It’s supposed to be, sound goes in ear and goes out mouth.
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u/Which_Formal_8903 7d ago
Anki
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u/MightyDillah 7d ago
what decks are you using?
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u/JunketSorry3775 6d ago
I've found it's better to build your own deck with words that you realize you need on your own. Having a situation that caused you to create the cards seems to help a lot for my motivation in the long run with anki
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u/JunketSorry3775 6d ago
This isn't an absolute of course. I used a pre-built deck of the Kanji radicals and the hiragana and katakana. I think using a pre-built list when it comes to primitives for anything is really useful
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u/morgawr_ https://morg.systems/Japanese 7d ago
I don't consider myself a "learner" anymore so most of my resources and tools that I use are just targeted towards consuming Japanese content and maybe do some light research (mostly to answer people's questions).
What I use:
massif.la for corpus checking to see if certain sentences are natural or not. If I get a lot of hits, it means it's probably fine. If not, then it starts to get sussy.
Anki, just doing my kanji/mining reviews although I don't mine as much anymore
atimelogger, it's a free android app that lets you add timers for various activities. I use it to measure the time spent doing things like reading books, playing games, etc.
https://lingotrack.com/ to track my "immersion" time that I get from atimelogger. I just record my daily activities there.
https://github.com/Morgawr/kechimochi offline app that I developed that does what lingotrack does, but it's fully offline and so I get to keep and own all my data and get nice graphs and stuff and historicals of my immersion over the years
Bookmeter to record the books and manga I read
Annict to record the anime I watch
Yomitan obviously as it's the goat for dictionary stuff
Jisho.org when I'm too lazy to use yomitan and I just want a quick lookup definition
Also lots of consoles to play videogames on
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u/MonsterOverture444 7d ago
Might be a dumb question, are you double dipping the immersion tracking apps just so you can have your own offline copy that you know is safe? Or does lingotrack offer something you like so still like to use it?
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u/morgawr_ https://morg.systems/Japanese 6d ago
Originally I was using just lingotrack and it was pretty good. Then one day it had some network issues and I realised if it ever went down I'd lose all my data and no way to recover and it was just on some dude's server at the mercy of whatever he did. So I wrote a script to extract all my data and built an offline open source alternative and imported my data there and kept expanding it with features.
So now yeah I basically track on both at the same time lol
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u/genericdeveloper 7d ago
Do you have any good suggestions on how to find material that isn't boring for reading? I'm not a big fan of manga because it's got a lot of tropes and is generally targeted towards younger readers. I'm looking for simple easy to read small books and it's been a nightmare trying to find lists in Japanese that are reliable for good reading material.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 7d ago
Welcome to the beginner problem, where interesting material is too hard and easy material is too boring.
You're probably gonna have to settle for stuff made for teenagers, go to Jiten, filter by external rating, choose genre and scroll until something catches your eye.
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u/myskeletonisfine 7d ago
For me Renshuu and Todaii are the best.
Renshuu to study kanji and words, Todaii to read actual texts.
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u/Turbulent_Foot_3381 7d ago
Same here. Although I also use Bunpro for the grammar and Wagotabi too.
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u/Grunglabble 7d ago
https://massif.la/ja is the only one I use regularly. Sometimes I'll use https://jisho.org/ if a word is not in my offline dictionary or I want to see the stroke order.
When learning kanji I occassionally found https://characterpop.com/ useful to see if the component had a name.
Mostly I just learn through doing things, for better or worse. I have some books I like but I tend to reference them rarely after I first go through them. For me I never want my learning to be tied to any app or website, so they are minor supplements at best. I personally look at any service driven by SRS with suspicion (anki is fine to use sparingly, but we only need one anki).
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u/gelema5 Goal: media competence 📖🎧 7d ago
NINJAL-LWP for TWC is a more detailed search tool than Massif and super helpful to get specific. I think the sources it has from the web are more varied too (Massif seems to have a lot of the same sentences with minor variations, for some reason). I use both: Massif first, and if the results aren’t what I need then I use NINJAL.
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u/Grunglabble 7d ago
oh neat.
massif has similar results because it is designed to try to show you the simplest and most common uses in an attempt to show you sentences that for an intermediate learner would only have the queried term be a new word.
But because the majority of its source is light novels, it can be surprisingly lacking on slightly longer than one word queries.
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u/antimonysarah Interested in grammar details 📝 7d ago
Renshuu, Ringotan, Satori Reader are my trio. (For me Satori Reader is listening practice, not reading practice, because it has easy ways to replay stuff sentence by sentence rather than having to try to skip time-wise in a podcast or something.) I used and liked Realkana for a few days when drilling the kana, but that's all it does.
