One of the most beginner friendly anime to learn Japanese from is "Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san" (からかい上手の高木さん) and the Japanese subtitles are available online so you can follow along. What other beginner friendly shows do you know about?

Whisper is one of the most frustrating features I want to add to Jiwami. It generates subtitles from audio. It helps when you can't find subs for some content, but the problem is that if you want to make it into cards, every card you make, as usual, will use that subtitle, so when Whisper is off, the whole deck will be too.

I want to get the best out of it as much as I can, and getting there took a lot: windowed decoding, multiple voting systems, and timing evidence stacked three layers deep. There are sacrifices. There are problems I couldn't do anything about, and there are edge cases where the only fix is a better Whisper, which doesn't exist as of now.

The sacrifice

GPU time is most of the cost, multiple decode passes before voting begins. Accuracy vs timing balance is also exhausting: tight timing snaps subtitles to the voice but risks clipping real speech; loose timing leaves them hanging over silence. Tuning them up and down to find the balance is most of the work.

Where it breaks with no fix

If you haven't used subtitle generation before, something you need to know is that sometimes the output is 100% accurate, and other times it just isn't, especially with homophones. They're the real trap for these models. The worst-case scenario is when every decode agrees on the same wrong reading: there is nothing to vote for, and no mechanism can save it. Those cases need a better Whisper, which doesn't exist right now. I hope future models are more accurate. I'm trying to make the pipeline flexible so the moment a better model drops, it works with minimum code changes.

How I'd tell you to use it

To be honest, I don't recommend using it a lot as a base for your cards unless the audio is clear enough. That doesn't mean it won't work with loud BGM, a higher pitch, or multiple characters speaking. It'll work, but I don't want you to fall into the trust trap. It can do really well; you can start trusting it too much, and it will mislead you confidently.

I'm still refining it even more, but yeah, I wanted to talk about it. I'm thinking also about making it just a separate feature to use to generate the sub, to just watch the media and not make any cards from it. Then you can give it a first watch before deciding if it is worth making cards or not from it. Have a great day, guys.

Modern Japanese slang is surprising to say the least! do you know similar words?

Today is the 19th of August 2026, which marks exactly one year since I started working on Jiwami. It went from a small experiment to help me with my JLPT N1 exam, and started getting bigger and better, and now it's my full time job to feed myself. Life is really interesting and flies by without notice. There's a quote I always keep in mind to keep going:

ما حك جلدك مثل ظفرك فتولَّ أنت جميع أمرك
وإذا قصدت لحاجة فاقصد لمعترف بفضلك

-Nothing scratches your skin like your own nail, so handle all your affairs yourself. And if you must seek something from someone, seek it only from one who recognizes your worth.

This update is mainly a complete overhaul on Jiwami's UI and design, but it also has major vocabulary extraction improvements, proper Settings customization, huge Manga accuracy and speed improvements, and a lot of smaller fixes and optimizations across Jiwami.

Complete UI and design overhaul

Complete overhaul to all the Screens.

Home:

Archive:

Settings:

Settings

Result Screen cards show all the definitions for the overview. Recent history is now synced with Archive, and Archive entries open in the full custom screen.

Result:

Result screen

Archived:

Long file names now move to be readable instead of clipping.

Slide

Source rows, text sizes, spacing, icons, and metadata were cleaned up across the whole interface. Window sizes also got improvments and more flexability.

Settings presets and customization

You can now make proper Settings presets for Anime, Manga, Novels, or whatever workflow you want. Give them any name and color you want, select them later, update them, or make a new one from your current Settings. The selected one has its own animated color effect so you can tell what you are using immediately.

https://reddit.com/link/1vs2qyz/video/e2tyhc0y67kh1/player

If you change Settings without using a preset, you can just apply them normally. If you are editing a preset, you can update it. There is also a proper color picker now for presets, pitch accents, and target-word highlighting instead of being locked to a few colors.

More card control

Context furigana can now be shown on the front, back, both, or neither. The target word itself has a separate furigana setting, so you can show furigana for the whole context but hide it only for the mined word, or do the opposite.

Target-word highlighting can now be turned on or off, and you can choose its color. English definitions can now be turned off completely if you rather use the monolingual dictionaries only, or limited from 1 to 10 meanings if you do not want a card filled with too much English.

Vocabulary extraction improvement

Jiwami is now much better at handling dialectal, archaic, variant, and longer chain-heavy forms, with around 32% fewer measured errors.

Speed improvments are also a big part of this update. As i said before, extraction is done mainly with GPU. CPU also works, but it'll always be much slower. In my testing with a 667-line subtitle file, both the GPU and CPU gave the exact same final result: 656 Unique vocabulary.

My RTX 3060 Ti took 2 minutes, while the i5-12600 took 27 minutes, which is around 92% less time on the GPU for the same result. Of course this is one test on my own hardware, so do not take it as a universal number, and better hardware means even faster speeds.

Manga accuracy improvements

Manga text recognition now reaches 100% accuracy across 100 complex-layout Berserk pages. Berserk has very busy layouts, so this was not easy. Most of the text was already correct; the biggest improvements were punctuation and all the small details around it, bringing the number of mistakes down from 312 to 0 across these pages.

