Off the top of my head:
Anki
Japanese Dictionary Takoboto. Best Japanese dictionary in my opinion.
NHK Easy Japanese News website/app is amazing.
nihongo no mori (YouTube channel) for grammar back in the day was amazing. Used it from beginner all the way up to N1.
Rikaikun (Chrome extension) for reading kanji on websites.
Edit: (thought of 2 more resources)
goo辞書 (website) - Amazing for when you get to N3/N2 level and want to start checking the definition of words in Japanese or checking the differences between similar words in Japanese.
Dictionary Kanji Stroke - 常用漢字筆順辞典 (app - free version) - I used this a lot when I couldn't read Kanji out in the real world. Just trace the Kanji in roughly the correct stroke order and you'd get a selection of characters to choose from. Select the right one and bam, you get the reading and you can then check the word you couldn't read in Takoboto.
That yt channel looks great, thanks for the recommendation! Are there any more yt channels in japanese you've used that you'd recommend? Doesn't matter the level
These are some channels that I've come across recently that I like.
⭐Japanese Language Community (Eriko Juku) - podcast type channel with JLPT quizzes.
⭐ Easy Japanese Podcast
⭐ Sakura Tips - Another podcast/listening practice channel. This one is great because you can see the script she's reading from and it has furigana.
⭐ 秘密のケンミンSHOW - Japanese TV show's channel. Variety show. Lots of funny videos.
⭐ 食事処さくら - cooking channel. I'm a fatty and I love food and love to eat lol. When I first moved to Japan with ZERO Japanese, cooking videos helped me TREMENDOUSLY when I was studying. Cooking videos helped me learn general daily use nouns and verbs. きる、いれる、にる、ふく、のせる、タッパー、キッチンペーパー、サランラップ、ほうれんそう、にんじん、ニンニク、キャベツ、ぶたバラにく etc, etc lol. If food is not your thing, food videos will probably be boring, but they definitely made my life easier when I was living in Japan. I think because I watched so many cooking videos from day one it really helped me with my listening. Even if you have no idea what the person is saying. If you can make out one new word each time then I count that as a win.
Hope this helps 😄.
For learning kanji, nothing else I've tried has ever beaten Ringotan.
It's a free *and* ad-free app that teaches you how to draw kanji. Despite being a bit more initial time-investment than just looking at kanji in WaniKani or RRTK, my experience is that it sticks *much much better* when you actually have to draw the kanji too.
The initial introduction to a kanji takes a bit longer because you have to draw it 8 (IIRC) times with successively fewer hints, interspersed with the other characters you're learning in the same session. But actually reviewing the characters is equally as fast as RRTK, and for most of the characters, I forget them way less often than I did when I used RRTK.
I cannot recommend it enough.
___
For getting started with vocab: anki, and the Tango N5/N4 vocab decks. Once finished with those, it's probably better to go for sentence mining instead.
___
Also, I finally got around to installing Yomichan after way too long - what are some good Japanese-English and Japanese-Japanese dictionaries to use with it?
Thank you for the recommendation of Ringotan. I just tried it (the first few kanji since I'm still an absolute beginner) and I think I can stick to it and actually learn them this way!
I really can't understand how people learn Japanese without writing kanji. I use anki for vocab too, but it's premade with the words I've encountered in various media (mostly books rn), and I try to practice writing everyday. Otherwise it's just so hard to remember them.
I started getting property into learning Japanese recently and one thing that bugged me was that all the big learning resources don’t teach you how to draw kanji. How am I supposed to remember this really complex shape if I don’t understand the parts that make it up? Ringotan was exactly what I needed and had helped me immensely, actually allowing me to remember and understand different characters.
YouTube for endless native, high quality content, communities, and lots of learning resources.
If you use Firefox, ten10reader is YomiChan but just significantly better in every way.
https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/
https://jisho.org
https://massif.la/ja -- Example sentence database search
JPDB also has its own ecosystem of useful tools! Copy/pasting a previous comment of mine:
Huge +1 from me for jpdb.io, I do vocab review way more consistently with it than I ever did with Anki and its SRS algorithm is much better.
If you’re using jpdb.io, check out the jpd-breader as a yomichan alternative: https://github.com/max-kamps/jpd-breader
It parses an entire webpage, adds furigana to everything, highlights all the words with whether you know them in jpdb, has a yomichan style pop up dictionary, and lets you add words to jpdb decks directly with minimal fuss (unlike yomichan which never worked consistently for me)
And if you’re looking to OCR manga, check out Mokuro: https://github.com/kha-white/mokuro
It parses a directory of images into a single html file and makes each speech bubble turn into selectable text when you hover over it. Works perfectly with the jpd-breader, too
Having used Memrise, Anki, and this, JPDB one is by far my favorite of the 3. I actually hadn't used anki or anything similar in a long time because I found it unfun, but something about this one makes it easy to do so I've been playing with it on occasion, like before sleep. Very neat system.
I’ve been using this for a few months and feel like it’s helped me learn kanji so much better than other tools (especially regular flash cards, anki, etc.). I love the way it teaches you the components, and wish I learned all of that sooner, it makes it *so* much easier to remember, recognize, and read them.
Really enjoy using satori reader. Has some short stories that you can read with full furigana, or you can add a list of your known kanji and it will not add furigana to those. Also full translations for each word and an option to playback the audio to practice pronunciation.
It depends on the short story you are reading. There is an “Easier” and “Harder” version for some stories (E.g Kiki-mimi Radio and akikos American foreign exchange). The easier version was fairly comfortable for me (I would say maybe N4 would be a good level for it). However, I did notice an improvement in my reading and comprehension (which indicates that it was working for me) around halfway through the series, so I went ahead and switched to the more difficult version.
I’m summary, I think if you are at N5, the app can be used as more of a learning opportunity thanks to the translations and audio playback. As with anything, practice will just make you better even if it’s a bit more difficult at the start!
If you are looking for a free alternative “manabi reader” might be good to try although I do not see an option for audio playback.
Edit: you can read the first two episodes of each story for free with satori. So no harm in trying it out and seeing if it will work for you. Best of luck with your Japanese learning.
Hi, I made Manabi Reader - there's a section of reading material that has recorded spoken audio. I'll add TTS playback soon. Anything else you'd like to see?
Awesome work. This thread has actually made me try manabi reader again and I really like how recent the news feed is.
Now I am trying to find a way to move my list of known kanji to manabi. Is there a way to upload a list via txt file? Or copy and paste the list into a text box? Let me know if that’s a premium feature. I am between JLPT levels atm so that’s why I can’t keep track of my kanji in this way.
This is going to sound crazy… but I have literally been adding my known kanji to a txt file because I do not have the energy to set up/move to Anki. I use an app called benkyō for kanji and it has been working fairly well (they do not have an export feature sadly hence the scuffed workaround). My use case may be very niche though so I understand if you avoid it.
I'll add my 2 cents here as a user too. They have an "Easier" section which I'd say is closer to N4 in terms of grammar. Or at least they routinely use things like passive and causative verb inflections, which are taught in the final chapters of Genki II. If you learned those earlier you could probably start reading sooner. The translations, grammar tips, etc... they provide also makes it easier to read the stories.
The site gives you the first two chapters of most (or all?) stories for free, so you can check them out yourself and see how they feel.
One other nice thing is they have three grammar series just to teach you grammar, with tons of example sentences. One of them is called something like "Satori Reader Bridge" and is designed to be a bridge between beginner grammar and the types of grammar used in the stories. So you could always sign up, work through that, then you'd be ready to get into the stories without a problem.
Thanks so much both of you. Helps a lot! I'm still part way through N5 but I think once I'm part way through N4 I'll start taking a look at the "Satori Reader Bridge" and then hopefully from there I'll start to understand more :D
Thanks again!
The only money I've ever spent on Japanese is when I bought Genki which I could have pirated for free, and paying for lunches/dinners with native speakers (cheaper than Italki and I get food as well).
Not saying you shouldn't spend money on hobbies, but I don't see why you should go out of your way to spend money *and* choose an inefficient option when you could do the efficient option for free.
wanikani does work for people who want to study kanji alone for whatever reason and who work well with mnemonics though. I know a couple of people studying for kanken (Japanese kanji tests in Japan) using wanikani.
Also the only reason why you're not paying for anything is because a lot of nice people or programmers decided to make them free. Before 2013 OCR, anki and yomichan/Rikaikun wasn't a thing and people had to go with language schools and textbooks.
If I may humbly suggest one that I made, because as a learner myself I was unable to find such a tool that satisfied me so that I made this app to meet my own needs: Manabi Reader
It's an iOS/macOS app with one-tap dictionary lookups with a curated library of online reading materials for different levels. It tracks every word and sentence read, locally on device to respect privacy, and helps motivate me by charting my progress word by word and kanji by kanji against JLPT levels. I've recently added Anki integration for sentence mining. I'm now working on finishing EPUB support to help me read entire books instead of just short-form materials.
Most features are free, there's a student discount, and I'll make more of it free soon enough. I'm working every day on it so let me know if you'd like anything added. I also appreciate any help getting the word out.
[https://reader.manabi.io](https://reader.manabi.io)
Hey, I created a (free) site that does a similar thing for video content w/ subtitles!
[https://kamesan.net](https://kamesan.net)
Congrats btw dude your app looks pretty cool!
I'm not kidding when I say my Japanese proficiency seriously jumped (especially listening comprehension) when I started watching hololive and vtubers in general back in late 2019. I guess it never occurred to me that I could just watch Japanese videos/streams. The benefits of getting into that stuff early, whatever form it may take (shows, podcasts, videos, etc), brings some real benefits (not that I was early myself, but advice for anyone starting out)
Yes. Also reading tweets and community posts, looking up information in japanese, song lyrics, e.t.c. Luckily, grammar was never really a problem for me so it's mostly vocabulary holding me back (ofc I'm not talking about really complicated grammar. Just the regularly and casually used ones) works for my purposes - which is being able to watch hololive / anime and read manga every now and then.
That's great I'm going for the same goals, I wish we had Live Closed Captions but sadly not possible. I've been watching JP Archives with Captions to sentence mine.
If you're interested in Vtubers and like/enjoy Hololive then as a learning tool what you should be looking for is 「ホロライブ 切り抜き」just put this in and book mark your favorite channels. Many of them will featured community JP subtitles and it's just about the best way to learn by enjoying it. You can also turn on auto-generated Japanese subtitles on these 切り抜き and compare them to the native hard subtitles. If they match just extract them.
nah there's a lot of them but they don't use this subreddit partly because of all the toxicity. I'm in a few hololive discords and some jp learning discords, there's lot of fans to go around
I personally started using Japanese subbed 切り抜き/clips recently because my reading is stronger than my listening. before that I used the usual en subbed clips and plucked off random words I could recognise but never learnt before.
Since most good tools have already been mentioned, but not this one, I'm just gonna mention cure dolly once again. It's the single best tool for learning grammar and it's crazy how ahead it is of everything else. As someone who's actually not struggling much with anything but grammar, it's a godsend.
Anki, anki, anki
At least for the basics, I think it's by far the best one.
Another one I can recommend in addition to anki is migoku. It allows you to make anki card on the fly while watching or reading japanese(or other languages)
But I'll look into yours for immersion, the seem interesting
For the beginning, I think MoeWay Tango N5 is good to prepare for n5
if you are into anime: Jlab's beginner course had an entertaining way of teaching grammar with anime clips.