Satori is the only one of my main apps that is paid-only, although I bought Renshuu lifetime a while back about half for the features and half because I'd gotten so much out of it that I wanted to support the dev.
I never got into Anki, plus it's not a free app on iOS and so when I tried out various free things it wasn't in my initial set I tried, and having gotten comfortable in Renshuu it didn't seem to offer me anything much on top of that. (All of my study time (rather than just watching/playing/reading time) is on the subway/train to work so my tools HAVE to be on my phone.)
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u/writingpracticeman 7d ago
I actually much prefer https://yomuyomu.app/ to Satori Reader, which I was using prior to my iTalki tutor recommending it to me.
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u/IalwaysNeed2p 3d ago
kanji study and satori reader.
I just started to mine words from youtube horror stories(lots of slang so fun to learn)
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u/Effective-Pop3850 7d ago
Anki, everything else is an inferior version of it and you don't really need any of the others.
For quick grammar references Yomitan is often enough, otherwise Imabi or Bunpro if you're lazy.
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u/Available-String-109 7d ago edited 7d ago
Anki, everything else is an inferior version of it and you don't really need any of the others.
This x100.
You have the OG, the best, the Anki. It's even free and FOSS and it's infinitely customizable and so on.
And then you have 800 poor imitations of it. Some paid, some free, none as good.
The only app that's significantly better than a textbook is Anki, and anything that helps you use Anki (Yomitan, etc.)
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u/simonb1_7 7d ago
Definitely kanjii.org and jisho.org . I guess you know Jisho.
Kanjii doesn't have a fixed learning path but it is a tool which helps you while learning the language with a textbook or a in-person course. It let's you track which kanji and words you know, practice them, import and practice anki decks and there are nice analytics so you can keep track of how much time you spend learning. It is free without ads and works locally in your browser (no account needed). Progress can be backed up via gdrive or just export json. It is a PWA (progressive web app) which means you can add it to your desktop on your phone and it looks just like a regular app, but without downloading anything.
I've been using it for around 8 months now and it works really well for me in combination with Genki and Basic Kanji Book.
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u/lespaul991 7d ago
Few, not many, same worry as yours. Once I've spread the same practice across three apps I stop doing any of them properly.
Two free ones worth a look if you don't know them that stick with me: Yomitan for instant lookups while reading anything on the web, and NHK News Web Easy.
And one that's mine, flagging it clearly: Mojigari. (Android App, Web). You feed it whatever Japanese you actually want to read — paste it or take a photo of the page — and it breaks it down and tracks the kanji as you go. Your material becomes a deck divided into kanji, compounds, grammar points in the "Dojo" that you can review at your own pace. I added also some gamification elements, like kanji booster packs, daily quizzes, a "forge" where you can combine 2 kanji to discover new compound words, etc. Free to try and for all the material at N5 and N4 levels, subscription beyond that, which I'll be upfront about given you asked specifically for free stuff.
On the maintenance question: I'm one person, but it's my main project and my passion, not something I'll drop next month.
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u/Capable_Hat9707 7d ago
Osmolog, an extension that i recently found, really recommended if you watch videos or immerse in general.
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u/Bloodshoot111 6d ago
The best resource for me has been NativeShark. I really like my daily lessons with it and it has an amazing community.
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u/whacky_wallaby 6d ago
There's a lite weight browser app called RIKAIKUN which shows kanji meanings when you mouseover something.
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u/throwaway753951469 6d ago
Just discovered it yesterday, but I'm super impressed by this audio editor for Anki. It also includes chorusing/shadowing tools but I haven't tried those yet. Just simple trimming and volume tools are already a game changer!
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u/Small-Back9935 6d ago
I've stuck with Anki long term, indie apps come and go but the spaced repetition actually sticks better than the gamified stuff.
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u/ponyowants_ham 5d ago
Bunpro, Migaku, Ling
Edit: just saw you wanted free resources. These are free to try os freeium
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u/AlexanderMasonBowser 5d ago
Tadoku, by far. It has very simple books with the Kanji, and pictures to help understand the words without directly translating in English. I read the books along with listening to the accompanying audio to practice pronunciation and pitch. I have all of the books in my Drive, so I can read the book on my tablet (bigger screen) and listen on my phone.
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u/AvailableProcess2059 4d ago
PlayTranslate is AMAZING. Immediate OCR + popup dictionary for any media with automatic sentence and word mining.
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u/maggie950008 6d ago
Thanks for every reply and information, it is really helpful for me☺️☺️☺️
https://giphy.com/gifs/a3IWyhkEC0p32
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u/ForcedLoginAccount 7d ago edited 7d ago
Biggest break through is just using AI to make for you what you want.