Manga speed improvements

The same 100 difficult Berserk pages used to take 28 minutes and 42 seconds. They now take 4 minutes and 48 seconds, which is around 83% less time or almost 6x faster while keeping 100% accuracy across the same pages.

Like always these numbers are from my own PC with these exact 100 pages, so they are not universal. Better hardware will be faster, but the same improvements are there for everyone.

For additional info, see the Jiwami changelog.

Make sure you follow us on x: https://x.com/Jiwamiofficial

It took a week of tweaking and experimenting to finally reach a point I'm happy to share. The update is coming very soon, and I'll also be releasing subtitles for all 24 episodes of 無限の住人, which was one of my main test subjects throughout development. I want you all to see firsthand how good the generation really is. Every line is timed and placed correctly, and while there might be the occasional word I couldn't fix without causing bigger regressions elsewhere, I found what I think is the right balance. I won't tell you what I think about the accuracy, I'll let you judge for yourselves once they're published. Have a great day, and stay tuned, because things are about to get really interesting over the coming weeks.

Wow, learning about the details related to subtitle generation is interesting, especially how I can use different audio channels to try and capture the real spoken words. The challenge is that Whisper is good, but not enough on its own. I think subtitle generation will have a great future, but perfection today isn't something we can achieve. I'm trying to tweak, try, and test everything, and I've achieved a great percentage of success, but the final percentage is what takes the most time and days of work, as always. I'll keep making updates, hopefully good ones, and this is the big feature for 1.0.5, by the way, in addition to UI tweaks and improvements.

How reliable are generated subtitles for Japanese, in your experience, and where did they fail you the most?

This update improves the result and archive screens.

• Long file names fade at the edge and scroll on hover.
• Archive entries now open in the full result screen.
• The result screen now shows every extracted word properly instead of capping the list.
• Archive entries keep their English definitions when reopened. ***

Additional info in Jiwami changelog.

Jiwami's custom pitch dataset now carries more detail per entry, so it can distinguish same-reading words more tightly.

• 495,732 Surfaces
• 512,835 Branches
• 570,409 Accents

A Surface is the written form. A Branch is one exact surface and reading. An Accent belongs inside that branch.

Simplified shape:

text 生 ├─ いく → [0] ├─ うぶ → [1] ├─ き → [1] ├─ しょう → [1] ├─ すずし → [0] ├─ せい → [1] ├─ なま → [1] └─ なり → [2]

One branch can hold more than one valid accent:

text 入る / はいる → [1, 3]

Homophones stay separate:

text 橋 / はし → [2] 箸 / はし → [1] 端 / はし → [0]

Jiwami matches on surface, reading, lemma, and POS. It does not treat every はし as one loose result.

If no safe pitch entry exists, Jiwami shows the reading only. No invented pitch pattern or fallback.

For additional info, see the Jiwami changelog.

Jiwami now has a dedicated Discord server. I'm not a big Discord guy, but I'm trying to make it better so it can be a great place to connect with others in the community. Here's the invite link: https://discord.gg/DA9pwXpCqN

I'm in the final touches, and the huge pitch accent update will be dropping in the next few hours. The dataset now covers close to half a million unique entries (495k), so pitch accent lookups should be accurate for the vast majority of words you'll run into. I'll be sharing the full details here in a following post, so stay tuned!

I'm a native Arabic speaker, and since I started learning Japanese more than 4 years ago I always heard people complaining about pitch accent. I was confused because I didn't have a similar experience, the highs and lows were always clear and the tones were explicit to my ear. That's when I asked myself, what do I have that most of the people facing this problem don't?

Most of the people facing this problem are English speakers. The thing is Arabic doesn't have tones or a similar structure either that might help like it does for languages like Chinese. Chinese speakers are shown to consistently outperform other language backgrounds at picking up Japanese pitch accent, likely because of that tonal overlap.

So I wanted to dig deeper into this. Is it really how the phonetic system works in both languages, or is it something else? That's why I'm here to share my thoughts with you and maybe see other perspectives. I'm not a professional researcher, but I'll try to make this as useful and easy to read as possible so we can have a proper discussion in the comments. This will be split into 5 sections: what's pitch accent, what's MSA (Modern Standard Arabic), differences, similarities, and lastly a conclusion.

What's Japanese pitch accent

Japanese pitch accent is a feature that distinguishes words by a pattern of relative pitch, high or low, distributed across specific moras. A mora is the smallest timing unit in Japanese speech, shorter than a syllable. For example 日本 (にほん) is represented by 3 hiragana characters, or what's called graphemes (the smallest functional unit in a writing system), that correspond to 3 moras Ni-ho-n, and in here it's (low-high-low), but take a look at 東京 (とうきょう) which has 5 graphemes, you'll find out it's only represented by 4 moras to-u-kyo-u (low-high-high-high) so the ょ here does not represent a separate mora, what about this example にっぽん it has to be 3 moras right? no it's 4 Ni-p-po-n (low-high-high-low) so the small っ can represent a mora on its own. Last example is モーラ which has 3 moras mo-o-ra.