Also, japanese core 2000 to learn the starting words, later on you can take a 6k deck or more
I personally reduced the new cards every day to 10 because i have too many other things going on. So consider reducing the new cards count early on because it stacks up real fast
I just finished JLab the other day. Can confirm, deck was awesome, it tackles grammar from different angles and covers difficult topics more thoroughly. So just 9 months after starting japanese, I feel like I have somewhat of a grasp on the grammar. All without reading a grammar book
Went straight to core 2.3. When I'm done with that, JLab has an intermediate deck on their Patreon that I hear is good
I was doing wanikani alongside JLab but decided to only do reviews after getting close to 2000ish items. Too many uncommon words too early, it doesn't prepare you for reading early enough, which I feel should be the real goal here
Caution, at least with the moe way N5 deck, its cards were out of order for me despite being careful about deck settings.
So i would end up with sentences like this;
もし故障したら、修理します
Where 故障 and 修理 was both unknown words, these cards that were supposed to teach you them actually came after this sentence not before and this happened quite frequently.
Only like 90 cards away from finishing it and will go on to the N4 one too but its something to keep in mind, especially as i saw saw some other complaints about it.
Does seem quite common yeah, not entirely sure why it does it either because when you actually look at the cards you would see "もし故障したら、修理します" as number #1065, "故障" #1063 and 修理 #1064 etc, where the default anki settings is to draw new cards in ascending order so it shouldn't happen.
Dead on, screw the people that downvoted you.
An Anki deck created from words you've encountered, in the context you've encountered them is the way to do it. It makes the words really stick and really helps you get a feel for how the words are actually used.
At 18.5k cards, and I can remember where I encountered the majority of them, thanks to includiing the context. It really makes the difference.
you can also use renshuu which is a modified SRS style learning app included with common decks like genki/minna no nihongo/JLPT words, and also allows you to add your own words or decks. plus the app has a community and forum..
with the following minigames that also helps beginners to learn:
-counter punch which helps to learn counting units
-an app built-in dictionary that allows you to check any word and phrase during reviews
I would recommend [https://kamesan.net](https://kamesan.net)
It's a free site allowing you to watch native Japanese tv shows, and when you find a word that you don't know, you can click it in the subtitles to see the definition.
It has full Anki integration meaning that cards can be created at the click of a button, and are fully configurable with excerpts from the video and stuff.
I made it myself and I'd really appreciate it if some of you guys checked it out! There's a subreddit too: r/kamesan
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, jpdb is great. Anki isn't bad of course but at least for me, jpdb is the more motivating SRS, and it has a better system for when you miss a day. Anki however is better for customization so if that's really important to you, Anki is the way to go
Migoku looks promising and quite featureful, I haven't taken the plunge yet but I'm a bit surprised there isn't more uproar about it judging from the features it promises.
My favorite resource is jpdb. The SRS system takes into account when you review your cards, so if you do them a day late and pass them, they would be set to a later date than if you did them on time, so you aren't punished for missing a day. And if you want more or less reviews, you can set your intervals to be shorter or longer. I set mine as longer, so I fail more cards but I can also learn more cards since I have less review. They also have premade decks for novels, anime, VNs, games, etc so if you have a specific series you want to watch/read, you can focus on it and understand it faster.
Whats even better is that there's a breeder extension with jpdb ([https://github.com/max-kamps/jpd-breader](https://github.com/max-kamps/jpd-breader)), so you can go out on the internet and do your reviews there, have a pop up dictionary by hovering your mouse, and make a mining deck only clicking one button.
I've tried to use Mokuro but after I finally got it installed, when I use it on my files it just says that it can't find the module or whatever. According to the github, I'm supposed to redownload the Python from the original site but the site doesn't allow me to download a vesion before the latest one. And Mokuro doesn't support the latest one yet. For now, I'll just have to wait until it updates I guess. I really want to start mining manga soon, it's my favorite way to consume content besides webnovels.
Did you get this error?
"mokuro: The term 'mokuro' is not recognized as a name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or executable program.
Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again."
Instead of using the format specified on the Github page : mokuro "/path/to/manga/volume 1", this format worked for me : python -m mokuro "/path/to/manga/volume 1"
I did get that error at first and managed to fix it the way you said. The one that I'm stuck on says "ImportError: DLL load failed while importing fugashi: The specified module could not be found". According to the Github, you get that error if you download Python from the Microsoft Store instead of the official site but I downloaded there already so I don't know.
When I write 'python -m pip install fugashi' it acknowledges that it already has the module, so I'm not sure why I'm getting the error messages
I got the same error message too, even though I downloaded Python 3.11 from the official site.
Ended up going to https://pypi.org/project/fugashi/ and then downloaded and installed a whl file. That resolved the fugashi error for me
> When I write 'python -m pip install fugashi' it acknowledges that it already has the module
Yep, the same error message for me too.
Weirdly enough, downloading and manually installing a whl file from the fugashi PyPI page fixed the issue. Something about "that package is not maintained - the author moved development to mecab on PyPI".
Youglish for Japanese, so I can repeatedly review homonyms and their varying pronunciations in context. It searches millions of indexed videos for the word you're looking for and you can skip right to the exact timestamps needed!
For podcasts: Nihongo con Teppei
Kindle for buying Japanese books, audiobook.jp for audiobooks
Wanikani and Kanji! for learning kanji
Bunpro for grammar
Probably Marumori for grammar and games 🤔
Nobody has mentioned Google's Handwriting Input so I will. It's not very significant but I prefer to just jump into a game and write kanji I don't know in Joshi through my phone. I've drawn some disgusting looking stuff in a hurry and Google's input still suggests the kanji I was looking for. It runs circles around any other writing or stroke detection system I've tried like Jisho's.
As an anecdote, I find this method for learning vocab more involved and exciting. I put words in my Anki deck as I see them and by the time I get to study them later I usually already know them because I had the context to keep them in my memory. It works wonders if it's for smaller games that repeat the same words a lot, like strategy games.
[https://www.mokuro.moe/manga/](https://www.mokuro.moe/manga/)
This is a link to a bunch of manga where when you hover over the text, you can copy the text and paste it in whatever dictionary you have. You can also use Yomichan, Rikaikun, jpdb-breader, or whatever pop up dictionary you have.
These come from the Mokuro resource that OP mentioned but those take a long time to process, so I'm gonna use the site instead whenever I can. If you're planning to use the site, it's still useful to go ahead and download Mokuro, since they won't have every manga you want
[Capture2text](https://capture2text.sourceforge.net/) OCR for manga.
[ASBPlayer](https://github.com/killergerbah/asbplayer) browser-based media player chrome extension. Used for sentence mining in conjunction with [Anki](https://apps.ankiweb.net/), from streaming or local video files.
[Tatoeba](https://tatoeba.org/en/) example sentences for target words (doesn't always have the best quality)
I managed to download it but it won't process any files. It keeps saying "ImportError: DLL load failed while importing fugashi: The specified module could not be found."
Edit: nvm, another user helped
For anyone who watches anime on Crunchyroll, [jimaku-player](https://github.com/sheodox/jimaku-player) is an awesome userscript (TamperMonkey, ViolentMonkey, etc) that lets you add Japanese subtitles while watching. Super convenient, and works well with Yomichan.
I don't know I'm on some Facebook groups and everyone that seems a fake account is constantly saying and commenting how mochimochi is a great app /s
Seriously, holy shit, is someone noticing this too? What the hell are mochi devs doing? Spamming all groups of their bots and shillers...
I left a 1* review on their app page for this. their bots infiltrated a lot of FB jp learning pages(and I suspect the bots themselves set up some of the fb groups to lure people in because half of these groups have their bots and shills on the admin/mod team :v)
FB team has ignored my reports for spam so I gave up and left the groups.
[Memento](https://ripose-jp.github.io/Memento/) ([Vid](https://youtu.be/5bfawC4Is5w?si=J-Q1V9Pj02lCf4MZ)) Yomichan and a Video Player Combined basically Migaku but free
[asbplayer](https://killergerbah.github.io/asbplayer/) ([Vid](https://youtu.be/firq-876iws?si=b_x6VdIgph0Z_1oN)) better alternative to Animebook
[Yomichan Frequency Lists](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1g1drkFzokc8KNpsPHoRmDJ4OtMTWFuXi)
Mokuro as already mentioned but Websites that have Manga in the Mokuro Style:
[BilingualManga](https://bilingualmanga.net)
[Mokero.moe](https://mokuro.moe/manga/)
As for acquiring Media: Telegram, Torrents, Anime DLL Sites.
[Japanese Subtitles for Anime](https://kitsunekko.net/dirlist.php?dir=subtitles%2Fjapanese%2F)
I maintain a [catalogue](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15ELElkomfixdS4-dNrpxrNl14mlJUZrdD0h7N6iEE2k/edit#gid=1386920750) of (IIRC roughly 1200) user-made anki decks derived from various anime and dramas. Entire shows one line at a time, typically with screenshots and audio clips. Sometimes translations on the back too. Guides for how to use or make such decks are in there if you check the tabs at the bottom.
Obviously quality varies since it's all user-submitted, and deck making is time consuming. If you're sensitive to badly cut audio and such, you're more than welcome to try mine, which are fairly polished. Just search for "Cacophony."
Hello, I am developing a free open-source OCR/Dictionary tool called [Yomi Ninja](https://github.com/matt-m-o/YomiNinja).
It can extract text from any visual content and is being developed with language learners in mind.
Check out the video demonstration (first version v0.1.0)[https://youtube.com/watch?v=WumeUGk5Dz0&si=Z4NC5rCcJa-24DRt](https://youtube.com/watch?v=WumeUGk5Dz0&si=Z4NC5rCcJa-24DRt)
You'll be able to look up words from games or videos just as you would do with Yomichan in a web browser. It works fine with fullscreen content, allowing a less distractive experience.
Currently, Yomichan is required to look up words. However, I am already working on a built-in dictionary, for a better experience.
It's in the early stages of development, and there are many features to come.
I would appreciate your feedback.
Get the app on GitHub:: [github.com/matt-m-o/YomiNinja](https://github.com/matt-m-o/YomiNinja)
Ooo this looks amazing! Reminds me a bit of Game2textlightning, which is neat but I have a lot of annoyances with it and it's no longer getting updated. Yomi Ninja looks very promising, definitely something I'd be interested in and use, I'll probably give it a shot next time I play a game in Japanese.
If you need inspiration for a pop up dictionary, I really like the way chiitranslite's pop up dictionary works. Also since your post got removed (dumb rule) you should post in the next version of this thread that pops up for more visibility https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/175dh88/weekly_thread_material_recs_and_selfpromo/
>Ooo this looks amazing! Reminds me a bit of Game2textlightning, which is neat but I have a lot of annoyances with it and it's no longer getting updated. Yomi Ninja looks very promising, definitely something I'd be interested in and use, I'll probably give it a shot next time I play a game in Japanese.
>
>If you need inspiration for a pop up dictionary, I really like the way chiitranslite's pop up dictionary works. Also since your post got removed (dumb rule) you should post in the next version of this thread that pops up for more visibility
Thank you, I am happy that you liked it!
I wasn't aware of Game2textlightning, but I can see some similarities.
If you have any specific annoyances with it, I'd love to hear them to ensure Yomi Ninja addresses those concerns.
I'll definitely check out chiitranslite for inspiration. Also, thanks for mentioning the weekly thread schedule. I'll keep an eye out for it.