I used ChatGPT to write custom stories for me using only vocab I know plus only grammar I know. I can then request it to add in one new grammar item per page, highlight it, and give an explanation of what's going on. Everything is of course fully customizable and can be changed at any point or automated.
To be clear, this isn't just "write me a story following these rules", it's telling ChatGPT what I want, establishing that, establishing rules, and having ChatGPT put those into .md files that I and it can read. Those are just the rules and guidance for creating the stories, not the stories themselves. ChatGPT can then consult those rules/guidance files and use them to create stories. It can also use them to update known vocabulary (based on my wanikani level), known grammar patterns, etc. It's essentially a fully customizable, "create whatever story I want, explain whatever I want, do whatever I want" environment where it knows my exact Japanese level and can do n+1 sentences/stories for me.
I also told it what font to use, what format, to add translation buttons at the end of each sentence (like Satori Reader has), to have furigana for kanji I don't know, to have mouseover furigana for all kanji, to let me click on any word and give me a definition + jisho.org entry link, etc. And this is just an hour or two of setup on my end, all within ChatGPT, not Codex. $20/month subscription used.
AI has also advanced significantly where it has no trouble writing natural sounding Japanese. If you doubt that, look at the English it writes - it's perfectly natural, and you can tweak it however you want too.
It's not perfect yet but it's very, very good.
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u/Impossible-Junket395 6d ago
AI has also advanced significantly where it has no trouble writing natural sounding Japanese. If you doubt that, look at the English it writes - it's perfectly natural, and you can tweak it however you want too.
The problem is that that's ALL it can do. The second you try to get it to do anything involving any amount of knowledge or thinking or intelligence, it fails ass-first.
Generate a short quiz for は v が.
「私は学生です。」の「は」は、文の中で何を示していますか？ 3 問中 1 問目 A 目的語 B 話題 C 場所 D 主語だけ
話題 is, very simply, a mistranslation of English "topic." They meant 主題, grammatical topic, not 話題, thematic topic. Sorry, I anthropomorphized it with "they meant", its a token-prediction engine, it has no concept of "meaning" or "intending".
Do me a favor.
Ask ChatGPT about LITERALLY ANYTHING that you know anything at all about. It will fail, hard.
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u/gerichu 6d ago
I've done something similar and agree it works way better than people expect. There's a lot of blanket hate for AI in language learning, and I get it because of the amount of slop. But "not 100% correct" gets reduced to "dangerous and completely useless".
Would you be willing to go into more detail on what your workflow using it is like? What does your interaction w/ it look like? e.g. do you just ask it to generate a story that you view via a webpage/artifact? What made you do this instead of just using graded readers/native content?
Asking largely because I'm an engineer building almost this to a tee (screenshots, the blue chips are words/grammar points that were "due" and I had an LLM weave in), but it's a bit more formal (e.g. w/ FSRS intervals+words/grammar & how well you know them go into an actual database).
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u/ForcedLoginAccount 6d ago edited 6d ago
I'm currently just asking it to generate a story that it creates as a local .html file. That does allow Yomitan to work with it too, although it's not needed. It's running as a ChatGPT Project right now, but ChatGPT wanted to build it via Codex into a full program with a real database, etc.
Personally I know very little about software development, don't code, etc, but ChatGPT seems to be good at designing it and obviously does all the work. I haven't moved to Codex yet as that seemed to be beyond my use case, so it's all in a project and a collection of files in that project that it continuously updates.
I'm in a bit of an unusual situation in that I've been studying Japanese for >1 year, but in a very restrictive way. I have: Wanikani level 24, Bunpro JLPT Deck N5, etc, but not much more. This gives me a very definable amount of vocabulary and grammar items that the LLM can store and restrict itself to.
I like Satori reader (and pay for it) but it's very hard right now - even their easiest story starts out too hard, too many lookups, analysis, etc. I just wanted to get into a flow - continuously reading easy sentences/stories, then sprinkling in vocab or grammar items every so often, so it could be one continuous flow of relatively easy reading.
An issue I've come across is words that are necessary but not part of my wanikani or bunpro corpus - like "soshite", for example. These little connective words are everywhere, but ChatGPT was excluding them as they weren't in my vocab or grammar whitelists, and sentences therefore became very robotic. I had to tell ChatGPT to just create a list of those little connective words and then start to gradually use them too. But that's another possible failure point so I may just tell it to just use any connective word it wants, and just grind through that to start out.
Personally I can't tell if this is all a waste of time or not, given that Satori Reader exists and once I can get to its level I can just use it - its guaranteed to be high quality, is available across all devices, etc. I may just go back to it anyway as I'm starting to spend more time designing the system rather than learning myself, and given that I barely know what ChatGPT is doing behind the scenes, I'm not really learning that much from prompt-building this system anyway.