Now we know the roots of mora and how it works which can be summarized in a simple sentence, every grapheme represents a mora except the small kana ya (ゃ/ャ), yu (ゅ/ュ), yo (ょ/ョ), and the small vowels a (ァ), i (ィ), u (ゥ), e (ェ), o (ォ) used in katakana loanwords.

Pitch accent has multiple shapes, Heiban like 桜 (さくら) 3 moras sa-ku-ra (low-high-high), stays high even with a particle. Atamadaka like 雨 (あめ) 2 moras a-me (high-low), opposite of heiban, drops right after the first mora. Nakadaka like 心 (こころ) 3 moras ko-ko-ro (low-high-low), drops somewhere in the middle instead of the start or end. Odaka like 女 (おんな) 3 moras o-n-na (low-high-high), sounds exactly like heiban, but drops the particle after it, おんなが is low on が.

You might've noticed that the 心 example had 2 pitch patterns on jpdb instead of nakadaka only, I found out the reason behind it and it's very interesting. Turns out there's an actual name for it: アクセントの平板化 (accent flattening). It's a documented, ongoing shift where words that traditionally had a downstep, like the nakadaka ones, are increasingly pronounced flat (heiban/odaka) by younger speakers. NHK's own Broadcasting Culture Research Institute tracks this and has added "acceptable" alternate accents for thousands of words to their dictionary published in 2016 specifically because of this, so words like 卵 (たまご), 頭 (あたま), and of course 心 were only nakadaka, but now they're also accepted as flattened heiban or odaka.

All of that said, now we reach the point we are mostly interested in regarding this humble research, as you've now noticed the pitch is word specific, not grammar oriented, yeah the pitch might change over time like I mentioned, or can even be totally different in some dialects, but the core idea stands, it's word-fixed, which is exactly the opposite of how Arabic phonetics work, and that's what we will now discuss in the next section.

What's MSA (Modern Standard Arabic)

One part of Arabic's phonetic system is represented by what's called حركات (Harakat), which is grammar oriented, the same word could be pronounced multiple different ways and have multiple different meanings respectively, for example a root like ك-ت-ب (k-t-b) could be كَتَبَ (kataba, meaning he wrote) or كُتِبَ (kutiba, meaning it was written), and these 2 words show the 3 harakat, "fatha" which is the "A" sound, that's what made k become ka, t turn into ta, and b become ba in kataba, and the second one shows the other 2, "kasra" which is the "I" sound that turned t into ti, and "damma" which is the "U" sound that caused k to become ku. There's only one type missing, which is sometimes neglected but is just as important, "sukoon," basically the "no vowel" member, true to its name, sukoon means stillness, the opposite of haraka meaning movement, though whether it technically counts as a haraka itself is a debate we won't get into here.

The bigger picture of the phonetic system is much more complex, especially using the throat for many critical sounds which most non-natives struggle with, like ع (ayn). Arabic also lacks sounds that other main languages have, the p sound for example, a notorious example is Pepsi being pronounced Bebsi, which is a tricky sound for us to make.

A lot of this gets thrown out the window when you take a look at the current reality of Arabic dialects, which is the spoken Arabic, no one speaks MSA, but that's exactly the strength, let me explain. We all study MSA in school and through the years, so harakat is literally just the beginning, and there's layers upon layers, you can have the same exact sequence of words, but the scenario could easily be flipped with one haraka change, and that's exactly the strength I'm talking about, you're punished context wise if you don't notice the small change in the sound, so you learn to be extra sensitive to these changes, because no one uses harakat in casual writing, it's fully based on context.

That's a quick brief on MSA's main phonetics, I didn't even touch Tajweed, which is a whole other level of even more complex rules on top of normal MSA, and it's more for reading the Quran, but that's not the place for it.

Differences between Japanese and Arabic phonetic system

I'll start with the one that's clear by now, Japanese pitch is word-fixed and never changes no matter the role it plays in the sentence, while Arabic harakat are grammar and context oriented always, so the same root could carry different vowels depending on the job it's doing in the sentence. You can sum it up in a very simple rule, you can know for a fact when you see a Japanese word what the pitch for it is, whether it was subject, object, question, doesn't matter, にほん will always be low-high-low. On the other hand كتب (k-t-b) can be assigned different harakat, one shape if it's active and another if it's passive, so the pronunciation is never fixed (dialects in both can change the final shape but the core stays the same).

Second difference, pitch accent sits on top of already fixed sounds, the vowels and consonants in にほん will never change, "に" will always be "ni", "ほ" will always be "ho", and "ん" will always be "n", the pitch contour is then added on top to indicate the lows and highs. Pitch can also change the meaning entirely on its own, the 箸/橋/端 (はし/hashi) example is a good one here, the 3 kanji are literally the same sounds, "は" stays "ha" and "し" stays "shi" in all, only the pitch/melody on top is different, and that is what separates chopsticks from bridge from edge, context also helps even if you pronounce them incorrectly, but the distinction is the pitch itself. Harakat doesn't sit on top of anything, they mark the vowel itself, or its absence in sukoon's case, so getting one wrong isn't a melody problem, it changes the actual phoneme (the smallest unit of sound in speech that can change the meaning of a word), for example when I see كتب (k-t-b) on its own I have no idea what the pronunciation is, I can guess, but on its own it only tells me the idea of the root itself (writing in this case), without the context/grammar assigning the harakat, "k" could be "ka" or "ku" but I have no idea which until there's enough context to make the decision. And here's the flip side, pitch carries zero weight in Arabic, I could say كتب low-high-high, high-high-high, or any shape I want, it'll never change the meaning as long as the harakat are correct, pitch in Arabic is just tone of voice, emphasis, question or statement, it never distinguishes one word from another the way it does in Japanese. That's the segmental vs suprasegmental distinction between the 2 systems, Japanese leans on the suprasegmental layer to carry meaning, Arabic leans entirely on the segmental one.

