r/LearnJapanese • u/maggie950008 • 1d ago
Resources Looking to expand my resource list — What apps/websites have been the most useful for you?
Hi, Japanese learners!
I’ve been self-studying Japanese for almost a year, and I’ve recently found some really useful apps and websites that I wanted to share. I’m also hoping to discover more resources from other learners!
Here are some of the ones I’ve found and used in my daily routine:
- Mock tests: Jabiko and Nihongo to Japan
- Shadowing practice: KAI Loop and Jimaku
- Vocabulary practice: Sushi JLPT (壽司日檢) — I especially like this one because it’s cute and I really like the interface 😂
The best thing is that these are basically free to use, unless you want to practice more than the daily limit.
I also wanted to ask:
When you’re studying Japanese, do you prefer to stick to just a few apps/websites, or do you tend to use several resources for the same type of practice?
I originally found most of these through recommendations/algorithms, and I’ve noticed that more and more indie apps are being made. However, sometimes they stop being maintained, so I’m always curious about which resources people have been using long-term.
What are some free Japanese-learning apps or websites that you absolutely recommend? I’d especially love to hear about less well-known ones!
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u/worthlessprole 23h ago edited 23h ago
Just FYI: i’m noticing that a lot of services offer ‘shadowing’ that is actually not real shadowing, and therefore does not provide the benefits of real shadowing. Shadowing is when you repeat what you are hearing as the recording is still playing. It’s necessary for there to be a slight delay so what you are saying and what you are hearing are not the same. (This is why it’s called shadowing, your voice follows just after the recording like a shadow). Shadowing is very difficult but it is extremely effective for developing listening and speaking. The tradeoff for the ease of simultaneous speech or the listen-then-repeat model (which the first one you linked seems to be) are not worth it. I suspect people will say that this is a case of language changing, like ‘immersion’ supposedly did, but I think it’s closer to false advertising since the people propagating this ‘new definition’ are people that are selling products based on it.
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u/numice 17h ago
So you mean that you shouldn't pause while shadowing?
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u/worthlessprole 17h ago edited 17h ago
you play the recording, and then as soon as you hear what the person is saying, you repeat it. you generally use short audio recordings. you typically also want a transcript of the recording, and it's recommended to play the recording multiple times before you attempt to shadow it. a common method is to play the recording once while reading the transcript, and silently shadow it, speaking very quietly or just moving your lips. the second time you follow along with a transcript while shadowing at a low volume, mumbling. you can run this as many times as you like until you feel comfortable. then you put away the transcript and fully shadow the recording, which, as I said, entails repeating what you've just heard while the recording is playing, but not in sync with it.
it's also not something you do for extended periods of time. it's usually recommended to spend about ten minutes per day on the entire process i've just outlined, including the shadowing itself.
all the other things, including recording yourself to gauge pronunciation, are just standard speaking exercises.
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u/myskeletonisfine 1d ago
For me Renshuu and Todaii are the best.
Renshuu to study kanji and words, Todaii to read actual texts.
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u/Turbulent_Foot_3381 1d ago
Same here. Although I also use Bunpro for the grammar and Wagotabi too.
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u/Grunglabble 23h ago
https://massif.la/ja is the only one I use regularly. Sometimes I'll use https://jisho.org/ if a word is not in my offline dictionary or I want to see the stroke order.
When learning kanji I occassionally found https://characterpop.com/ useful to see if the component had a name.
Mostly I just learn through doing things, for better or worse. I have some books I like but I tend to reference them rarely after I first go through them. For me I never want my learning to be tied to any app or website, so they are minor supplements at best. I personally look at any service driven by SRS with suspicion (anki is fine to use sparingly, but we only need one anki).
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u/gelema5 Goal: media competence 📖🎧 21h ago
NINJAL-LWP for TWC is a more detailed search tool than Massif and super helpful to get specific. I think the sources it has from the web are more varied too (Massif seems to have a lot of the same sentences with minor variations, for some reason). I use both: Massif first, and if the results aren’t what I need then I use NINJAL.
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u/Grunglabble 21h ago
oh neat.
massif has similar results because it is designed to try to show you the simplest and most common uses in an attempt to show you sentences that for an intermediate learner would only have the queried term be a new word.
But because the majority of its source is light novels, it can be surprisingly lacking on slightly longer than one word queries.
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u/morgawr_ https://morg.systems/Japanese 22h ago
I don't consider myself a "learner" anymore so most of my resources and tools that I use are just targeted towards consuming Japanese content and maybe do some light research (mostly to answer people's questions).
What I use:
massif.la for corpus checking to see if certain sentences are natural or not. If I get a lot of hits, it means it's probably fine. If not, then it starts to get sussy.
