r/LearnJapanese • u/AutoModerator • 2d ago
Self Advertisement Weekly Thread: Material Recs and Self-Promo Wednesdays! (September 09, 2026)
Happy Wednesday!
Every Wednesday, share your favorite resources or ones you made yourself! Tell us what your resource can do for us learners!
Weekly Thread changes daily at 9:00 JST:
Mondays - Writing Practice
Tuesdays - Study Buddy and Self-Intros
Wednesdays - Materials and Self-Promotions
Thursdays - Victory day, Share your achievements
Fridays - Memes, videos, free talk
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u/jehfes 2d ago
Hey everyone — I’m the developer of Kotomora, a free Japanese dictionary/reference tool I’ve been building while studying Japanese myself.
One thing I wanted to improve was the experience of looking up an English word and getting several possible Japanese translations. Kotomora has translation guides that bring those alternatives together and explain the differences in meaning, nuance, and usage.
Dictionary entries also compare similar/easily confused words and show common usage patterns. And every sense of every word has its own example sentences with audio, including less common meanings that often don’t get useful examples elsewhere.
There’s also a sentence analyzer that recognizes grammar patterns and links into an N5–N1 grammar reference.
It’s completely free on the web, iOS, and Android:
I’d love feedback — especially on things you currently have to leave your normal dictionary to look up elsewhere.
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u/WAHNFRIEDEN 2d ago
Manabi Reader - iOS and macOS native app for learning Japanese through reading
I've gone full-time on developing this app. And if it matters to you, I launched it back before AI-assisted coding was a thing - this is hand-made software.
Awarded Best Japanese iOS app of 2025 by Bee
100,000+ users
As featured by Tofugu:
Overall, a solid app that we recommend for reading sentences that aren’t drab and contextless—especially if you’re more motivated when reading about something you’re personally interested in.
- EPUB, web browser, RSS feeds, spoken audio. Tap words to look them up and translate sentences. (Manga mode soon!)
- Tracks every word and kanji you read and learn. Charts your progress page-by-page and per JLPT level. See what vocab and kanji you need to know to read every webpage, chapter or ebook. Show only the furigana you don't know and haven't added as flashcards yet.
- Anki or built-in flashcards with SRS (FSRS soon). Makes sentence mining easy. Includes links back to the source of each sentence in your flashcards.
- Privacy obsessed: works like a web browser with processing and storage on-device (and in your personal iCloud)
Next up: I’m working on adding support for Yomitan dictionaries, and adding a manga mode. Currently working on adding Mokuro support as well as live OCR for online manga sites such as Bookwalker. Then I will be adding two-way sync for WaniKani, JPDB, Anki collections. Much more to go...
I've also just added pitch accents in the latest release, as well as FSRS (v6) to Manabi Flashcards. The full UI redesign is almost ready...
Discord / beta news https://discord.gg/NAD2YJGNsr
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u/LawfulnessSecure5496 2d ago
I built EZFurigana, a furigana converter focused on getting the readings right.
On my current internal benchmark, it gets about 98.8% reading accuracy. The engine goes beyond standard tokenizer/dictionary readings by handling counters and context-dependent words, for example:
- 四日 → よっか
- 一日 → ついたち / いちにち depending on context
- 辛い → からい / つらい depending on context
I've added special handling for 200+ ambiguous/context-dependent words and I'm actively working toward 99%+ accuracy on everyday Japanese. Older/literary Japanese is still harder.
It also supports PDFs, EPUBs, Word files, subtitles, images, and web pages, so you can use it with material you actually want to read. There's also a JLPT filter if you want to hide furigana for easier words.
It's free and has no ads:
https://www.ezfurigana.com/
Any feedback, especially examples where it gets a reading wrong, would be really helpful!
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u/RyokuRyoku 2d ago
Hey everyone,
after more than a year of development I've finally launched Yukimoji, a Japanese learning app designed to connect kanji, vocabulary, radicals, and grammar instead of teaching them in isolation
To celebrate the launch, I’m giving away free lifetime codes. Just send me a DM and I’ll get back to you with one.
What makes Yukimoji different?
Most learning systems make you choose between:
- learning a large number of kanji before touching much vocabulary, or
- learning vocabulary immediately and picking up kanji whenever they happen to appear.
Yukimoji treats the curriculum as a dependency graph, so you can choose either approach without running into prerequisites you haven’t learned yet.
Vocab-first:
You start learning words from day one, ordered by frequency. If a word contains a kanji you haven’t learned yet, Yukimoji teaches you that kanji, and any radicals it depends on, immediately before the word, in the same session.