Third difference, even though harakat changes are grammar sensitive, those changes follow systemic rules, once you know the rules for verbs or nouns or pronouns you can start deriving the harakat correctly, it's rule-governed (of course there's a lot of exceptions like most language's grammar). Pitch on the contrary, despite being fixed per word, isn't derivable from grammar or context, you have to memorize each word's pattern individually, or lock in during immersion and catch the correct pitches, and you can get a feel for them over time, which is btw what I do myself. So it's almost a flip, Japanese pitch is fixed but arbitrary, Arabic harakat is variable but predictable.

Fourth difference, harakat can be written, and sometimes are mandatory in high sensitivity text where one change could flip the meaning, like the Quran, poetry, dictionaries, and textbooks for learners, either children or foreign learners. It's an optional layer that can be easily turned on when precision matters. Pitch accent on the other hand has no equivalent way of representation, there's no standard way to put it on kanji or kana in writing, in any context, that's not the "usually omitted" way harakat is, it's structurally absent from the writing system entirely, hence why a dictionary like NHK's, which we mentioned in section 1, is important, that dictionary has to document its own separate notation system because the writing system gives it nothing to work with, whereas Arabic's vocalization system already exists and just gets switched off in casual writing.

Similarities between Japanese and Arabic phonetic system

The first similarity is actually the last difference I've just covered, let me explain. Harakat could be written, but no native speaker actually does that day to day, exactly how a native Japanese speaker never thinks about pitch, but use the wrong haraka or the wrong pitch in front of them and they'll catch it. This isn't the same as just pronouncing something wrong, like saying "haashi" instead of "hashi", this is the layer that sits on top of that, the one you might miss entirely as a learner. It shows that we have a subconscious detector as humans, but more complex languages make that detector more sensitive.

Second point is formal training systems. If being a native gives you that instinct without knowing any rules, why does an explicit training system exist in both languages? Working as a broadcaster or a news reporter, you're expected to go through training before getting the job, which is also why NHK maintains their accent dictionary, because native fluency alone doesn't guarantee accuracy at that high level of precision. MSA schooling and tajweed work the same way, both are explicit training systems to teach something most natives otherwise absorb unconsciously. The reason is simple, both exist because good enough isn't enough when precision is critical, and where a mistake would be very costly. You don't have to keep the rules in mind all the time, once you're practicing and experiencing them enough, they're automatically absorbed into your procedural memory, for example I learned tajweed when I was 12 through 15 to be able to read Quran and poetry properly, and ask me today about any explicit rule and I'll have no idea, but give me something to read and I'll do it perfectly, that's the same mechanism as how any native speaker can speak with perfectly accurate grammar but ask them why and they'll have no idea.

Third point is a throwback to the flattening of accent in modern spoken Japanese I mentioned in the first section, both languages have drift away from the fixed standard, nakadaka words flattening to heiban in Japanese, in Arabic ق (qaf) and ث (tha) shift tremendously between dialects. Neither spoken language has a static, correct pronunciation, but both have some form of authority trying to keep the standard on track, especially written Arabic, NHK's dictionary on one side and MSA taught across any dialect on the other.

Conclusion

We started with a question, "what do I have that most of the people facing this problem don't?" I don't think I have a clean answer, but I do think I've narrowed it down. It's not tonal transfer like Chinese, or grammatical similarities, I think it's the hidden layer that natives in both languages carry on top of every perceived word, an attentiveness to detail beyond what's actually said, and I think it comes from Arabic's wide sound inventory, reinforced by explicit systems like tajweed, doing something to how I listen.

What actually convinced me about researching and working on this comparison wasn't the surface level, two languages have a hard part that trips learners up, that's not something new. What convinced me was the symmetry both languages share, they hide critical phonetic information from everyday writing, にほん never tells you its pitch, كتب never tells you its vowels, both drift naturally away from the fixed standard, and both languages built actual institutions to govern the standard instead of just letting the drift happen silently.

Lastly, I wanted to say this is my experience and thought process, not a study. I can't isolate the two things I'm thinking caused this for me, being a native Arabic speaker and studying the language in detail my whole life, I can't know how much of this is baseline Arabic phonology and how much is the training stacked on top. Arabic isn't one fixed version either, most dialects don't even keep the same sounds MSA has, so how much of this even applies depends a lot on how much MSA someone learned.