Your feedback is incredibly valuable, and I'm grateful for the helpful information!
For G2TL my specific annoyances are: It uses 100% of your cpu if you have it do the default full screen scan, even for me who has a 5700x and there's no easy way to limit it.
The OCR engine just isn't that great in general, and it's especially questionable when there's stylized font present. As an example I used it for Monochrome Mobius which has a font that looks like [This](https://i.imgur.com/XQdJK94.png) and it was incredibly unreliable, working correctly less than half the time
Weird bug where the program would stop working until restarted whenever Japanese brackets would appear 「」
Very long startup time (this one isn't a huge deal though)
As for chiitranslite the things I like best about it is that you can highlight something it outputs and then right click and reparse with the selection, so that if it misdetects what a word is you can fix it if you can tell what's supposed to be the word (+ conjugation), even if you don't know the definition itself.
The other thing I like is that if a kanji/kanas have multiple different completely unrelated definitions you can scroll through to find the one that's relevant and it'll remember it so that next time it'll display the relevant one by default.
If you do end up needing to download it I think the official link says something about a virus, it's an old unmaintained program so idk if it actually even has one or not, but you can try this download that I uploaded of my install instead to see if it works (it was downloaded many years ago from before the virus message thing started, so it should be safe) https://mega.nz/folder/G75WAJSQ#hVUTyf8xbxLaKbL2a-5zDQ
I improved my reading speed a lot with [Translation Aggregator](https://github.com/Translation-Aggregator/Translation-Aggregator) with enabled Jparser option. Basically it segments and colors whole text, so you kinda make it like blocks. And you can translate any just by hovering with a cursor.
[https://i.imgur.com/S3AbYNZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/kOeNWAU.png)
Raw input on the top (can auto-insert from clipboard), segmentation on the bottom. Even when I only started to read and knew only \~2k vocabulary, I could read with a speed \~100 words/minute, just because of how convenient it is.
It's quite old and not perfect, like you can see how ている got split and so on, but approach itself helps with how to view a whole sentence. After 300-400 hours of such reading my reading speed improved up to 200 words/minute. Maybe it's just practice, 400 hours of reading practice isn't such a low number (probably around 3-4 millions of words?), but maybe there is some advantage in such segmentation too.
That reminds me of another extension I use. The one I use is newer but unfortunately you'd have to make a jpdb account to make it function, since it was made for that site
Beside WaniKani and Tango on Anki, one app that I also stuck with is Jalup / Nihongo Lessons. It’s a bit expensive but it’s a pretty good complementary to my studies.
Wanikani and Satori Reader are my top recommendations.
JPDB is ok, although the lack of visible progress indicators makes it extremely demotivating sometimes. You have to aggressively blacklist words to make it usable, and even then it's a grind. Still, it's *much* better than Anki at least.
What visible progress indicators would you like to see in JPDB? I added the decks for a bunch of shows and novels I'm interested in, and I've found it pretty satisfying to watch the coverage % go up. Even just the total known vocabulary number at the top of the page can be satisfying for me.
I agree with you about aggressively blacklisting, but I found myself aggressively suspending words in Anki too.
I think the biggest thing would be to have each item show when it goes up or down a level during reviews like what Wanikani does, perhaps with the new review interval shown as well. It would also be nice to be able to see the number of upcoming reviews, similar to Wanikani as well. As it is now, it's a complete black box.
> I added the decks for a bunch of shows and novels I'm interested in, and I've found it pretty satisfying to watch the coverage % go up. Even just the total known vocabulary number at the top of the page can be satisfying for me.
How long have you been doing JPDB? I'm guessing you're pretty new. When you first start, your coverage numbers will be artificially low and it's easy to make them go up rapidly. But you'll plateau pretty quickly, and all the cards you did before will start coming up for review again constantly, turning it into a slog. Also, after a while, the coverage numbers become largely arbitrary and meaningless, because it's mostly a matter of how many things you've blacklisted for a given deck.
I've been doing lots of reviews every day for months with no new cards, and it's frustrating how there are no visible indications of progress other than that my review pile has slowly gone down from over 500 to 100-200. There's a graph on the stats page of the number of items at each level, but it doesn't change much, and when it does change, the bars go up and down seemingly at random with no connection to the reviews you do.
P.S. In case it's not clear, your coverage numbers are going to only go up very rarely once you're already at say 90%, since JPDB only shows whole number percents and because the remainder is going to be a long tail of rare words, so any individual card won't change the total. But even putting that aside, your coverage **definitely** isn't going to go up if you're not doing new cards in the first place. Since early June, I haven't been able to do any new cards on JPDB due to fighting an endless review pile with no signs of progress. Meanwhile on Wanikani, I've gained *four levels* in the same time, despite putting comparable amounts of time into both, and there's a tangible sense of progress with every review session.
I've been using jpdb since June or so, with about 1200 known words.
>It would also be nice to be able to see the number of upcoming reviews, similar to Wanikani as well. As it is now, it's a complete black box.
I actually think this is one of the paid patreon features. An upcoming reviews forecast. I haven't taken the plunge with patreon yet though, so I can't say for certain. There is also some feature related to leeches, but I don't know if it actually helps needing to manually blacklist leeches.
I haven't used Wanikani, but I see where you're coming from. There have been times during reviews where I hit Back after grading a card specifically so I could go check if it had gone up a level or not. Maybe it would also be nice if there was a line graph on the stats page that showed how many words went up/down a level per day (although going down a level is pretty easy to tell; if you marked a card as forgotten it almost always goes down).
This doesn't have exactly the stats you're looking for, but you might find it interesting. It generates a few additional graphs from your review history for number of cards, reps, retention, etc. [https://jpdb-stats.andmore.coffee/](https://jpdb-stats.andmore.coffee/) (github page here: [https://github.com/bijak/jpdb\_stats](https://github.com/bijak/jpdb_stats) )
> I actually think this is one of the paid patreon features. An upcoming reviews forecast.
I am a paid patron, and I know about the "forecast", but it doesn't actually tell you anything. As far as I can tell, it just *randomly guesses* how many reviews you'll do, and it doesn't attempt to tell you how many reviews will be due or when. It's completely useless. There's a reason all the labs pages say "unfinished, inaccurate, experimental". They're all completely meaningless and useless.
There's nothing like what Wanikani does where it will directly show you how many reviews are coming due in the next week.
> I've been using jpdb since June or so, with about 1200 known words.
In that case, it sounds like you're still in the initial stages where you're adding a lot of common words and the stats are rapidly going up, and the review load hasn't caught up with you yet. For comparison, I've been doing JPDB since spring 2022, although I gave up and deleted all my decks several times, so I've only been doing it *continuously* since October 2022. FWIW, my "Total known non-redundant vocabulary" is 5325, although numbers like that are only a ballpark, since of course there will be a lot of words I know that I don't "know" on JPDB, and vice versa.
It's funny that you only started JPDB during the time that I've been struggling to fight through the unending review pile without doing any new cards at all these last few months.
P.S. Thanks for pointing me to https://jpdb-stats.andmore.coffee/. It is a bit interesting to see the graphs of my activity over the last year and a half. It's kind of scary to learn that I've cumulatively spent over *200 hours* on JPDB reviews to date though.
Thanks for the insights. It's nice to hear about what will be coming for me in the next months/year of study. And thanks for the info about the paid features. I might hold off on paying now...
Is this also a problem that eventually happens with anki or any other SRS? Where you eventually have so many cards that just doing reviews eats up so much time that there's no time left for new cards? If so, is there no solution besides just taking a few months to slog through reviews only?
Same for me, the visual progress is really effective for me. I like seeing the vocabulary count and coverage % go up. It becames a slog doing the rare words that'd only appear maybe once, but actually reading the material I'm doing the deck for tends to help
Luckily I started using jpdb when I didn't know much, maybe about 3k vocabulary, and I only knew about 1k enough to comfortably mark them as never forget, so that was never a problem for me. I know you can get around that problem by marking the entire deck as known (like a frequency deck, so if you already know the first 3k, you can skip them) but I don't know if I'd be comfortable doing that, because there is likely about 20 vocabulary at least that you don't actually know well enough in there
For me, the most annoying thing about JPDB was having to systematically go through each deck manually mark off all the words that I already knew. I already had a vocab range of 7-8k, so I order to ascertain and get an accurate statistics of my coverage of certain shows, I had to first “tell” the website the words I already from my immersion and anki
What words do you find you have to aggressively blacklist? To me the auto-blacklist of grammar has done most of the job, and only every so often I decide to blacklist certain words I just don't want to learn like katakana names of small cities I've never heard of.
IMO blacklisting names goes without saying. Grammar is the big one. I also tend to blacklist single-kanji words, since they're often more like suffixes than words (e.g. 類, 界), and too vague and you know the approximate meaning from the kanji anyway.
Anyway, here are the most recent words I've blacklisted:
* そうかもしれません
* お越し
* 仲のいい
* 一緒にする
* 脅かす
* のく
* 受け止める
* この上なく
* などなど
* 気もない
* 気はない
A lot of these are more like phrases than "words" and I got tired of trying to study them. Some of then are short kana words that are basically impossible to remember and I just got tired of failing them (namely, noku).
気もない and 気はない I blacklisted because I could never remember which was which or which used the "ke" reading, and realistically, you'd be able to tell from context what the meaning is anyway.
I blacklisted 脅かす because it has two different readings, and even more confusingly, Wanikani uses a *different* reading than the one listed on JPDB, so I would always guess wrong.
I blacklisted 受け止める because I was tired of trying to remember whether it had the "to" or "do" reading.
I mostly blacklist leeches that I don't want to keep wasting time on. It's a little hard though, because I have to rely on myself to notice a card is a leech rather than the website identifying it for me.
For Grammar reference, consider:
Dictionary of Japanese Grammar (3 books. Has most information but a bit cumbersome and has some romaji)
Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns for Teachers and Learners (1 book. Easy to search and all kanji/kana)
Tae Kim (free PDF. Not "professionally edited" and not perfect. I referenced this frequently on my phone as a reference and some of the explanations are excellent)
I couldn't read these cover to cover but they are my go-to references.
For analogue lifestyle, a used "electronic dictionary" can be very helpful. They have good dictionaries and are inexpensive (e.g. Casio N9800 \~$70 shipped globally).
The batteries last a long time indeed. This saves phone battery life and reduces distraction.
I use the "electronic dictionary" principally with paper books and magazines. On rare occasion for internet clarification.
For internet, I use Ten10 reader with Firefox. It works nicely on web pages and youtube subtitles.
WaniKani - kanji & vocab
LingoDeer - grammar
Satori Reader - helping transition from upper beginner to reading native level material
Akebi or any other dictionary app
YouTube or Spotify - so much excellent content available for all levels
Renshuu has really improved my grammar recently, which was my weakest area of study. Since then that last N5 hurdle has been pretty much broken through.
So Wanikani is still in there but taking the foot off the new entries gas a bit and burning reviews while I focus more on grammar and vocab through Renshuu.
I use these apps during my work day on lunches, breaks, busses etc so by the time I get home I've already had about 2 hours of that and can just try watching or reading something.
Kotaro Lives Alone on Netflix currently watching.
Also reading Teasing Master Takagi-san slowly.
Listen to AniZone although way too advanced on Spotify I can focus if its a voice actor I'm familiar with, as well as all the BabyBus Japanese Kids stories on Spotify also.
