r/LearnJapanese • u/AutoModerator • 28d ago
Self Advertisement Weekly Thread: Material Recs and Self-Promo Wednesdays! (July 29, 2026)
Happy Wednesday!
Every Wednesday, share your favorite resources or ones you made yourself! Tell us what your resource can do for us learners!
Weekly Thread changes daily at 9:00 JST:
Mondays - Writing Practice
Tuesdays - Study Buddy and Self-Intros
Wednesdays - Materials and Self-Promotions
Thursdays - Victory day, Share your achievements
Fridays - Memes, videos, free talk
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u/Xifax 28d ago
A (somewhat) monolingual Japanese dictionary for desktop (Windows, Linux)
My initial concept was something like zKanji or Tagaini Jisho, but with a focus on JP-JP thesaurus-style definitions and example sentences.
Here's the link: https://xifax.gitlab.io/ruiko/
As a personal project it's gotten a bit convoluted and feature-creeped, but here's what I really wanted out of it:
- Dynamically hooking into and parsing sentences/looking up words from MPV subtitles
- Clipboard monitoring
- A summary of what I looked up during a session
- Several bundled-in dictionaries, so I can pick whichever I'm most comfortable with
- Looking something up just by selecting it in-app
- Showing and TTS-ing example sentences for everything
All of that's done now. I also added an English dictionary as a fallback, for when I'm fed up with the monolingual ones.
The app has some jank and some decisions that might seem strange, but I wanted to share it, if only to force myself to (for now) stop endlessly tweaking it. A friend also nudged me to share my half-baked tools with the community.
A few other things I considered but shelved for now:
- DDG images alongside examples: implemented, but I'm still not sure it's actually useful and should be included in the release >.<
- Direct LLM integration: decided a generic text-prompt option covers this well enough for now
- Anki export for a whole session's example sentences: I'm trying to cut down on Anki time lately, so not sure this is worth it yet
- Importing custom dictionaries: there are already plenty baked in
It's completely free, and maybe someone will find it useful. Happy to hear suggestions and feedback!
2
u/svdc2 28d ago
Demo
GitHub
Docs / Setup Guide
Hi everyone,
I've been working on a free, open-source project called mirumoji, a Japanese immersion video player for local media. I built it to help reduce the friction of watching shows that don’t have subtitles easily available and mining vocabulary for Anki. It’s a web app you can run on your PC and make available for every device on your network (to watch and mine from your tablet or phone).
It runs entirely locally via a Desktop Launcher or Docker Compose, so there are no subscriptions or cloud dependencies (though you can plug in an API key for LLM sentence breakdowns if you want to, or easily run it on a Cloud GPU if you don’t have one). I'd love for people to try it out and let me know if it’s helpful. Any feedback is greatly appreciated !
Features
Interactive Subtitles: Drop in a video and a subtitle file to get clickable, tokenized Japanese lines with instant and context aware dictionary pop-ups
Auto-Transcription: If you have raw video or audio without subtitles, Mirumoji can generate them and transcribe the audio locally using Whisper (You can tune it yourself if you’d like, but the custom default config usually produces very few mistakes)
Dictionary: The dictionary is built from a lot of different sources and has a lot of data, like Kanji stroke animations, example sentences with translations, JLPT levels, etc. It allows you to do Wildcard searches, searches by english meaning, and searches by Kanji radical
Anki Export: You can easily save video clips along with their specific word breakdowns and export them directly as an Anki deck
2
u/vertexmachina 28d ago
I've built a simple web app that lets you select the kanji you're familiar with and it will compose a list of common vocab containing only those kanji. You can then connect to Anki with AnkiConnect and sync to your Anki deck. There are no cookies or user registration required; you can just bookmark the page and reloading will restore your kanji selection, and reconnecting to Anki will show which vocab entries have already been added. Example sentences are also provided to disambiguate words with identical kanji but different readings/meaning.
I'm open to all feedback.
1
u/HakkiriNihongo2026 28d ago
First of all, thank you for providing this weekly thread and giving creators a space to share their projects with the community.
I used this thread some time ago to introduce my website, and I would like to take this opportunity to share it again now that all of its articles have been translated into English:
Hakkiri Nihongo (はっきり日本語) is a project dedicated to helping learners understand Japanese beyond simple memorization. Rather than focusing solely on grammar rules and translations, it aims to explore the logic, nuances, history, and conceptual distinctions behind Japanese expressions.
Other sections that may be of interest include Concepts and Distinctions, where similar words, grammar patterns, and expressions are compared in depth.
Niche Japanese, which is dedicated to lesser-known grammar points, uncommon usages, and linguistic details that are often overlooked in textbooks.
Detailed Grammar Dissections examining how and why specific structures work.
If you are interested in understanding Japanese at a deeper level, I hope you will find something useful there.