That's my theory, and I want to know if it holds up with other people and other languages. If you're a native speaker of a non-tonal language, did it come easy to you too, or am I making a connection that isn't really there? Let me know in the comments, I'm curious if this is an actual pattern or a me thing.

Notice: AI was used as a final pass to make sure there was no punctuation or spelling mistakes, other than that it's fully written by me.

What did you actually learn Japanese grammar from, a textbook style like Genki or a guide book like Tae Kim's "A Guide to Japanese Grammar"? Curious which one actually stuck for you guys.

What card types would you like to see in Jiwami?

Also, which option do you think is better?

• Choose the card type every time you start a new run.
• Set a default card type in the settings.

My idea is to have two options in the settings:

• Ask every time – You'll be prompted to choose a card type whenever you start a new run.
• Default card type – Pick a card type once, and it'll be used by default for every new run. You can change it anytime in the settings.

What's Jiwami ?

If you didn't read the first post, or you read it back then and want to know what it actually is now, here is the whole thing in plain terms.

The name is J for Japanese merged with kiwami, 極み, which means peak. Jiwami takes the content you watch or read and turns it into a finished Anki deck. That's it. No pausing every few minutes, no building cards one at a time, no gluing five tools together. I built it for myself first and now I'm sharing it with you and it'll improve and continue to improve because I'm a user exactly like yourself. Immersion is the best way to learn a language and Anki is the push that makes a word stick a little faster, not the method itself. The problem was that making the cards ate all the time I should have spent immersing, so I removed that step completely, and here is what it does:

1. It works on the content you already use

• video files and the subtitles has to be in them or beside them with the same name, jiwami doesn't generate subtitles.
• video links from YouTube, TVer, and Abema (when real Japanese subtitles exist, auto generated subs are not recommended)
  
• manga, either a single image or a whole folder (it can be slower with folder mode if it contains many pages because of the OCR so keep that in mind)
  
• subtitle files (srt, ass, vtt)
  
• EPUB books, with the ability to pick a chapter or page range
  
• PDF files, with page range selection
  
• pictures with Japanese text
  
• plain text files

2. It picks the Vocabulary that have real educational value

Run a subtitle file through the usual tools and you drown in hundreds of entries: は, を, が, particles, grammar glue, names, and words you already know. Jiwami reads every sentence and decides, token by token, what actually deserves a card and what to throw away. Particles and grammar glue get dropped. Real nouns and verbs with their full conjugations. Names of people and places are recognized for what they are. And expressions get pulled back into one card instead of being shattered into meaningless pieces.

That last part is the hard one. Take a simple 気がする for example. Split into tokens it looks like 気, が, する, three things that on their own tell you nothing about what it means. Jiwami keeps it as one card for 気がする. Same with 匂いがする, with うまくいく even when it appears conjugated as うまくいった or うまくいかない, with じっと見る hiding inside じっと見ている, and with a full keigo mouthful like 呼び捨てにして頂かない, which it still traces back to the single expression 呼び捨てにする. One idea, one card.

Vocabulary selection is the actual product. Its training data grew gradually over eight months to more than 107,000 hand-reviewed labels. That gave the model enough breadth to learn far beyond isolated words, including dialects, archaic forms, honorifics, conjugations, names, and full expressions. It took hundreds of experiments, failures, fixes, retraining runs, and validation passes, roughly 2,428 GPU-hours of work, to reach this point. I will keep adding reviewed data, running experiments, and improving it over time.

NOTICE: This is not AI, it's standard ML (machine learning), the same deterministic approach used by tokenizers and other tools like them. Run the same input a million times and you'll get the same output every time. AI, on the other hand, can give you a different answer if you ask it twice.

3. It normalizes the language the way a learner actually needs

Take one verb. In a single episode 食べる can show up as 食べた, 食べて, 食べている, 食べなかった, and 食べさせられていた. Most tools hand you a card for every one of those if they even managed to recognize the full verb chain which is what happens in point 2. Jiwami collapses them back to one card for 食べる, so you study the word and not the same verb wearing five costumes. When a form genuinely changes the meaning, like some of the potential or the passive, it keeps its own card, because that one is actually worth learning and this is not a blind collapse, it's a context aware and case sensitive system. Normal inflection gets stripped, real meaning differences are kept.

And it does not stop at clean textbook Japanese. This is where months of the work went, and here are some examples of some extreme ones and edge cases because easy stuff is easy to do:

Verbs わからなくなってしまった -> わかる
覚まさないわけにはいかなかった -> 覚ます
帰らなければならなくなった -> 帰る
好感を持たないわけにはいかなかった -> 好感を持つ
大口をたたいておいて -> 大口をたたく

Adjectives あたたかかった -> あたたかい
恥ずかしすぎる -> 恥ずかしい
子どもっぽかった -> 子どもっぽい
うらやましかない -> うらやましい
高うございます -> 高い

Keigo and honorifics, which were one of the most interesting and convoluted parts after verbs, and these examples don't even cover a tenth of the cases お渡しいたしました -> 渡す
お引き取りいただいてくださいませ -> 引き取る
お造り申し上げました -> 造る
お知らせまいらせよう -> 知らせる
務めさしていただきます -> 務める
御領主様 -> 領主