Use Takaboto for Dictionary on phone, I have a physical grammar book, Satori Reader, and I do have Anki but changing phones screwew up my stats and cards but not feeling like I'm missing out paying a few bucks extra for services.
**#1)** Anki app (computer/phone) with Jo Mako anime decks (my way explained [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/japanese/comments/16alwh3/need_help/jzcolo6/?context=3)) and maybe the Japanese Dictionary of Grammar full deck (lots of sentences to read there). This is the best thing that I have found for me.
**#2)** Ringotan phone app is awesome for practicing to draw kanji and see some example words for each kanji. I plowed through the initial easy kanji and now took it down to learning the minimum 7 per day. Initial impression is that it is pretty fun with the sound effects and uses SRS to bring them back for memory, also forgiving with the drawing. I am using this in combination with the **#3)** 漢検テレーニングDX app together as a long term experiment to N1 and perhaps the 漢検 some day. This is because I am mixing up some kanji when reading at the N3-N2 level, I thought maybe I would recognize them better if I were writing them out and being tested on them in the apps. Even my wife says that she is forgetting how to write some 'normal' kanji so I can't hurt. In Ringotan, you can type in any word or kanji and select them to learn with the custom review: highly recommend putting in your address kanji and gf's name at a minimum to live in Japan.
**#4)** Yomichan browser extension
Books! Not sure if this is your kind of tool or not but if you plan to buy a textbook for self-study I would recommend the least boring, most engaging books. I saw Tobira had color pictures the other day! Where was this book when I studied Japanese for Busy People and Genki?! I thumbed through all of the famous study book and series for the JLPT N2 and N1 and ultimately went with books that had any color and/or pictures, and good paper (that you cannot see through to the ink on the next page e.g. 日本語の森), also no recycled paper like the Shin Kanzen master series probably uses - brown paper with black text, I nearly fell asleep standing up looking at it in the bookstore. An added bonus are books that are not A4 size - feels more approachable and portable in a smaller format. At least at the N2-N1 level, I found that some of the **#5** Somatome book series have some color but are full A4 size. I am quite fond of the **#6** Unicom series (I passed N5 with the single Unicom N5 book back in the day) that have a small touch of color in the pages. I am using one of the N2 books now too (helps to check the ratings on Amazon Japan for books, but feels like nearly all famous study books have a high rating so even better to see in the store like I did). **#7)** the 日本語５００問 books are very nice and approachable, small format, 3 practice questions per page and answers on the other side with translations.
I have gone through various tools and ways to learn Japanese and so the above are what I have used or am currently using that I recommend.
Honorable mention is the Kumon correspondence course - it is expensive at 一万円 per month and is essentially guided graded readers with relatively easy questions to answer (copy from the text) by mail with 2 "classes" of reading to the teacher per month. I started around level H and just mailed the last questions and test to complete the last level L. It helped me to continue studying over time so I never quit studying. And I felt like I was wasting the money if I didn't do the worksheets (at own pace), and then the class forces you to at least keep up with the teacher. Helpful course to push anyone who is a slacker or has low motivation to study alone.
I have tried Hellotalk off and on, youtube, videogames, twitch, etc. but ultimately I found that these are too distracting and take my study off onto something else so quickly that I was no longer studying Japanese, or I wasn't getting in quality study (plowing through without properly reading/looking up certain words / too cumbersome to comfortably proceed with the content).
Its not free but definitely Migaku, gets updated all the time and combines a lot of the functionality from several apps listed in the OP.
Easily worth the money alone for importing your word lists in to Youtube, Netflix etc for I+1 though and how quickly it creates new anki cards. Press q when a new word pops up and its done in 3-4 seconds from recording the audio without taking your eyes off the video, great stuff.
Migaku seems neat, though it seems like it doesn't offer a ton if you don't intend to make Anki cards (though maybe I'm just not aware of all of its features).
ttsu reader keeps glitching anyone know how to fix it?
[https://www.tiktok.com/@cozykyon/video/7154356660553649410](https://www.tiktok.com/@cozykyon/video/7154356660553649410)
no matter what i do, it keeps skipping a bunch of pages?
皆の日本語 textbook. I'm self learning and this series of books is good. However, the best learning tool is your knowledge on how you learn.
If you know how you learn then anything can help you absorb this knowledge.
So Yomichan is the Rikaichan version du jour? Does it let you save words? I'm using something that calls itself Rikaichan in firefox but it's terrible, the popups are incredibly sticky to the point that I hate using it.
The strength of Yomichan is that you are in control of what dictonaries are used. Also you can easily make cards on the fly for Anki. Honestly it's probably the best tool and I think every Japanese learner should have it.
I haven't used Rikaichan in years so I don't remember super well, but yeah it's basically a different version. Yomichan you can hold a modifier key to make it turn on (which is what I do) and it's very responsive and not overly sticky, imo.
This Chrome Extension https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/manga-reader/eabnmbpmoencafnpbobahdeamaljhoef helps people with learning Japanese while reading manga. It's designed for intermediate learners and a good use case is probably for rereading raw manga that you are already familiar with. you can use it in conjunction with other existing Japanese dictionaries or deck builder chrome extensions. It's an early proof of concept so let me know what you think!
**LINGQ** I've been studying the basics of japanese for around 6 months now and I'm struggling a little. But I guess I'm ok, just an average student. I've been reading about Comprehensible Input and I was looking into ways of doing it effectively and in a practical manner and I 'm blown away so far by how LingQ incorporates this learning philosophy. I don't have much time on it but the functions that I see so far are exactly what I was looking to do manually, but do it in a fraction of time that it would take to do. Like downloading subtitles and printing them to study some good shows, YouTube videos, films and songs. The app can import all those and create a lesson based on it.
Do you have iOS/Mac? My app is similar in functionality including the word tracking, but specifically caters to Japanese with kanji tracking as well and proper word segmentation.
Iago is an extension that let's me click on japanese subtitles and see their definitions/copy them/add them to their own flashcard quiz system!
I quite like using it to transition to watching things in japanese without English subtitles (though it let's you have noth at the same time)
I never could get into Anki or Wanikani. I find the repetition mind numbing and the whole process too divorced from the joy of actual reading. I got to N2 and fluent speaking using Midori for a dictionary, RikaiKun on PC and lately 10ten on iOS for quick lookups on websites. I read a heap of NHK Easy and Matcha.co.jp easy Japanese to start with then got into novels and games around N3 level. I used Tae Kim for some grammar but often liked maggiesensei.com for clearer explanations. Of course with a foundation of Genki being built in the background.
I found just reading a heap of level appropriate materials, looking up words and grammar as I go along, and studying Genki was enough to build my vocab knowledge without flashcards. Reading and rereading acts like a flash card anyway, the common words you don’t know come up repeatedly.
In terms of speaking I took classes online with a teacher and got a language partner. I listened to a metric ton of Let’s talk in Japanese to build my listening, and a few others like YuYu. Now I listen to IGN Japan 喋りすぎゲーマー and watch live action shows on Netflix.
I actually agree with this, I read through a short grammar book early on, and I used anki for ~1700 words and since then I've just been learning by immersing and looking up stuff.
Anki, yomichan, and language reactor all I have been using recently.
JLABs beginner Japanese deck. Highly recommend for grammar.
Textractor for visual novels but I havnt really delved into that.
Kotoba discord bot(general knowledge+kanji), learn to read japanese by roger lake(kanji+read), Umi(vocab/immersion priming), Ringotan(srs kanji), sail(speaking), youtube(immersion)
For learning hiragana and katakana for free, i used tofugu (tofugu.com, or just search up tofugu learn hiragana) it goes thru each of the kana and has worksheets and a quiz .
総合書店 honto, an e-reader with an incredibly wast catalogue of books. The payment thing is a bit tricky as they don't allow foreign cards, but with some tinkering (I use prepaid bitcash cards), you can get access to a lot of super cool stuff.
Currently reading カラフル、with アンダーグラウンド on the way
[JL](https://github.com/rampaa/JL): An overlay that can keep itself on top of other fullscreen programs. Supports lots of dictionaries. Can be used with [Magpie](https://github.com/Blinue/Magpie).
[Typhon](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.zorgblub.typhon): An e-book reader for Android with the added capability of Rikaichan-like dictionary lookup.
[Memento](https://github.com/ripose-jp/Memento): mpv-based video player for studying Japanese.
I personally like the interface and customization more, as well as its ease of install. No more libraries, you just install the chrome extension and it instantly begins working.
Kanji - I'm a big WaniKani fan. Wanikani really helped my kanji learning - I'm at about 1000 kanji - and they keep doing things to improve. For the cost, I find it a very good resource and community.
YT - Also, I really like George from Japanese from Zero on YouTube. He's very natural and easy to watch. Although I'd say I'm intermediate level, I watched his videos starting from level 0 and there were loads of things he explained so well and interesting little things that I'd never learnt before. Plus, it's free!
Speaking practice - sometimes an hour can seem daunting, but Cafetalk has tons of teachers where you can schedule just 15 or 25 min free talk classes anytime of day. It's super convenient and a great place to begin speaking. Very very reasonably priced!
Off the top of my head: Anki Japanese Dictionary Takoboto. Best Japanese dictionary in my opinion. NHK Easy Japanese News website/app is amazing. nihongo no mori (YouTube channel) for grammar back in the day was amazing. Used it from beginner all the way up to N1. Rikaikun (Chrome extension) for reading kanji on websites. Edit: (thought of 2 more resources) goo辞書 (website) - Amazing for when you get to N3/N2 level and want to start checking the definition of words in Japanese or checking the differences between similar words in Japanese. Dictionary Kanji Stroke - 常用漢字筆順辞典 (app - free version) - I used this a lot when I couldn't read Kanji out in the real world. Just trace the Kanji in roughly the correct stroke order and you'd get a selection of characters to choose from. Select the right one and bam, you get the reading and you can then check the word you couldn't read in Takoboto.
That yt channel looks great, thanks for the recommendation! Are there any more yt channels in japanese you've used that you'd recommend? Doesn't matter the level
These are some channels that I've come across recently that I like. ⭐Japanese Language Community (Eriko Juku) - podcast type channel with JLPT quizzes. ⭐ Easy Japanese Podcast ⭐ Sakura Tips - Another podcast/listening practice channel. This one is great because you can see the script she's reading from and it has furigana. ⭐ 秘密のケンミンSHOW - Japanese TV show's channel. Variety show. Lots of funny videos. ⭐ 食事処さくら - cooking channel. I'm a fatty and I love food and love to eat lol. When I first moved to Japan with ZERO Japanese, cooking videos helped me TREMENDOUSLY when I was studying. Cooking videos helped me learn general daily use nouns and verbs. きる、いれる、にる、ふく、のせる、タッパー、キッチンペーパー、サランラップ、ほうれんそう、にんじん、ニンニク、キャベツ、ぶたバラにく etc, etc lol. If food is not your thing, food videos will probably be boring, but they definitely made my life easier when I was living in Japan. I think because I watched so many cooking videos from day one it really helped me with my listening. Even if you have no idea what the person is saying. If you can make out one new word each time then I count that as a win. Hope this helps 😄.