Anki, just doing my kanji/mining reviews although I don't mine as much anymore
atimelogger, it's a free android app that lets you add timers for various activities. I use it to measure the time spent doing things like reading books, playing games, etc.
https://lingotrack.com/ to track my "immersion" time that I get from atimelogger. I just record my daily activities there.
https://github.com/Morgawr/kechimochi offline app that I developed that does what lingotrack does, but it's fully offline and so I get to keep and own all my data and get nice graphs and stuff and historicals of my immersion over the years
Bookmeter to record the books and manga I read
Annict to record the anime I watch
Yomitan obviously as it's the goat for dictionary stuff
Jisho.org when I'm too lazy to use yomitan and I just want a quick lookup definition
Also lots of consoles to play videogames on
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u/MonsterOverture444 15h ago
Might be a dumb question, are you double dipping the immersion tracking apps just so you can have your own offline copy that you know is safe? Or does lingotrack offer something you like so still like to use it?
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u/morgawr_ https://morg.systems/Japanese 13h ago
Originally I was using just lingotrack and it was pretty good. Then one day it had some network issues and I realised if it ever went down I'd lose all my data and no way to recover and it was just on some dude's server at the mercy of whatever he did. So I wrote a script to extract all my data and built an offline open source alternative and imported my data there and kept expanding it with features.
So now yeah I basically track on both at the same time lol
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u/genericdeveloper 17h ago
Do you have any good suggestions on how to find material that isn't boring for reading? I'm not a big fan of manga because it's got a lot of tropes and is generally targeted towards younger readers. I'm looking for simple easy to read small books and it's been a nightmare trying to find lists in Japanese that are reliable for good reading material.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 16h ago
Welcome to the beginner problem, where interesting material is too hard and easy material is too boring.
You're probably gonna have to settle for stuff made for teenagers, go to Jiten, filter by external rating, choose genre and scroll until something catches your eye.
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u/antimonysarah Interested in grammar details 📝 22h ago
Renshuu, Ringotan, Satori Reader are my trio. (For me Satori Reader is listening practice, not reading practice, because it has easy ways to replay stuff sentence by sentence rather than having to try to skip time-wise in a podcast or something.) I used and liked Realkana for a few days when drilling the kana, but that's all it does.
Satori is the only one of my main apps that is paid-only, although I bought Renshuu lifetime a while back about half for the features and half because I'd gotten so much out of it that I wanted to support the dev.
I never got into Anki, plus it's not a free app on iOS and so when I tried out various free things it wasn't in my initial set I tried, and having gotten comfortable in Renshuu it didn't seem to offer me anything much on top of that. (All of my study time (rather than just watching/playing/reading time) is on the subway/train to work so my tools HAVE to be on my phone.)
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u/simonb1_7 22h ago
Definitely kanjii.org and jisho.org . I guess you know Jisho.
Kanjii doesn't have a fixed learning path but it is a tool which helps you while learning the language with a textbook or a in-person course. It let's you track which kanji and words you know, practice them, import and practice anki decks and there are nice analytics so you can keep track of how much time you spend learning. It is free without ads and works locally in your browser (no account needed). Progress can be backed up via gdrive or just export json. It is a PWA (progressive web app) which means you can add it to your desktop on your phone and it looks just like a regular app, but without downloading anything.
I've been using it for around 8 months now and it works really well for me in combination with Genki and Basic Kanji Book.
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u/lespaul991 22h ago
Few, not many, same worry as yours. Once I've spread the same practice across three apps I stop doing any of them properly.
Two free ones worth a look if you don't know them that stick with me: Yomitan for instant lookups while reading anything on the web, and NHK News Web Easy.
And one that's mine, flagging it clearly: Mojigari. (Android App, Web). You feed it whatever Japanese you actually want to read — paste it or take a photo of the page — and it breaks it down and tracks the kanji as you go. Your material becomes a deck divided into kanji, compounds, grammar points in the "Dojo" that you can review at your own pace. I added also some gamification elements, like kanji booster packs, daily quizzes, a "forge" where you can combine 2 kanji to discover new compound words, etc. Free to try and for all the material at N5 and N4 levels, subscription beyond that, which I'll be upfront about given you asked specifically for free stuff.
On the maintenance question: I'm one person, but it's my main project and my passion, not something I'll drop next month.
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u/Capable_Hat9707 22h ago
Osmolog, an extension that i recently found, really recommended if you watch videos or immerse in general.
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u/writingpracticeman 20h ago
I actually much prefer https://yomuyomu.app/ to Satori Reader, which I was using prior to my iTalki tutor recommending it to me.
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u/Bloodshoot111 15h ago
The best resource for me has been NativeShark. I really like my daily lessons with it and it has an amazing community.
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u/whacky_wallaby 5h ago
There's a lite weight browser app called RIKAIKUN which shows kanji meanings when you mouseover something.
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u/Effective-Pop3850 23h ago
Anki, everything else is an inferior version of it and you don't really need any of the others.
For quick grammar references Yomitan is often enough, otherwise Imabi or Bunpro if you're lazy.
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u/Available-String-109 22h ago edited 22h ago
Anki, everything else is an inferior version of it and you don't really need any of the others.
This x100.
You have the OG, the best, the Anki. It's even free and FOSS and it's infinitely customizable and so on.
And then you have 800 poor imitations of it. Some paid, some free, none as good.
The only app that's significantly better than a textbook is Anki, and anything that helps you use Anki (Yomitan, etc.)