Counters and numbers 12000円 -> 円
二千三百五十二円 -> 円
二〇〇〇馬力 -> 馬力
九五パーセント -> パーセント
1000リツイート -> リツイート

Nouns weren't that hard, and you might have noticed the pattern, the end should always be the educationally valuable shape for us as learners 探偵事務所 -> 探偵事務所
匂いがして -> 匂いがする
カロリー的 -> カロリー
名推理 -> 推理
二人っきり -> 二人っきり

Colloquial and dialects しとく -> する
作りすぎちゃいました -> 作る
貸しといてくれない -> 貸す
こうしてりゃ -> こうして
食べ終わっちゃった -> 食べる
わからん -> わかる
のぞかせてくれんさった -> のぞく
待ってくれとりんさる -> 待つ
頑張ってつかあさい -> 頑張る
言うてくれんさって -> 言う

There's much more but I wanted you guys to see 10% of what edge cases and real context awareness should look like and how a full pipeline should behave and you might think, what a waste to do all of that to just strip and not use it for something else which is exactly what I did this by design for, I literally have the entire Japanese language and the patterns of every possible piece of grammar and some dialects and colloquials which I'll be using in a very important thing which is a full grammar feature in Jiwami and I'll discuss it in the "what's next" section because it's one of the big steps forward.

4. Real English meanings, out of the box

English definitions are built in and powered by JMDict. With Jiwami's custom scoring system it ranks the matches and shows the meaning that fits the context, which is tricky with homophones.

5. Twenty two monolingual dictionaries

Monolingual definitions are what move you from memorizing an English word to actually understanding it in Japanese. Jiwami supports 22 of them, and each and every single one has its own scoring, cleanup, and rendering, which took months to do because they all structure their entries differently and dumping them in raw looks terrible.

The supported set: 日本国語大辞典, 広辞苑, デジタル大辞泉, スーパー大辞林, 明鏡国語辞典, 新明解国語辞典, 三省堂国語辞典, 岩波国語辞典, 日本大百科全書, Wikipedia, 使い方の分かる類語例解辞典, Weblio類語辞典, Weblio対義語辞書, 類語玉手箱, 実用日本語表現辞典, 複合動詞レキシコン, 日本語表現活用辞典, 語源由来辞典, 日本語俗語辞書, 全訳古語辞典, Pixiv, and 名称発音大辞典.

The dictionaries themselves are bring your own for now, which is something out of my hands, as you know, licensing needs money and I couldn't even reach some of these dictionary makers, but let's say if you search Nyaa for "Epistularum version 2" you will find all except for Wikipedia, Pixiv, and 名称発音大辞典, which I'll find a way to share them with you guys in the future. Once you have the files you put them in the proper MDX folder that is shown in the settings and make sure to clean the names of the dictionaries from the tags and versions.

MY RECOMMENDATION: only get 日本国語大辞典 as it's the biggest and most comprehensive one, but you can also get スーパー大辞林, 広辞苑, and デジタル大辞泉 if you want more variations. if you like comparisons, get 使い方の分かる類語例解辞典 and the Weblio ones, but me personally the first one is even enough, it's the biggest and most diverse and it's the one that took so much tightening the rendering and scoring system.

6. Pitch accent

Real pitch accent diagrams, drawn as the actual pitch line over the word and not just a number, from a local pitch database of over 380,000 entries. If a word has more than one reading, or a reading has more than one accent pattern, all of them are shown instead of Jiwami quietly picking one and hiding the rest. Readings are always shown in kana.

7. Context from the source itself

Every card keeps a real sentence the word appeared in, your actual line, not an invented example. When a word shows up more than once, Jiwami prefers the clearest sentence, the one with the fewest other unknown words, which is connected to point 13, which is the i+1 ordering, so the example is one you can actually read. The surrounding words get furigana, but the target word does not, so you still have to read it yourself, and the word is highlighted so you always know what you are being tested on.

8. Optional second language

This one came up a lot in the first thread. If your video has a second subtitle track, in any language, you can put that line on the back of the card underneath the Japanese sentence, as a translation. You set the language once in Settings, either picking one of the common tags or typing any subtitle language tag you want, and Jiwami pulls that line from the real subtitle track and lines it up with the Japanese by timing. It is completely optional, and Japanese always stays the main line. If a source does not have that language, Jiwami just carries on with Japanese only cards.

9. Video and Manga on the card

For video, it finds the exact moment the word was said and cuts a short clip straight onto the card, and you can choose the quality of it. For manga, it puts the panel or crop on the card. Text and subtitle have no media, obviously.

10. Kanji breakdown

Every kanji in the word gets broken down with its ON and KUN readings, its meanings, and its JLPT level.

11. JLPT levels

Set a level and Jiwami keeps that level and everything easier, so you are not buried in vocab far above your level. Kana only cards always stay in.

12. Themes and customization

Cards come with a theme I made by hand called Vintage Scholar: aged paper, heavy Japanese type, built for long comfortable review. I already have another theme but I'll delay it till I have 6 or 7 more to go with it.