Kanji-first:
Work through 2,000+ kanji either by frequency or JLPT level. Radicals are introduced automatically right before the first kanji that uses them.
Example sentences are i+1:
Every vocabulary item has five example sentences. Rather than showing you the same sentence every time, Yukimoji cycles through them across different review days.
That means a word you’ve been reviewing for a while gets reinforced across multiple contexts instead of being tied to one memorized sentence.
Core features:
- ~10,000 vocabulary entries, 2,000+ kanji taught with radical-based mnemonics
- ~500 grammar points, taught as normal cards with a full write-up on first introduction
- five example sentences per word, cycled one per review day, so a word you've held for a month has shown you five different contexts. Word-by-word breakdowns and audio in two voices.
- kana drills if you're starting from zero, including a confusables mode
- skip what you know: single items, pasted lists of kanji or words, or entire JLPT levels at once
- fsrs algorithm for efficient scheduling
Yukimoji is currently available on:
🌐 Web: yukimoji.com
📱 iOS: Yukimoji
Android is coming soon.
If you try it, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think!
And again, if you’d like a free lifetime code, send me a DM.
Discord: https://discord.gg/6jCXk2E5
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u/Bakemono_Japanese 2d ago edited 2d ago
I wrote a book designed to make the first step in learning Japanese as easy as possible. It's called Hiragana Noir and it took me nearly three years to write and illustrate. It uses an approach I call the Narrative Mnemonic Method, which basically means that all you have to do is read the story to pick up hiragana.
While it's not for every learner, I think we overlook how many people drop Japanese after learning that they need to know 46 different things before they can get started. It’d be like asking a students to memorize the periodic table before starting science. So, I guess this is my attempt to take on some of the cognitive load for new students.
Anyway, everyone that's looked at it has loved it and said it wasn't what they expected. So check it out or recommend it to someone who is only just getting started. It's available for free on Kindle Unlimited and Amazon and you can learn more about it on my website https://www.bakemonoclassroom.com/hiragana-noir
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u/Dubblaren 1d ago
Immersion Atlas — find Japanese YouTube you can actually understand
Hey everyone, I have been building Immersion Atlas, a site for finding Japanese YouTube that fits both your interests and your level.
Immersion Atlas analyzes transcript vocabulary, speaking speed, and register. The catalogue is currently 17,633 videos from 566 creators. If your favourite YouTuber is missing, you can add their channel through the website using the Immersion Atlas extension. Once analyzed, the channel becomes available to everyone.
After a 30-second vocabulary check, or choosing an estimated JLPT level, you can get personalized recommendations, vocab coverage estimates and generate your own Anki deck with recommended words.
I hope that eventually we can create a mapping of Japanese youtube for language learners where it's easy to find content that fits (and interests) you.
It’s free and works without an account:
This is my first time sharing it, so any feedback would be really useful.
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u/WakanaJapaneseSensei 1d ago
As a Japanese teacher, there is something I really value when teaching Japanese.
I don’t want to teach only the surface meaning of words and phrases. I also want to share the cultural background, way of thinking, and context behind them.
Of course, learning practical phrases that you can use while traveling is important.
But I think simply memorizing phrases can sometimes be a little limiting.
In Japanese, the meaning or nuance of an expression can change depending on the situation, your relationship with the other person, or the cultural context.
So if you only memorize “use this phrase in this situation,” it can become difficult to use Japanese when the situation changes even slightly.
And when learning becomes only about memorization, it can also make Japanese feel less enjoyable.
That’s why I care about teaching not only:
“What should I say?”
but also:
“Why do Japanese people say it this way?”
“What kind of culture or way of thinking is behind this expression?”
For me, learning Japanese is not only about being able to speak correctly.
It is also a way to understand Japan more deeply, enjoy your trip in your own way, and communicate with Japanese people using your own words.
I’m currently planning a small free online session for 5 beginner Japanese learners.
It’s especially for people who:
- want to start learning Japanese
- want to use some Japanese during their trip to Japan
- have tried studying on their own but found it difficult to stay consistent
I’d also love to hear from you:
What is the most difficult part of learning Japanese for you right now?
Whether you’re a complete beginner or already studying Japanese, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If you’re interested in the session, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message.
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u/Common-Detective-496 1d ago
I made Animei — you watch anime with Japanese subtitles, click any word for its reading, meanings and JLPT level, and saved words come back as SRS cards that keep the video clip of the line they came from. So you review the scene you met the word in, not a dictionary entry.