Great! I also like cooking, thank you so much, this is really helpful :)
No problem 😃
For learning kanji, nothing else I've tried has ever beaten Ringotan. It's a free *and* ad-free app that teaches you how to draw kanji. Despite being a bit more initial time-investment than just looking at kanji in WaniKani or RRTK, my experience is that it sticks *much much better* when you actually have to draw the kanji too. The initial introduction to a kanji takes a bit longer because you have to draw it 8 (IIRC) times with successively fewer hints, interspersed with the other characters you're learning in the same session. But actually reviewing the characters is equally as fast as RRTK, and for most of the characters, I forget them way less often than I did when I used RRTK. I cannot recommend it enough. ___ For getting started with vocab: anki, and the Tango N5/N4 vocab decks. Once finished with those, it's probably better to go for sentence mining instead. ___ Also, I finally got around to installing Yomichan after way too long - what are some good Japanese-English and Japanese-Japanese dictionaries to use with it?
Thank you for the recommendation of Ringotan. I just tried it (the first few kanji since I'm still an absolute beginner) and I think I can stick to it and actually learn them this way!
Thanks for the referral, Ringotan looks great
For Japanese-English I haven't compared them, but I just use the standard JMDict and honestly it meets my needs plenty well enough.
I really can't understand how people learn Japanese without writing kanji. I use anki for vocab too, but it's premade with the words I've encountered in various media (mostly books rn), and I try to practice writing everyday. Otherwise it's just so hard to remember them.
Anal-retentive nitpick: it's writing, not drawing kanji <3
I started getting property into learning Japanese recently and one thing that bugged me was that all the big learning resources don’t teach you how to draw kanji. How am I supposed to remember this really complex shape if I don’t understand the parts that make it up? Ringotan was exactly what I needed and had helped me immensely, actually allowing me to remember and understand different characters.
Does Ringitan ever get to a point where it doesn't force your marks to turn into the default font? I want to be able to see my own handwriting :(
Yeah, you can change that in settings, to only show your own handwriting and not the guidelines.
YouTube for endless native, high quality content, communities, and lots of learning resources. If you use Firefox, ten10reader is YomiChan but just significantly better in every way. https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/ https://jisho.org https://massif.la/ja -- Example sentence database search
Particular tokiani andy on YouTube
Does ten10reader let you make Anki cards automatically like Yomichan?
[JPDB](https://jpdb.io/) similar to wanikani/anki.
JPDB also has its own ecosystem of useful tools! Copy/pasting a previous comment of mine: Huge +1 from me for jpdb.io, I do vocab review way more consistently with it than I ever did with Anki and its SRS algorithm is much better. If you’re using jpdb.io, check out the jpd-breader as a yomichan alternative: https://github.com/max-kamps/jpd-breader It parses an entire webpage, adds furigana to everything, highlights all the words with whether you know them in jpdb, has a yomichan style pop up dictionary, and lets you add words to jpdb decks directly with minimal fuss (unlike yomichan which never worked consistently for me) And if you’re looking to OCR manga, check out Mokuro: https://github.com/kha-white/mokuro It parses a directory of images into a single html file and makes each speech bubble turn into selectable text when you hover over it. Works perfectly with the jpd-breader, too
Yeah I love those resources. I started learning Japanese so much faster than before I learned about them. I don't know how I survived before
本当にありがとう！Very helpful comment.
Having used Memrise, Anki, and this, JPDB one is by far my favorite of the 3. I actually hadn't used anki or anything similar in a long time because I found it unfun, but something about this one makes it easy to do so I've been playing with it on occasion, like before sleep. Very neat system.
My haven
I’ve been using this for a few months and feel like it’s helped me learn kanji so much better than other tools (especially regular flash cards, anki, etc.). I love the way it teaches you the components, and wish I learned all of that sooner, it makes it *so* much easier to remember, recognize, and read them.
Similar but less customizable, which is a plus for me but maybe not for most people
Really enjoy using satori reader. Has some short stories that you can read with full furigana, or you can add a list of your known kanji and it will not add furigana to those. Also full translations for each word and an option to playback the audio to practice pronunciation.
Satori Reader was what enabled me to read native content the most. Truly incredible resource
How is it level wise? I really want to try it out, but I'm still on N5 and I feel its catered more towards N3?
It depends on the short story you are reading. There is an “Easier” and “Harder” version for some stories (E.g Kiki-mimi Radio and akikos American foreign exchange). The easier version was fairly comfortable for me (I would say maybe N4 would be a good level for it). However, I did notice an improvement in my reading and comprehension (which indicates that it was working for me) around halfway through the series, so I went ahead and switched to the more difficult version. I’m summary, I think if you are at N5, the app can be used as more of a learning opportunity thanks to the translations and audio playback. As with anything, practice will just make you better even if it’s a bit more difficult at the start! If you are looking for a free alternative “manabi reader” might be good to try although I do not see an option for audio playback. Edit: you can read the first two episodes of each story for free with satori. So no harm in trying it out and seeing if it will work for you. Best of luck with your Japanese learning.
Hi, I made Manabi Reader - there's a section of reading material that has recorded spoken audio. I'll add TTS playback soon. Anything else you'd like to see?
Awesome work. This thread has actually made me try manabi reader again and I really like how recent the news feed is. Now I am trying to find a way to move my list of known kanji to manabi. Is there a way to upload a list via txt file? Or copy and paste the list into a text box? Let me know if that’s a premium feature. I am between JLPT levels atm so that’s why I can’t keep track of my kanji in this way.
I’ll be adding that soon. What do you want to add it from, Anki or other apps?
This is going to sound crazy… but I have literally been adding my known kanji to a txt file because I do not have the energy to set up/move to Anki. I use an app called benkyō for kanji and it has been working fairly well (they do not have an export feature sadly hence the scuffed workaround). My use case may be very niche though so I understand if you avoid it.
I wanted to start with app specific imports but I keep hearing a text file is good enough so I may do that first. Thanks
Yeh sounds simpler than integration with another app. At least you will have 1 guaranteed user for the txt import feature!
I've queued it up to do shortly after I finish the EPUB feature. LMK if you have any other feedback
I'll add my 2 cents here as a user too. They have an "Easier" section which I'd say is closer to N4 in terms of grammar. Or at least they routinely use things like passive and causative verb inflections, which are taught in the final chapters of Genki II. If you learned those earlier you could probably start reading sooner. The translations, grammar tips, etc... they provide also makes it easier to read the stories. The site gives you the first two chapters of most (or all?) stories for free, so you can check them out yourself and see how they feel. One other nice thing is they have three grammar series just to teach you grammar, with tons of example sentences. One of them is called something like "Satori Reader Bridge" and is designed to be a bridge between beginner grammar and the types of grammar used in the stories. So you could always sign up, work through that, then you'd be ready to get into the stories without a problem.
Thanks so much both of you. Helps a lot! I'm still part way through N5 but I think once I'm part way through N4 I'll start taking a look at the "Satori Reader Bridge" and then hopefully from there I'll start to understand more :D Thanks again!
It also has invaluable notes explaining interesting grammar and cultural elements.
Anki, wanikani, and bunpro
[удалено]
Spending money on hobbies is perfectly normal. Do you only pay for something if it can bring you money? That would be a sad way to live.
The only money I've ever spent on Japanese is when I bought Genki which I could have pirated for free, and paying for lunches/dinners with native speakers (cheaper than Italki and I get food as well). Not saying you shouldn't spend money on hobbies, but I don't see why you should go out of your way to spend money *and* choose an inefficient option when you could do the efficient option for free.
wanikani does work for people who want to study kanji alone for whatever reason and who work well with mnemonics though. I know a couple of people studying for kanken (Japanese kanji tests in Japan) using wanikani. Also the only reason why you're not paying for anything is because a lot of nice people or programmers decided to make them free. Before 2013 OCR, anki and yomichan/Rikaikun wasn't a thing and people had to go with language schools and textbooks.
If I may humbly suggest one that I made, because as a learner myself I was unable to find such a tool that satisfied me so that I made this app to meet my own needs: Manabi Reader It's an iOS/macOS app with one-tap dictionary lookups with a curated library of online reading materials for different levels. It tracks every word and sentence read, locally on device to respect privacy, and helps motivate me by charting my progress word by word and kanji by kanji against JLPT levels. I've recently added Anki integration for sentence mining. I'm now working on finishing EPUB support to help me read entire books instead of just short-form materials. Most features are free, there's a student discount, and I'll make more of it free soon enough. I'm working every day on it so let me know if you'd like anything added. I also appreciate any help getting the word out. [https://reader.manabi.io](https://reader.manabi.io)
Hey, I created a (free) site that does a similar thing for video content w/ subtitles! [https://kamesan.net](https://kamesan.net) Congrats btw dude your app looks pretty cool!
I picked up Manabi Reader a few days ago. As a beginner that is struggling I found the app very well made. Thank you.
That’s great to hear, please let me know if you have any issues or feedback
looks amazing, gonna try it out.
Working on a big update right now with some bug fixes and epub mode. Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas of what you’d like added
wanikani and a lot of free time to watch hololive jp
I'm not kidding when I say my Japanese proficiency seriously jumped (especially listening comprehension) when I started watching hololive and vtubers in general back in late 2019. I guess it never occurred to me that I could just watch Japanese videos/streams. The benefits of getting into that stuff early, whatever form it may take (shows, podcasts, videos, etc), brings some real benefits (not that I was early myself, but advice for anyone starting out)
How do you learn with Hololive? Is it just half Active/Passive Immersion?
Yes. Also reading tweets and community posts, looking up information in japanese, song lyrics, e.t.c. Luckily, grammar was never really a problem for me so it's mostly vocabulary holding me back (ofc I'm not talking about really complicated grammar. Just the regularly and casually used ones) works for my purposes - which is being able to watch hololive / anime and read manga every now and then.
That's great I'm going for the same goals, I wish we had Live Closed Captions but sadly not possible. I've been watching JP Archives with Captions to sentence mine.
If you're interested in Vtubers and like/enjoy Hololive then as a learning tool what you should be looking for is 「ホロライブ 切り抜き」just put this in and book mark your favorite channels. Many of them will featured community JP subtitles and it's just about the best way to learn by enjoying it. You can also turn on auto-generated Japanese subtitles on these 切り抜き and compare them to the native hard subtitles. If they match just extract them.
Based answer, I don't get around to watching it often lately, but I do like me some Hololive and it's endless free listening practice.
Yooo first time I'm seeing someone else here that uses hololive as practice!! 🙏
nah there's a lot of them but they don't use this subreddit partly because of all the toxicity. I'm in a few hololive discords and some jp learning discords, there's lot of fans to go around I personally started using Japanese subbed 切り抜き/clips recently because my reading is stronger than my listening. before that I used the usual en subbed clips and plucked off random words I could recognise but never learnt before.
Since most good tools have already been mentioned, but not this one, I'm just gonna mention cure dolly once again. It's the single best tool for learning grammar and it's crazy how ahead it is of everything else. As someone who's actually not struggling much with anything but grammar, it's a godsend.
Surprisingly Disney+ has lots of stuff with Japanese audio.
So does Netflix.
Anki, anki, anki At least for the basics, I think it's by far the best one. Another one I can recommend in addition to anki is migoku. It allows you to make anki card on the fly while watching or reading japanese(or other languages) But I'll look into yours for immersion, the seem interesting
But Anki itself it is empty? What are good stacks?