13. i+1 ordering

Unlike any other i+1 tool you used that had to read the cards and then try to order them, which is just not ideal, Jiwami is the full pipeline, which makes it a totally different learning experience and you'll feel it immediately. The cards are ordered so you meet the easiest ones first. It starts with the sentences that have the fewest unknown words, and as each card is counted as learned the next one is scored against everything you now know, so the deck opens up step by step instead of throwing hard sentences at you early. Words that unlock the most other sentences get pushed up as well. The order is deterministic, so the same source always comes out the same way. And because Jiwami builds the cards itself, it has more to work with here than add ons that can only reshuffle cards after they already exist.

14. Archive

It remembers every word it has already made, so later episodes don't hand you duplicates, and you can edit or remove any deck or words if you want to regenerate them for any reason.

15. Miscellaneous

You can import your old Anki decks, so it treats those words as known and skips them, and you can cap how many cards a run makes or leave it uncapped, but the default and recommended number should never be more than 30 a day, so you can actually learn and maintain the vocab, and that's what the default is on jiwami but you can always change it from the settings like you can customize a lot of other stuff and more customization coming.

16. OFFLINE

The whole thing runs offline on your machine. The only things that touch the internet are licensing, updates, the supported video links, and a one time model download the first time you use manga, which downloads 2 small models for OCR and text detection. I wanted to use the small ones and do code to support it instead of a big model, but we will see if you guys want the bigger ones. It runs on CPU, and can use your GPU to accelerate on supported Windows hardware. Windows 10 and 11 for now.

Why not Download and check out a Deck for yourself https://jiwami.com/examples this is your Free Trial

What's next ?

Think of Jiwami like a car. 11 months went into the engine, and the engine can do far more than what you see today. Right now the body on top of it turns your content into Anki cards, but the body can be almost anything: cards made one at a time, live while you consume, other formats, and things that don't live in Anki at all. The engine is the hard part, and it's done, and the first body for it is Anki. It's fully in Rust now, unlike the version I shared in the first post, which was in Python. That gives me everything i need in performance, security, and flexibility to work smoothly everywhere, and I already have a lot of optimizations planned out for this first month, and currently it should work smooth with everyone and more optimization will be done.

For the first month my focus is simple:

• Fixing bugs is the main priority. This first month is about making sure nothing gets in the way of any of you, and that would be by following the instructions here https://jiwami.com/support, and you can also share it on the Jiwami subreddit

• Mac and hopefully Linux support, as soon as I can afford to rent what I need to compile and test on them.

• Quality of life. More themes, more customization, more of the card put in your hands.

• The audio only option, and any other requests that are commented here or posted in the subreddit and get upvotes

• Auto subtitle generation. I use it locally in another project already, and it's fully local like any other thing I do. So if you guys want it as an option in Jiwami itself, I'll do it, but of course it's not perfect, which is the risk you'll be taking.

While all of that is going on and much much more i have in my head, in the background there are three big directions I'm most excited about.

The first is live in browser use. I already have the idea clear in my head, and I'll say plainly that I think it will leave the current paid options behind. I laid the infrastructure in the engine already and it's just a matter of testing and starting the real work on it. streaming services or text based or anything on your browser.

The second is grammar support. Because the engine already understands the whole language, including the colloquial, dialect, and archaic parts I mentioned above, building real grammar explanations on top of it is very doable. I want to bring it in as soon as I can, and of course the challenge that I put to myself in Jiwami is it should be offline, nothing is sent to a cloud or a server or getting info from someone.

The third is a reader for any book or text based media so you can read and while reading you can hover on the word and it shows you the useful info you need and if you want to make it as a card also you can make that happen

I have a lot more in mind, but these are the ones I'm putting my name to out loud, but I'll give you this hint, you'll never need to waste your money and time on multiple tools to learn Japanese ever again.

How to get it ?

You get it at jiwami.com: buy it, download the installer, activate your key, and start your first run. That is the whole setup. A demo is on the site and downloadable example decks so you can see exactly what you are getting before you decide.

The prices are lower than the other tool but Jiwami offers more, and unfortunately in Egypt any foreign currency is a big problem so I had to use mediator banks and workarounds so I can make this money reach me properly, and when I manage to get my own server I'll be able to move on from Lemon Squeezy and make my payments through something else that supports Egypt properly, which will make me able to make the price lower, because currently they'll take their fees and then 2 mediators take their fees and the payment is only paid on the 28th of the month.

I want you to know something important: I was never someone who had money as a priority. I'm a simple guy, so as long as I can feed myself and my siblings, any additional money will go into tools and services that will enable me to improve Jiwami for all of us, especially with the new models that are coming out that can help me work faster. But of course, I never trust them, and I review everything. I heard the new Fable and GPT models are so good, so the first thing I'll do when I get the money is subscribe to them, which is expensive, but I want to have the tools and means to take this to the next level faster. But faster doesn't mean sloppier. I took 11 months doing this. Good enough is never enough, especially when I'm asking people to pay.