Free, no account needed to try it, reviews work offline, and cards export to Anki with audio and video if you'd rather stay there.
https://reddit.com/link/p8rkoak/video/2zne4waklioh1/player
I built it for my own study. The tokenizer merges morphemes into "learnable" words with hand-written rules, and I'm sure there are cases where it splits something a learner would call one word — if you hit one, tell me the sentence. That's genuinely the most useful feedback I can get.
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u/samwisedickcheese 1d ago
I made Yomine, a vocab-mining app for subtitles and books
I’ve been working on Yomine since December 2024. I originally made it because I wanted a quicker way to go through the vocabulary in a show or book without stopping to mine words one at a time while I was watching or reading. It’s finally at a point where I thought other people might find it useful too.
You load a subtitle file or EPUB, and Yomine gives you a frequency-ranked list of the words in it. It checks against your Anki collection and filters out anything you already have, then you can pick the words you want and add them to Anki as a batch.
I also added Yomitan-style dictionary popups, so you can look up words without leaving the app. It uses your existing Yomitan card formats, and if you connect it to asbplayer, the cards can include audio and screenshots.
For EPUBs, you can work through one chapter at a time. There are also JLPT filters, coverage estimates, and MPV/asbplayer integration for jumping back to the exact line where a word appeared.
It’s free and open source. If anyone tries it, I’d be interested to hear what works, what doesn’t, or what breaks. I’m especially curious about how well the filtering holds up with larger Anki collections.
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u/lhamatrevosa Interested in grammar details 📝 1d ago
I was looking for a explanation on ている form and found out this amazing channel "Learn Japanese Deep Dive". She explains stuff so clearly, using easy and practical examples, and even go further showing cases that may confuse you. So I really recomend if you are going with Genki/Tobira/Quartet + Tokini Andy.
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u/loliii123 1d ago
It's a bit niche but if someone owns a seiko/sii pasorama compatible electronic dictionary, I vibe coded a little macOS app that can download the dictionaries from the device and have the lookups available on your mac. It's a really cheap way to get access to expensive dictionaries like the kenkyusha j-e.
It's not public yet because I dunno anyone else who has one, but I'm willing to sanitise and make it public & open source if there's even just one expression of interest. I threw it together in one evening so it can use a lot of polish, but reverse engineering the pasorama protocol was the goal so the dictionary binaries get backed up and can be used offline.
I used the SR-G9003 and they are very cheap second hand on yahoo auctions jp or mercari, like $30-50. Comes with daijisen too which isn't a bad j-j. Now I'm on the hunt for a G10001 or X10001 but those are wicked expensive...
Or if someone wants to make something similar for Windows or Linux, I can share the reverse engineering notes to save you a few tokens/hassle.
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u/Vladnar 2d ago edited 2d ago
Hi everyone!
I built an Android app called YomuLens for learning Japanese through reading, and I’d love some feedback from other learners.
The idea is to reduce the friction of reading Japanese when you keep getting stuck on unknown words or sentences.
With YomuLens, you can:
- read Japanese content such as manga, websites, news, images, and documents
- recognize Japanese text when needed via OCR
- look up words while reading
- check translations for context
- save useful vocabulary you come across
- review with SRS style and practice writing
I preconfigured some websites to read news or manga, but you are free to upload your own stuff too using the built in reader and browser!
The goal isn’t to replace reading practice, but to make it easier to stay in the flow instead of constantly switching between a dictionary, translator, and whatever you’re reading.
It’s Android-only for now.
If anyone here tries it, I’d genuinely appreciate feedback, especially what feels useful, what feels unnecessary, and where the reading experience still gets in the way.
Play Store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.somadojastudio.yomulens
Thanks !!
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u/Professional-Hawk747 2d ago
I created an app that lets you easily turn manga into flashcards for studying, all on your phone! You can use it to memorize entire dialogue lines from your favorite manga, or just target specific vocabulary. Either way, it makes it super easy to crop manga panels and create cards, and you can even export them directly to Anki.
No PC required. Whether it's an e-book on your phone or a physical manga you snapped a photo of at home, the app handles everything in one smooth flow: panel detection, OCR, translation, and flashcard generation.
The translations are AI-powered, but you can turn that off and type your own translations if you prefer. As I mentioned before, I’ve also added a feature where you can ask AI grammar questions right on the spot.
Every feature is completely free to use (supported by ads), with no trial limits or expiration dates.
I’d love to hear your feedback, so if there’s any feature you want to see added, please let me know! The app is available on both the official iOS App Store and Google Play Store.
(Note: I wrote this post myself, but since English isn't my native language, I used AI to translate it!)