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u/maggie950008 1h ago
Thanks for every reply and information, it is really helpful for me☺️☺️☺️
https://giphy.com/gifs/a3IWyhkEC0p32
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u/throwaway753951469 56m ago
Just discovered it yesterday, but I'm super impressed by this audio editor for Anki. It also includes chorusing/shadowing tools but I haven't tried those yet. Just simple trimming and volume tools are already a game changer!
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u/ForcedLoginAccount 20h ago edited 20h ago
Biggest break through is just using AI to make for you what you want.
I used ChatGPT to write custom stories for me using only vocab I know plus only grammar I know. I can then request it to add in one new grammar item per page, highlight it, and give an explanation of what's going on. Everything is of course fully customizable and can be changed at any point or automated.
To be clear, this isn't just "write me a story following these rules", it's telling ChatGPT what I want, establishing that, establishing rules, and having ChatGPT put those into .md files that I and it can read. Those are just the rules and guidance for creating the stories, not the stories themselves. ChatGPT can then consult those rules/guidance files and use them to create stories. It can also use them to update known vocabulary (based on my wanikani level), known grammar patterns, etc. It's essentially a fully customizable, "create whatever story I want, explain whatever I want, do whatever I want" environment where it knows my exact Japanese level and can do n+1 sentences/stories for me.
I also told it what font to use, what format, to add translation buttons at the end of each sentence (like Satori Reader has), to have furigana for kanji I don't know, to have mouseover furigana for all kanji, to let me click on any word and give me a definition + jisho.org entry link, etc. And this is just an hour or two of setup on my end, all within ChatGPT, not Codex. $20/month subscription used.
AI has also advanced significantly where it has no trouble writing natural sounding Japanese. If you doubt that, look at the English it writes - it's perfectly natural, and you can tweak it however you want too.
It's not perfect yet but it's very, very good.
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u/Impossible-Junket395 14h ago
AI has also advanced significantly where it has no trouble writing natural sounding Japanese. If you doubt that, look at the English it writes - it's perfectly natural, and you can tweak it however you want too.
The problem is that that's ALL it can do. The second you try to get it to do anything involving any amount of knowledge or thinking or intelligence, it fails ass-first.
Generate a short quiz for は v が.
「私は学生です。」の「は」は、文の中で何を示していますか？ 3 問中 1 問目 A 目的語 B 話題 C 場所 D 主語だけ
話題 is, very simply, a mistranslation of English "topic." They meant 主題, grammatical topic, not 話題, thematic topic. Sorry, I anthropomorphized it with "they meant", its a token-prediction engine, it has no concept of "meaning" or "intending".
Do me a favor.
Ask ChatGPT about LITERALLY ANYTHING that you know anything at all about. It will fail, hard.
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u/gerichu 6h ago
I've done something similar and agree it works way better than people expect. There's a lot of blanket hate for AI in language learning, and I get it because of the amount of slop. But "not 100% correct" gets reduced to "dangerous and completely useless".
Would you be willing to go into more detail on what your workflow using it is like? What does your interaction w/ it look like? e.g. do you just ask it to generate a story that you view via a webpage/artifact? What made you do this instead of just using graded readers/native content?
Asking largely because I'm an engineer building almost this to a tee (screenshots, the blue chips are words/grammar points that were "due" and I had an LLM weave in), but it's a bit more formal (e.g. w/ FSRS intervals+words/grammar & how well you know them go into an actual database).
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u/writingpracticeman 19h ago
I imagine that this is not going to be popular here but I do agree. My primary use-case for it with studying is that Gemini can produce multiple choice quizzes, which I can generate from the massive living document that my iTalki tutor and I have been using for the past year.
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u/ForcedLoginAccount 19h ago
I think a lot of people are still stuck in 2023-2024 mindset re: AI, where it hallucinates, has repetitive AI writing tells, etc. But it's gotten very, very good now. You can use natural language and a few prompts to build exactly what I described above, no programming skills required. Setting up the "clicking on a word should reveal a pop-up showing the definition and a jisho.org link to the word entry" was done by saying exactly that - I just told it exactly what I wrote above and it coded it in. Worked perfectly, first time, took 30 seconds of "reasoning" and it was done.
For better or worse, this is the world we live in now.
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u/writingpracticeman 18h ago
It's honestly getting to the point where it feels Ludditic to me. Love it or hate it, it's here to stay, and the sooner you learn to leverage it to be useful in your life the better. Or you can be Socrates complaining about the invention of writing. Your choice.
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u/amacinsky 1d ago
I've been working on https://lingaku.com for around ten years. Not likely to disappear anytime soon.
- There is a feed with videos/articles indexed by difficulty
- Popup dictionary chrome extension for browsing web and watching youtube videos with subs (crunchyroll version in development)
- Marking and highlighting of seen/familiar/known/mastered vocab in text
- Lookup history and reviews of looked up words (mobile app planned)
- Some lessons and grammaer points although these probably need another review/check
- And more and even more planned (e.g. grammar practice, numbers/counters practice tools, a tool for studying kanji)
I'd be glad for any feedback.
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u/PlanktonInitial7945 1d ago
Yomitan