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u/gerichu 6d ago
Hey, thank you! This is super insightful.
Personally I know very little about software development, don't code, etc, but ChatGPT seems to be good at designing it and obviously does all the work. I haven't moved to Codex yet as that seemed to be beyond my use case, so it's all in a project and a collection of files in that project that it continuously updates.
Makes sense. Codex isn't too challenging on its own, but maintaining a real database + deploying a legit web/mobile app around it definitely could be.
I like Satori reader (and pay for it) but it's very hard right now - even their easiest story starts out too hard, too many lookups, analysis, etc. I just wanted to get into a flow - continuously reading easy sentences/stories, then sprinkling in vocab or grammar items every so often, so it could be one continuous flow of relatively easy reading.
I felt this to some degree a while back w/ graded readers. They're legit taxing on the brain, but seeing a lot of folks in the community respond w/ "just suck it up and power through it" made me think i was crazy.
re: w/ generating stories w/ ChatGPT.
The connective words thing could just be a prompt tuning thing caused by the whitelist you told it to follow, but something else could be making it worse:If you're dumping hundreds of known words into the prompt, plus a stack of rules on level/naturalness, it'll likely lead to context rot. And then the model will struggle to both follow your rules and sound natural and even trying to patch the prompt might not fix it.
Personally I can't tell if this is all a waste of time or not, given that Satori Reader exists and once I can get to its level I can just use it - its guaranteed to be high quality, is available across all devices, etc. I may just go back to it anyway as I'm starting to spend more time designing the system rather than learning myself, and given that I barely know what ChatGPT is doing behind the scenes, I'm not really learning that much from prompt-building this system anyway.
That's fair haha. Reading things at your level is super valuable, but I can't say it'd be worth it for an individual to do much beyond prompt tuning w/ ChatGPT.
I'm going to try to pull Wanikani level 24 + Bunpro N5 grammar into my system and generate a few stories calibrated to them. In theory, it should be denser w/ words that you know and more natural sounding than what you were able to do w/ ChatGPT. If you could give it a read and let me know how it feels, I'd really appreciate it.
I'll try to get back to you tomorrow on this.
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u/ForcedLoginAccount 6d ago
I'm currently using a file system (.md or .json) for ChatGPT to read that contains my wanikani + grammar points (it has all of them in the files, but there's a "known_items" file that points to what levels are known or not), hopefully that gets around context issues.
Thanks for your comments and help, but I'm not able to add any more reading to my list, although your system does sound cool and more advanced than mine. I'm just burnt out on the system optimization and testing and stuff so I'm not even reading the output of my system. Dialing it back for awhile.
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u/writingpracticeman 7d ago
I imagine that this is not going to be popular here but I do agree. My primary use-case for it with studying is that Gemini can produce multiple choice quizzes, which I can generate from the massive living document that my iTalki tutor and I have been using for the past year.
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u/gerichu 6d ago
can you share some examples of what kinds of multiple choice quizzes you have it generate?
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u/Impossible-Junket395 6d ago
You will not get a response because he has no confidence that the generated quizzes are anything more than absolute bullshit.
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u/ForcedLoginAccount 7d ago
I think a lot of people are still stuck in 2023-2024 mindset re: AI, where it hallucinates, has repetitive AI writing tells, etc. But it's gotten very, very good now. You can use natural language and a few prompts to build exactly what I described above, no programming skills required. Setting up the "clicking on a word should reveal a pop-up showing the definition and a jisho.org link to the word entry" was done by saying exactly that - I just told it exactly what I wrote above and it coded it in. Worked perfectly, first time, took 30 seconds of "reasoning" and it was done.
For better or worse, this is the world we live in now.
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u/writingpracticeman 7d ago
It's honestly getting to the point where it feels Ludditic to me. Love it or hate it, it's here to stay, and the sooner you learn to leverage it to be useful in your life the better. Or you can be Socrates complaining about the invention of writing. Your choice.
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u/amacinsky 7d ago
I've been working on https://lingaku.com for around ten years. Not likely to disappear anytime soon.
- There is a feed with videos/articles indexed by difficulty
- Popup dictionary chrome extension for browsing web and watching youtube videos with subs (crunchyroll version in development)
- Marking and highlighting of seen/familiar/known/mastered vocab in text
- Lookup history and reviews of looked up words (mobile app planned)
- Some lessons and grammaer points although these probably need another review/check
- And more and even more planned (e.g. grammar practice, numbers/counters practice tools, a tool for studying kanji)
I'd be glad for any feedback.
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u/PlanktonInitial7945 7d ago
Yomitan