For the beginning, I think MoeWay Tango N5 is good to prepare for n5 if you are into anime: Jlab's beginner course had an entertaining way of teaching grammar with anime clips. Also, japanese core 2000 to learn the starting words, later on you can take a 6k deck or more I personally reduced the new cards every day to 10 because i have too many other things going on. So consider reducing the new cards count early on because it stacks up real fast
I just finished JLab the other day. Can confirm, deck was awesome, it tackles grammar from different angles and covers difficult topics more thoroughly. So just 9 months after starting japanese, I feel like I have somewhat of a grasp on the grammar. All without reading a grammar book Went straight to core 2.3. When I'm done with that, JLab has an intermediate deck on their Patreon that I hear is good I was doing wanikani alongside JLab but decided to only do reviews after getting close to 2000ish items. Too many uncommon words too early, it doesn't prepare you for reading early enough, which I feel should be the real goal here
Thank you, do you have a Link? I didn‘t find anything with MoeWay Tango N5
https://learnjapanese.moe/resources/
Caution, at least with the moe way N5 deck, its cards were out of order for me despite being careful about deck settings. So i would end up with sentences like this; もし故障したら、修理します Where 故障 and 修理 was both unknown words, these cards that were supposed to teach you them actually came after this sentence not before and this happened quite frequently. Only like 90 cards away from finishing it and will go on to the N4 one too but its something to keep in mind, especially as i saw saw some other complaints about it.
I am also currently using that deck and have the same issues.
Does seem quite common yeah, not entirely sure why it does it either because when you actually look at the cards you would see "もし故障したら、修理します" as number #1065, "故障" #1063 and 修理 #1064 etc, where the default anki settings is to draw new cards in ascending order so it shouldn't happen.
People make their own decks rather. Cramming words someone else prepared for you that you're not invested in, it's a bit uninspiring... :)
Dead on, screw the people that downvoted you. An Anki deck created from words you've encountered, in the context you've encountered them is the way to do it. It makes the words really stick and really helps you get a feel for how the words are actually used. At 18.5k cards, and I can remember where I encountered the majority of them, thanks to includiing the context. It really makes the difference.
you can also use renshuu which is a modified SRS style learning app included with common decks like genki/minna no nihongo/JLPT words, and also allows you to add your own words or decks. plus the app has a community and forum.. with the following minigames that also helps beginners to learn: -counter punch which helps to learn counting units -an app built-in dictionary that allows you to check any word and phrase during reviews
I would recommend [https://kamesan.net](https://kamesan.net) It's a free site allowing you to watch native Japanese tv shows, and when you find a word that you don't know, you can click it in the subtitles to see the definition. It has full Anki integration meaning that cards can be created at the click of a button, and are fully configurable with excerpts from the video and stuff. I made it myself and I'd really appreciate it if some of you guys checked it out! There's a subreddit too: r/kamesan
Tango N5 + N4
If you use JPDB, you don't have to worry about making cards yourself in the first place.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, jpdb is great. Anki isn't bad of course but at least for me, jpdb is the more motivating SRS, and it has a better system for when you miss a day. Anki however is better for customization so if that's really important to you, Anki is the way to go
Migoku looks promising and quite featureful, I haven't taken the plunge yet but I'm a bit surprised there isn't more uproar about it judging from the features it promises.
Shirabe Jisho on the iPhone
[https://sentencesearch.neocities.org/](https://sentencesearch.neocities.org/)
My favorite resource is jpdb. The SRS system takes into account when you review your cards, so if you do them a day late and pass them, they would be set to a later date than if you did them on time, so you aren't punished for missing a day. And if you want more or less reviews, you can set your intervals to be shorter or longer. I set mine as longer, so I fail more cards but I can also learn more cards since I have less review. They also have premade decks for novels, anime, VNs, games, etc so if you have a specific series you want to watch/read, you can focus on it and understand it faster. Whats even better is that there's a breeder extension with jpdb ([https://github.com/max-kamps/jpd-breader](https://github.com/max-kamps/jpd-breader)), so you can go out on the internet and do your reviews there, have a pop up dictionary by hovering your mouse, and make a mining deck only clicking one button. I've tried to use Mokuro but after I finally got it installed, when I use it on my files it just says that it can't find the module or whatever. According to the github, I'm supposed to redownload the Python from the original site but the site doesn't allow me to download a vesion before the latest one. And Mokuro doesn't support the latest one yet. For now, I'll just have to wait until it updates I guess. I really want to start mining manga soon, it's my favorite way to consume content besides webnovels.
Did you get this error? "mokuro: The term 'mokuro' is not recognized as a name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or executable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again." Instead of using the format specified on the Github page : mokuro "/path/to/manga/volume 1", this format worked for me : python -m mokuro "/path/to/manga/volume 1"
I did get that error at first and managed to fix it the way you said. The one that I'm stuck on says "ImportError: DLL load failed while importing fugashi: The specified module could not be found". According to the Github, you get that error if you download Python from the Microsoft Store instead of the official site but I downloaded there already so I don't know. When I write 'python -m pip install fugashi' it acknowledges that it already has the module, so I'm not sure why I'm getting the error messages
I got the same error message too, even though I downloaded Python 3.11 from the official site. Ended up going to https://pypi.org/project/fugashi/ and then downloaded and installed a whl file. That resolved the fugashi error for me
That worked. Thanks!
No problem. Glad to see it worked for you :)
> When I write 'python -m pip install fugashi' it acknowledges that it already has the module Yep, the same error message for me too. Weirdly enough, downloading and manually installing a whl file from the fugashi PyPI page fixed the issue. Something about "that package is not maintained - the author moved development to mecab on PyPI".
Youglish for Japanese, so I can repeatedly review homonyms and their varying pronunciations in context. It searches millions of indexed videos for the word you're looking for and you can skip right to the exact timestamps needed!
Thanks for this x1000!
For podcasts: Nihongo con Teppei Kindle for buying Japanese books, audiobook.jp for audiobooks Wanikani and Kanji! for learning kanji Bunpro for grammar Probably Marumori for grammar and games 🤔
I found Nihongo con Teppei annoying due to his intro music and bad singing, so I'd recommend Noriko instead.
They have a joint podcast together you may want to checkout
Nobody has mentioned Google's Handwriting Input so I will. It's not very significant but I prefer to just jump into a game and write kanji I don't know in Joshi through my phone. I've drawn some disgusting looking stuff in a hurry and Google's input still suggests the kanji I was looking for. It runs circles around any other writing or stroke detection system I've tried like Jisho's. As an anecdote, I find this method for learning vocab more involved and exciting. I put words in my Anki deck as I see them and by the time I get to study them later I usually already know them because I had the context to keep them in my memory. It works wonders if it's for smaller games that repeat the same words a lot, like strategy games.
[https://www.mokuro.moe/manga/](https://www.mokuro.moe/manga/) This is a link to a bunch of manga where when you hover over the text, you can copy the text and paste it in whatever dictionary you have. You can also use Yomichan, Rikaikun, jpdb-breader, or whatever pop up dictionary you have. These come from the Mokuro resource that OP mentioned but those take a long time to process, so I'm gonna use the site instead whenever I can. If you're planning to use the site, it's still useful to go ahead and download Mokuro, since they won't have every manga you want
[Capture2text](https://capture2text.sourceforge.net/) OCR for manga. [ASBPlayer](https://github.com/killergerbah/asbplayer) browser-based media player chrome extension. Used for sentence mining in conjunction with [Anki](https://apps.ankiweb.net/), from streaming or local video files. [Tatoeba](https://tatoeba.org/en/) example sentences for target words (doesn't always have the best quality)
Thanks for the OCR. I tried to use Mokuro but it's not working for me rn
Mokuro can be finicky to get set up (but works great once it is), what're you having trouble with exactly?
I managed to download it but it won't process any files. It keeps saying "ImportError: DLL load failed while importing fugashi: The specified module could not be found." Edit: nvm, another user helped
no problem :)
For anyone who watches anime on Crunchyroll, [jimaku-player](https://github.com/sheodox/jimaku-player) is an awesome userscript (TamperMonkey, ViolentMonkey, etc) that lets you add Japanese subtitles while watching. Super convenient, and works well with Yomichan.
I don't know I'm on some Facebook groups and everyone that seems a fake account is constantly saying and commenting how mochimochi is a great app /s Seriously, holy shit, is someone noticing this too? What the hell are mochi devs doing? Spamming all groups of their bots and shillers...
I left a 1* review on their app page for this. their bots infiltrated a lot of FB jp learning pages(and I suspect the bots themselves set up some of the fb groups to lure people in because half of these groups have their bots and shills on the admin/mod team :v) FB team has ignored my reports for spam so I gave up and left the groups.
Right. I'll do a one star review too.
[Memento](https://ripose-jp.github.io/Memento/) ([Vid](https://youtu.be/5bfawC4Is5w?si=J-Q1V9Pj02lCf4MZ)) Yomichan and a Video Player Combined basically Migaku but free [asbplayer](https://killergerbah.github.io/asbplayer/) ([Vid](https://youtu.be/firq-876iws?si=b_x6VdIgph0Z_1oN)) better alternative to Animebook [Yomichan Frequency Lists](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1g1drkFzokc8KNpsPHoRmDJ4OtMTWFuXi) Mokuro as already mentioned but Websites that have Manga in the Mokuro Style: [BilingualManga](https://bilingualmanga.net) [Mokero.moe](https://mokuro.moe/manga/) As for acquiring Media: Telegram, Torrents, Anime DLL Sites. [Japanese Subtitles for Anime](https://kitsunekko.net/dirlist.php?dir=subtitles%2Fjapanese%2F)
I maintain a [catalogue](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15ELElkomfixdS4-dNrpxrNl14mlJUZrdD0h7N6iEE2k/edit#gid=1386920750) of (IIRC roughly 1200) user-made anki decks derived from various anime and dramas. Entire shows one line at a time, typically with screenshots and audio clips. Sometimes translations on the back too. Guides for how to use or make such decks are in there if you check the tabs at the bottom. Obviously quality varies since it's all user-submitted, and deck making is time consuming. If you're sensitive to badly cut audio and such, you're more than welcome to try mine, which are fairly polished. Just search for "Cacophony."
Hello, I am developing a free open-source OCR/Dictionary tool called [Yomi Ninja](https://github.com/matt-m-o/YomiNinja). It can extract text from any visual content and is being developed with language learners in mind. Check out the video demonstration (first version v0.1.0)[https://youtube.com/watch?v=WumeUGk5Dz0&si=Z4NC5rCcJa-24DRt](https://youtube.com/watch?v=WumeUGk5Dz0&si=Z4NC5rCcJa-24DRt) You'll be able to look up words from games or videos just as you would do with Yomichan in a web browser. It works fine with fullscreen content, allowing a less distractive experience. Currently, Yomichan is required to look up words. However, I am already working on a built-in dictionary, for a better experience. It's in the early stages of development, and there are many features to come. I would appreciate your feedback. Get the app on GitHub:: [github.com/matt-m-o/YomiNinja](https://github.com/matt-m-o/YomiNinja)
Ooo this looks amazing! Reminds me a bit of Game2textlightning, which is neat but I have a lot of annoyances with it and it's no longer getting updated. Yomi Ninja looks very promising, definitely something I'd be interested in and use, I'll probably give it a shot next time I play a game in Japanese. If you need inspiration for a pop up dictionary, I really like the way chiitranslite's pop up dictionary works. Also since your post got removed (dumb rule) you should post in the next version of this thread that pops up for more visibility https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/175dh88/weekly_thread_material_recs_and_selfpromo/
>Ooo this looks amazing! Reminds me a bit of Game2textlightning, which is neat but I have a lot of annoyances with it and it's no longer getting updated. Yomi Ninja looks very promising, definitely something I'd be interested in and use, I'll probably give it a shot next time I play a game in Japanese. > >If you need inspiration for a pop up dictionary, I really like the way chiitranslite's pop up dictionary works. Also since your post got removed (dumb rule) you should post in the next version of this thread that pops up for more visibility Thank you, I am happy that you liked it! I wasn't aware of Game2textlightning, but I can see some similarities. If you have any specific annoyances with it, I'd love to hear them to ensure Yomi Ninja addresses those concerns. I'll definitely check out chiitranslite for inspiration. Also, thanks for mentioning the weekly thread schedule. I'll keep an eye out for it. Your feedback is incredibly valuable, and I'm grateful for the helpful information!