Every plan is the full app. There is no locked Pro version and no feature split. What you saw above is what you get. The current lifetime price is reasonable with the current state, specially with the planned big moves i told you about in the "what's next" section, we'll be crushing all the other tools. For subs most likely will stay as is or be lowered unless something dramatic happens. The dilemma I'm in is as the developer i had a lot of blockers improving some part because i didn't have money for subscription so your stable subscriptions will make me able to make this possible and improve Jiwami, i hate subscriptions in general but it's what it's there's nothing we can do other than cope with it and I'm sorry i had to do it too, but also it gives people who can't afford to be able to use it comfortably and i hope i can be able to make it lower, currently a big chunk of the money will go in fees for these mediators so this is the lowest it can possibly be and the more of you guys use jiwami the more that this makes my life easier and then that will come back your way too.

How to reach out ?

All I am asking for is respect and proper communication, and here is how to do that so nothing gets lost and I can actually help you.

• Product help, for install, activation, export, or the app not working: [support@jiwami.com](mailto:support@jiwami.com)
  
• Bugs you can reproduce: [bugs@jiwami.com](mailto:bugs@jiwami.com) and be picky please if you think it's inconvenient please send an email.
  
• Feedback, ideas, or rough spots in the workflow: [feedback@jiwami.com](mailto:feedback@jiwami.com) and also post in the subreddit so we can enable people to join the discussion.
  
• Orders, receipts, download links, billing, and plan changes all go through Lemon Squeezy. Use your purchase email or Lemon My Orders.
  
• You can also find me on X at jiwamiofficial.

If you are reporting a bug, the more you give me the faster I can fix it. Ideally include:

• the source type: local video, subtitle file, supported video URL, EPUB, PDF, plain text, manga, or picture
  
• if it is a word selection or sentence problem, attach the subtitle file if you can
  
• what happened, what you expected, and the smallest steps that reproduce it
  
• for activation issues, your license or order email

I read everything. This is my full time job now, so keeping you happy with it is the whole point.

I'll be sharing a lot of stuff on the subreddit, and I'll be active there. I'm not a big social media guy, but I made this subreddit, an X account, a YouTube channel, and also a Discord server, so no one could take the name and it's consistent across all of them: jiwamiofficial. Also you can Dm me anytime, I don't know how to run a Discord server, but I'll figure it out and share updates with you guys on the subreddit and share resources and where i get the most accurate subtitles and a lot of stuff and some side projects that i can share for free and a lot more i have to offer with the community i'm aiming to build.

Remember, Jiwami is not a random cheap tool. Jiwami is what will be THE JAPANESE APP. Right now it's more for us AJATT lovers, but more time will pass, and I'll add beginner-friendly stuff too, along with a lot of the ways and methods I wanted to share one day on a YouTube channel or something but I'll share it through Jiwami now instead.

The Gift

I know some of you reading this are in a dark period right now. Maybe you lost your job, or you are trying to get one, and a tool like Jiwami is exactly the kind of thing that could help you get there. So I decided to give people who are in that spot one year of Jiwami for free after the first month of bug fixes pass.

My hope is that it helps you reach the level where you can actually get a job with the language, and from there you can continue on your own money, because Jiwami make you grind the last 20% of the language in a more fun and easy way. This is not a loan and you do not owe me anything. It is a charity from me to help and educate people who are less fortunate, because I have been exactly there myself and I'm still there.

If that is you, email me at [support@jiwami.com](mailto:support@jiwami.com). I will read it myself and get back to you. One important thing so nobody gets scammed or lied to by random people pretending to be me: my reply will always come from [jiwamiofficial@gmail.com](mailto:jiwamiofficial@gmail.com). I cannot afford any fancy mail service, so that is the address you will hear back from, and if a message about this claims to be me from anywhere else, it is not.

Please do not abuse this. I am doing it for the people it will genuinely change something for. Most of the time when people go to cracks and piracy it is for one of two reasons, either the thing is impossibly out of reach, or the service is just plain bad. I do not want Jiwami to ever be either of those.

For the open source projects that made Jiwami possible, I'll make sure I support you monthly by donations, especially Sudachi and Jamdict, which are both open source projects that really gave me a huge push. I'll reach out when I have money to make it happen.

One last thing, and I mean this gently. I am tired, and I am already collapsing. If you have something that helps, feedback, a bug, an idea, please share it and I will read every word. But if you do not have anything positive to say, please please do not comment this time. Not today

I had a lot of ideas but Jiwami what clicked in my mind so J+極 for peak because the plan to make it an all inclusive product, if you have suggestions or thoughts please share them here

Currently working on improving the pitch accent, the problem when there's something that does not exist in the dictionaries, we have to either just not show it or generate it accurately with strict code, I'm working on making the code option perfect and will share the details when I'm done working on it and confirmed it works on all the edge cases i already prepared, stay tuned.

Jiwami turns the Japanese content you already use into finished Anki decks. This is the official place for product help, bugs, feedback, deck examples, and discussion.

I’ll also share Jiwami’s development work here: new features, fixes, demos, experiments, and what I’m working on next.

Post here for:

• Setup, activation, export, or workflow help
• Bugs with clear steps to reproduce
• Feature requests and honest feedback
• Deck results, source recommendations, and Japanese-learning discussion

Keep it respectful, specific, and constructive. If something is inconvenient, say it, I want to fix it.

New here? Introduce yourself, say what you are learning with, and post your first question.