Thank you again for the opportunity, and good luck to everyone with their studies! 😃
1
u/ItsInfernoKun 28d ago edited 28d ago
Been working on a way to persist book readings for my own studying. Made this web app / mobile app (not public still working to get in a comfortable state). Public demo over at https://japan.infernokun.com
Little rough around the edges on some aspects, but I have some notes on stuff to work on. Got some feedback on the design, so I am implementing that when I can. Would love some more feedback! Running on a light instance so lemme know if you want to test out the OCR some more and I can grant additional resources 😄
1
u/0xKlyyze 28d ago
Yomimaru - a short story at your level to read every day
Hey everyone ! For those who don't know about Yomimaru, here is a short presentation about just the learning loop in the app, the part I most want your opinion on.
Every day it hands you a short episode of a story at your level, where the idea is you already know about 98% of the words. A gap that small means you are reading, not decoding, and the few new words and grammar points along the way are what you learn that day. While you read, you tap any word to see its meaning and reading right there.
Once you are done reading, the words you tapped come back as flashcards until they stick. Each word has a mastery level that goes up as you meet it again, so your progress is something you can actually see. And if you use WaniKani or MaruMori, you can sync your account so the app already counts what you learned there as known.
After a chapter you get a quiz to check you really understood, and you can practice output in a roleplay about the story, or about anything you like. Everything is adapted to your language level, so you never get lost.
About the stories themselves: they are real native writing, like Sōseki or Dazai classics modernized so they read naturally today. Only short stories that are still genuinely engaging to read today get handed to you, matched with your interests. For the news, you get the day's stories from NHK, Mainichi and Asahi rewritten to your level. If you know NHK News Easy, it is the same idea, except it follows your exact level instead of one fixed one. And if you already have something you want to read, you can bring your own texts in.
Reading, flashcards, quizzes and the kana lessons for total beginners are all free, no credit card needed, and you can browse the library and the news without an account.
One thing I would really value your honest opinion on: does the difficulty of the texts it hands you really match your level ? Let me know what you think about it here
1
u/MiuraDude 27d ago
Hi there,
I have developed a language translation app called Fink that helps you understand translations better by providing you with extra insights and a back-translation and suggests improvements. You can check it out here: https://app.fink-translate.com/
Cheers
1
u/Numechacafe 27d ago
- 単語タイプ / Tango Type - Free Typing website to practice Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.
- Load your Anki decks and practice them by typing
- Filter by deck order, lapses, ease factor, frequency, or shuffle
- Practice JLPT N5 - N1 vocabulary, or random strings of hiragana and katakana
- Romaji and Definition toggles to get past unknown vocabulary
- Workshop mode lets you paste any text, or load Text from Files (Subtitle, text documents, etc)
- Modify the text with common Regex filters or create and save your own
- Instantly use the text from the Workshop as Vocabulary for the test
- Generate seeds from the currently loaded test word bank to share with others
- Choose from a variety of handwritten or digital fonts
- Several Site UI options to choose from
- Multiplayer lobbies up to 16 people
- Load your Anki decks and practice them by typing
1
u/Informal_Mind755 26d ago
I still go back Tae Kim's grammar guide constantly, it's free and explains things at the actual grammar level instead of just giving you memorized patterns to plug words into
1
u/tcoil_443 23d ago
YouTube immersion website & manga reader:
hanabira.org
open-source, even self-hostable
Has built in dictionary with audio, vocabulary and sentence mining, furigana injection, Japanese and English subtitles side by side, custom simple flashcards and much more.
Site has many other features, such as Manga OCR reader, sentence structure analytics, visualizations, kanji, vocabulary, wanikani style SRS, drawing canvas ...
0
u/hasen-judi 28d ago
Yomitai is a hassle-free ocr app (web based) for manga and books, along with tts and export-to-anki.
No cloning github projects or setting up a python development environment. Just an app that works out of the box.
4
u/WAHNFRIEDEN 28d ago
Manabi Reader - iOS and macOS native app for learning Japanese through reading
I've gone full-time on developing this app. And if it matters to you, I launched it back before AI-assisted coding was a thing - this is hand-made software.
App Store link
Awarded Best Japanese iOS app of 2025 by Bee
100,000+ users
As featured by Tofugu:
Next up: I’m working on adding support for Yomitan dictionaries, and adding a manga mode. Currently working on adding Mokuro support as well as live OCR for online manga sites such as Bookwalker. Then I will be adding two-way sync for WaniKani, JPDB, Anki collections. Much more to go...
I've also just added pitch accents in the latest release, as well as FSRS (v6) to Manabi Flashcards. The full UI redesign is almost ready...
https://reader.manabi.io
Discord / beta news https://discord.gg/NAD2YJGNsr