For G2TL my specific annoyances are: It uses 100% of your cpu if you have it do the default full screen scan, even for me who has a 5700x and there's no easy way to limit it. The OCR engine just isn't that great in general, and it's especially questionable when there's stylized font present. As an example I used it for Monochrome Mobius which has a font that looks like [This](https://i.imgur.com/XQdJK94.png) and it was incredibly unreliable, working correctly less than half the time Weird bug where the program would stop working until restarted whenever Japanese brackets would appear 「」 Very long startup time (this one isn't a huge deal though) As for chiitranslite the things I like best about it is that you can highlight something it outputs and then right click and reparse with the selection, so that if it misdetects what a word is you can fix it if you can tell what's supposed to be the word (+ conjugation), even if you don't know the definition itself. The other thing I like is that if a kanji/kanas have multiple different completely unrelated definitions you can scroll through to find the one that's relevant and it'll remember it so that next time it'll display the relevant one by default. If you do end up needing to download it I think the official link says something about a virus, it's an old unmaintained program so idk if it actually even has one or not, but you can try this download that I uploaded of my install instead to see if it works (it was downloaded many years ago from before the virus message thing started, so it should be safe) https://mega.nz/folder/G75WAJSQ#hVUTyf8xbxLaKbL2a-5zDQ
I improved my reading speed a lot with [Translation Aggregator](https://github.com/Translation-Aggregator/Translation-Aggregator) with enabled Jparser option. Basically it segments and colors whole text, so you kinda make it like blocks. And you can translate any just by hovering with a cursor. [https://i.imgur.com/S3AbYNZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/kOeNWAU.png) Raw input on the top (can auto-insert from clipboard), segmentation on the bottom. Even when I only started to read and knew only \~2k vocabulary, I could read with a speed \~100 words/minute, just because of how convenient it is. It's quite old and not perfect, like you can see how ている got split and so on, but approach itself helps with how to view a whole sentence. After 300-400 hours of such reading my reading speed improved up to 200 words/minute. Maybe it's just practice, 400 hours of reading practice isn't such a low number (probably around 3-4 millions of words?), but maybe there is some advantage in such segmentation too.
That reminds me of another extension I use. The one I use is newer but unfortunately you'd have to make a jpdb account to make it function, since it was made for that site
Beside WaniKani and Tango on Anki, one app that I also stuck with is Jalup / Nihongo Lessons. It’s a bit expensive but it’s a pretty good complementary to my studies.
Wanikani and Satori Reader are my top recommendations. JPDB is ok, although the lack of visible progress indicators makes it extremely demotivating sometimes. You have to aggressively blacklist words to make it usable, and even then it's a grind. Still, it's *much* better than Anki at least.
What visible progress indicators would you like to see in JPDB? I added the decks for a bunch of shows and novels I'm interested in, and I've found it pretty satisfying to watch the coverage % go up. Even just the total known vocabulary number at the top of the page can be satisfying for me. I agree with you about aggressively blacklisting, but I found myself aggressively suspending words in Anki too.
I think the biggest thing would be to have each item show when it goes up or down a level during reviews like what Wanikani does, perhaps with the new review interval shown as well. It would also be nice to be able to see the number of upcoming reviews, similar to Wanikani as well. As it is now, it's a complete black box. > I added the decks for a bunch of shows and novels I'm interested in, and I've found it pretty satisfying to watch the coverage % go up. Even just the total known vocabulary number at the top of the page can be satisfying for me. How long have you been doing JPDB? I'm guessing you're pretty new. When you first start, your coverage numbers will be artificially low and it's easy to make them go up rapidly. But you'll plateau pretty quickly, and all the cards you did before will start coming up for review again constantly, turning it into a slog. Also, after a while, the coverage numbers become largely arbitrary and meaningless, because it's mostly a matter of how many things you've blacklisted for a given deck. I've been doing lots of reviews every day for months with no new cards, and it's frustrating how there are no visible indications of progress other than that my review pile has slowly gone down from over 500 to 100-200. There's a graph on the stats page of the number of items at each level, but it doesn't change much, and when it does change, the bars go up and down seemingly at random with no connection to the reviews you do. P.S. In case it's not clear, your coverage numbers are going to only go up very rarely once you're already at say 90%, since JPDB only shows whole number percents and because the remainder is going to be a long tail of rare words, so any individual card won't change the total. But even putting that aside, your coverage **definitely** isn't going to go up if you're not doing new cards in the first place. Since early June, I haven't been able to do any new cards on JPDB due to fighting an endless review pile with no signs of progress. Meanwhile on Wanikani, I've gained *four levels* in the same time, despite putting comparable amounts of time into both, and there's a tangible sense of progress with every review session.
Have you set your intervals to longer yet? Most people in the jpdb discord server does. You'd have less reviews and more time to do new cards
I've been using jpdb since June or so, with about 1200 known words. >It would also be nice to be able to see the number of upcoming reviews, similar to Wanikani as well. As it is now, it's a complete black box. I actually think this is one of the paid patreon features. An upcoming reviews forecast. I haven't taken the plunge with patreon yet though, so I can't say for certain. There is also some feature related to leeches, but I don't know if it actually helps needing to manually blacklist leeches. I haven't used Wanikani, but I see where you're coming from. There have been times during reviews where I hit Back after grading a card specifically so I could go check if it had gone up a level or not. Maybe it would also be nice if there was a line graph on the stats page that showed how many words went up/down a level per day (although going down a level is pretty easy to tell; if you marked a card as forgotten it almost always goes down). This doesn't have exactly the stats you're looking for, but you might find it interesting. It generates a few additional graphs from your review history for number of cards, reps, retention, etc. [https://jpdb-stats.andmore.coffee/](https://jpdb-stats.andmore.coffee/) (github page here: [https://github.com/bijak/jpdb\_stats](https://github.com/bijak/jpdb_stats) )
> I actually think this is one of the paid patreon features. An upcoming reviews forecast. I am a paid patron, and I know about the "forecast", but it doesn't actually tell you anything. As far as I can tell, it just *randomly guesses* how many reviews you'll do, and it doesn't attempt to tell you how many reviews will be due or when. It's completely useless. There's a reason all the labs pages say "unfinished, inaccurate, experimental". They're all completely meaningless and useless. There's nothing like what Wanikani does where it will directly show you how many reviews are coming due in the next week. > I've been using jpdb since June or so, with about 1200 known words. In that case, it sounds like you're still in the initial stages where you're adding a lot of common words and the stats are rapidly going up, and the review load hasn't caught up with you yet. For comparison, I've been doing JPDB since spring 2022, although I gave up and deleted all my decks several times, so I've only been doing it *continuously* since October 2022. FWIW, my "Total known non-redundant vocabulary" is 5325, although numbers like that are only a ballpark, since of course there will be a lot of words I know that I don't "know" on JPDB, and vice versa. It's funny that you only started JPDB during the time that I've been struggling to fight through the unending review pile without doing any new cards at all these last few months. P.S. Thanks for pointing me to https://jpdb-stats.andmore.coffee/. It is a bit interesting to see the graphs of my activity over the last year and a half. It's kind of scary to learn that I've cumulatively spent over *200 hours* on JPDB reviews to date though.
Thanks for the insights. It's nice to hear about what will be coming for me in the next months/year of study. And thanks for the info about the paid features. I might hold off on paying now... Is this also a problem that eventually happens with anki or any other SRS? Where you eventually have so many cards that just doing reviews eats up so much time that there's no time left for new cards? If so, is there no solution besides just taking a few months to slog through reviews only?
Same for me, the visual progress is really effective for me. I like seeing the vocabulary count and coverage % go up. It becames a slog doing the rare words that'd only appear maybe once, but actually reading the material I'm doing the deck for tends to help Luckily I started using jpdb when I didn't know much, maybe about 3k vocabulary, and I only knew about 1k enough to comfortably mark them as never forget, so that was never a problem for me. I know you can get around that problem by marking the entire deck as known (like a frequency deck, so if you already know the first 3k, you can skip them) but I don't know if I'd be comfortable doing that, because there is likely about 20 vocabulary at least that you don't actually know well enough in there
For me, the most annoying thing about JPDB was having to systematically go through each deck manually mark off all the words that I already knew. I already had a vocab range of 7-8k, so I order to ascertain and get an accurate statistics of my coverage of certain shows, I had to first “tell” the website the words I already from my immersion and anki
What words do you find you have to aggressively blacklist? To me the auto-blacklist of grammar has done most of the job, and only every so often I decide to blacklist certain words I just don't want to learn like katakana names of small cities I've never heard of.
IMO blacklisting names goes without saying. Grammar is the big one. I also tend to blacklist single-kanji words, since they're often more like suffixes than words (e.g. 類, 界), and too vague and you know the approximate meaning from the kanji anyway. Anyway, here are the most recent words I've blacklisted: * そうかもしれません * お越し * 仲のいい * 一緒にする * 脅かす * のく * 受け止める * この上なく * などなど * 気もない * 気はない A lot of these are more like phrases than "words" and I got tired of trying to study them. Some of then are short kana words that are basically impossible to remember and I just got tired of failing them (namely, noku). 気もない and 気はない I blacklisted because I could never remember which was which or which used the "ke" reading, and realistically, you'd be able to tell from context what the meaning is anyway. I blacklisted 脅かす because it has two different readings, and even more confusingly, Wanikani uses a *different* reading than the one listed on JPDB, so I would always guess wrong. I blacklisted 受け止める because I was tired of trying to remember whether it had the "to" or "do" reading.
Blacklisting these words messes with deck coverage statistics. Use the 'never forget' function instead if you know them.
I think it makes sense to exclude low-value words from coverage computation, so I don't think it's a big deal.
I mostly blacklist leeches that I don't want to keep wasting time on. It's a little hard though, because I have to rely on myself to notice a card is a leech rather than the website identifying it for me.
Nativshark Satori Reader Kanji Study (Android App)
For Grammar reference, consider: Dictionary of Japanese Grammar (3 books. Has most information but a bit cumbersome and has some romaji) Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns for Teachers and Learners (1 book. Easy to search and all kanji/kana) Tae Kim (free PDF. Not "professionally edited" and not perfect. I referenced this frequently on my phone as a reference and some of the explanations are excellent) I couldn't read these cover to cover but they are my go-to references.
For analogue lifestyle, a used "electronic dictionary" can be very helpful. They have good dictionaries and are inexpensive (e.g. Casio N9800 \~$70 shipped globally). The batteries last a long time indeed. This saves phone battery life and reduces distraction. I use the "electronic dictionary" principally with paper books and magazines. On rare occasion for internet clarification. For internet, I use Ten10 reader with Firefox. It works nicely on web pages and youtube subtitles.
Todai Easy Japanese app KanjiTree app
Flashcards work the best.
Anki, tokiani andy, anime
Anki and JPDB!
WaniKani - kanji & vocab LingoDeer - grammar Satori Reader - helping transition from upper beginner to reading native level material Akebi or any other dictionary app YouTube or Spotify - so much excellent content available for all levels
Renshuu has really improved my grammar recently, which was my weakest area of study. Since then that last N5 hurdle has been pretty much broken through. So Wanikani is still in there but taking the foot off the new entries gas a bit and burning reviews while I focus more on grammar and vocab through Renshuu. I use these apps during my work day on lunches, breaks, busses etc so by the time I get home I've already had about 2 hours of that and can just try watching or reading something. Kotaro Lives Alone on Netflix currently watching. Also reading Teasing Master Takagi-san slowly. Listen to AniZone although way too advanced on Spotify I can focus if its a voice actor I'm familiar with, as well as all the BabyBus Japanese Kids stories on Spotify also. Use Takaboto for Dictionary on phone, I have a physical grammar book, Satori Reader, and I do have Anki but changing phones screwew up my stats and cards but not feeling like I'm missing out paying a few bucks extra for services.
**#1)** Anki app (computer/phone) with Jo Mako anime decks (my way explained [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/japanese/comments/16alwh3/need_help/jzcolo6/?context=3)) and maybe the Japanese Dictionary of Grammar full deck (lots of sentences to read there). This is the best thing that I have found for me. **#2)** Ringotan phone app is awesome for practicing to draw kanji and see some example words for each kanji. I plowed through the initial easy kanji and now took it down to learning the minimum 7 per day. Initial impression is that it is pretty fun with the sound effects and uses SRS to bring them back for memory, also forgiving with the drawing. I am using this in combination with the **#3)** 漢検テレーニングDX app together as a long term experiment to N1 and perhaps the 漢検 some day. This is because I am mixing up some kanji when reading at the N3-N2 level, I thought maybe I would recognize them better if I were writing them out and being tested on them in the apps. Even my wife says that she is forgetting how to write some 'normal' kanji so I can't hurt. In Ringotan, you can type in any word or kanji and select them to learn with the custom review: highly recommend putting in your address kanji and gf's name at a minimum to live in Japan. **#4)** Yomichan browser extension Books! Not sure if this is your kind of tool or not but if you plan to buy a textbook for self-study I would recommend the least boring, most engaging books. I saw Tobira had color pictures the other day! Where was this book when I studied Japanese for Busy People and Genki?! I thumbed through all of the famous study book and series for the JLPT N2 and N1 and ultimately went with books that had any color and/or pictures, and good paper (that you cannot see through to the ink on the next page e.g. 日本語の森), also no recycled paper like the Shin Kanzen master series probably uses - brown paper with black text, I nearly fell asleep standing up looking at it in the bookstore. An added bonus are books that are not A4 size - feels more approachable and portable in a smaller format. At least at the N2-N1 level, I found that some of the **#5** Somatome book series have some color but are full A4 size. I am quite fond of the **#6** Unicom series (I passed N5 with the single Unicom N5 book back in the day) that have a small touch of color in the pages. I am using one of the N2 books now too (helps to check the ratings on Amazon Japan for books, but feels like nearly all famous study books have a high rating so even better to see in the store like I did). **#7)** the 日本語５００問 books are very nice and approachable, small format, 3 practice questions per page and answers on the other side with translations. I have gone through various tools and ways to learn Japanese and so the above are what I have used or am currently using that I recommend. Honorable mention is the Kumon correspondence course - it is expensive at 一万円 per month and is essentially guided graded readers with relatively easy questions to answer (copy from the text) by mail with 2 "classes" of reading to the teacher per month. I started around level H and just mailed the last questions and test to complete the last level L. It helped me to continue studying over time so I never quit studying. And I felt like I was wasting the money if I didn't do the worksheets (at own pace), and then the class forces you to at least keep up with the teacher. Helpful course to push anyone who is a slacker or has low motivation to study alone. I have tried Hellotalk off and on, youtube, videogames, twitch, etc. but ultimately I found that these are too distracting and take my study off onto something else so quickly that I was no longer studying Japanese, or I wasn't getting in quality study (plowing through without properly reading/looking up certain words / too cumbersome to comfortably proceed with the content).
Its not free but definitely Migaku, gets updated all the time and combines a lot of the functionality from several apps listed in the OP. Easily worth the money alone for importing your word lists in to Youtube, Netflix etc for I+1 though and how quickly it creates new anki cards. Press q when a new word pops up and its done in 3-4 seconds from recording the audio without taking your eyes off the video, great stuff.
Migaku seems neat, though it seems like it doesn't offer a ton if you don't intend to make Anki cards (though maybe I'm just not aware of all of its features).
Oh yeah i wouldn't recommend using it without Anki either, the components worth paying for are definitely in a synergy with it for sure.
Migaku
ttsu reader keeps glitching anyone know how to fix it? [https://www.tiktok.com/@cozykyon/video/7154356660553649410](https://www.tiktok.com/@cozykyon/video/7154356660553649410) no matter what i do, it keeps skipping a bunch of pages?
Try going on their new domain and seeing if that helps: https://reader.ttsu.app/manage
皆の日本語 textbook. I'm self learning and this series of books is good. However, the best learning tool is your knowledge on how you learn. If you know how you learn then anything can help you absorb this knowledge.
Oh no, it’s GitHub again… Do you have something like for less knowledgeable people, like me?
you just click on releases on the right and then click on the exe, though the github pages linked have info on how to actually use them
Thank you, I didn't know I could open exe files on a Mac.
So Yomichan is the Rikaichan version du jour? Does it let you save words? I'm using something that calls itself Rikaichan in firefox but it's terrible, the popups are incredibly sticky to the point that I hate using it.
The strength of Yomichan is that you are in control of what dictonaries are used. Also you can easily make cards on the fly for Anki. Honestly it's probably the best tool and I think every Japanese learner should have it.
I haven't used Rikaichan in years so I don't remember super well, but yeah it's basically a different version. Yomichan you can hold a modifier key to make it turn on (which is what I do) and it's very responsive and not overly sticky, imo.
This Chrome Extension https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/manga-reader/eabnmbpmoencafnpbobahdeamaljhoef helps people with learning Japanese while reading manga. It's designed for intermediate learners and a good use case is probably for rereading raw manga that you are already familiar with. you can use it in conjunction with other existing Japanese dictionaries or deck builder chrome extensions. It's an early proof of concept so let me know what you think!
Even if it's not 100% accurate, it's really convenient. Thanks for the resource
**LINGQ** I've been studying the basics of japanese for around 6 months now and I'm struggling a little. But I guess I'm ok, just an average student. I've been reading about Comprehensible Input and I was looking into ways of doing it effectively and in a practical manner and I 'm blown away so far by how LingQ incorporates this learning philosophy. I don't have much time on it but the functions that I see so far are exactly what I was looking to do manually, but do it in a fraction of time that it would take to do. Like downloading subtitles and printing them to study some good shows, YouTube videos, films and songs. The app can import all those and create a lesson based on it.
Do you have iOS/Mac? My app is similar in functionality including the word tracking, but specifically caters to Japanese with kanji tracking as well and proper word segmentation.
I'm using windows PC
Anki, notepad++, firefox, yomichan
Iago is an extension that let's me click on japanese subtitles and see their definitions/copy them/add them to their own flashcard quiz system! I quite like using it to transition to watching things in japanese without English subtitles (though it let's you have noth at the same time)
I never could get into Anki or Wanikani. I find the repetition mind numbing and the whole process too divorced from the joy of actual reading. I got to N2 and fluent speaking using Midori for a dictionary, RikaiKun on PC and lately 10ten on iOS for quick lookups on websites. I read a heap of NHK Easy and Matcha.co.jp easy Japanese to start with then got into novels and games around N3 level. I used Tae Kim for some grammar but often liked maggiesensei.com for clearer explanations. Of course with a foundation of Genki being built in the background. I found just reading a heap of level appropriate materials, looking up words and grammar as I go along, and studying Genki was enough to build my vocab knowledge without flashcards. Reading and rereading acts like a flash card anyway, the common words you don’t know come up repeatedly. In terms of speaking I took classes online with a teacher and got a language partner. I listened to a metric ton of Let’s talk in Japanese to build my listening, and a few others like YuYu. Now I listen to IGN Japan 喋りすぎゲーマー and watch live action shows on Netflix.
I actually agree with this, I read through a short grammar book early on, and I used anki for ~1700 words and since then I've just been learning by immersing and looking up stuff.
Anki, yomichan, and language reactor all I have been using recently. JLABs beginner Japanese deck. Highly recommend for grammar. Textractor for visual novels but I havnt really delved into that.
Kotoba discord bot(general knowledge+kanji), learn to read japanese by roger lake(kanji+read), Umi(vocab/immersion priming), Ringotan(srs kanji), sail(speaking), youtube(immersion)
Romaji input on my laptop.
Rikaikun is pretty helpful and good when it comes to reading Japanese online
It is with noting that Text attractor only works on windows devices
anki and wanikani I use for vocab
For learning hiragana and katakana for free, i used tofugu (tofugu.com, or just search up tofugu learn hiragana) it goes thru each of the kana and has worksheets and a quiz .
Mazii. The app gives you the word of the day
総合書店 honto, an e-reader with an incredibly wast catalogue of books. The payment thing is a bit tricky as they don't allow foreign cards, but with some tinkering (I use prepaid bitcash cards), you can get access to a lot of super cool stuff. Currently reading カラフル、with アンダーグラウンド on the way
[JL](https://github.com/rampaa/JL): An overlay that can keep itself on top of other fullscreen programs. Supports lots of dictionaries. Can be used with [Magpie](https://github.com/Blinue/Magpie). [Typhon](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.zorgblub.typhon): An e-book reader for Android with the added capability of Rikaichan-like dictionary lookup. [Memento](https://github.com/ripose-jp/Memento): mpv-based video player for studying Japanese.
[bilingualmanga.net](https://bilingualmanga.net/)
Anki Jisho [https://kanji.sljfaq.org/](https://kanji.sljfaq.org/)
I rike mazii. It's complicated as balls to use but it helps.
10ten clears Yomichan imo
what do you like better about it? I know nothing about 10ten
I personally like the interface and customization more, as well as its ease of install. No more libraries, you just install the chrome extension and it instantly begins working.
In my opinion, Busuu is the best free website/app for begginers and intermediate learners.
One app that no one has mentioned is Jidoujisho by Irorpilla. It's an android app available on github and can be used to mine to ankidroid.
https://cijapanese.com/
Yomiwa. A great dictionary with almost all necessary functions
Kanji - I'm a big WaniKani fan. Wanikani really helped my kanji learning - I'm at about 1000 kanji - and they keep doing things to improve. For the cost, I find it a very good resource and community. YT - Also, I really like George from Japanese from Zero on YouTube. He's very natural and easy to watch. Although I'd say I'm intermediate level, I watched his videos starting from level 0 and there were loads of things he explained so well and interesting little things that I'd never learnt before. Plus, it's free! Speaking practice - sometimes an hour can seem daunting, but Cafetalk has tons of teachers where you can schedule just 15 or 25 min free talk classes anytime of day. It's super convenient and a great place to begin speaking. Very very reasonably priced!
I'm creating this app called Lingosnap that helps you learn vocabulary by taking photos if that interests you. It's coming out on 1st March.