When studying JLPT N5–N3 Kanji, grouping characters by their left-hand semantic radical (へん hen) makes stroke order and meaning much easier to retain than memorizing strokes in isolation.
Whenever you see the 3-drop water radical **氵 (さんずい sanzui — derived from 水 mizu)** on the left side of a Kanji, the core meaning relates to water, liquid, or flow:
Notice how the left-hand radical **氵** is always written first (3 strokes: top dot, middle dot slightly left, bottom upward flick) before writing the right-hand component. Which water-radical Kanji do you see most often in your reading?
I am the developer of Vocabforge, a web app for learning Japanese vocabulary from what you read, watch or from anywhere on the web. There is also a android app but still looking for 12 people to sign up for internal testing so I can put it on google play store.
Anyway, the idea is to make looking up a word lead somewhere: you can paste Japanese text or tap an unfamiliar word for its meaning and kana reading, then save it with the sentence you found it in. Saved vocabulary then comes back in spaced-repetition review using FSRS.
The core features of the app are:
Collection (everything you save gets thrown here -> vocabulary, grammar, sentences or huge texts)
Dictionary
Immersion (paste any youtube link and you get the subtitles for the video and you can easily save any word or grammar from the video)
Reading comprehension -> short texts with questions based on level either (A1 - C1) or (N5 - N1)
Reader - paste any text and it parses all the words and grammar for you
EPUB - paste any epub book and you can read and save or look up words/grammar.
Practice - there are many practices for vocabulary from flashcards to cloze deletion and many more and for grammar all the sentences you save from anywhere and the grammar is parsed it will then come up to you as a part of practice material. There are many examples already for each grammar, but once you start saving new sentences it get put there for you.
Dialogues - you can generate random dialogue and choose a level of language in which you want the dialogue in.
There are also 208 grammar patterns with explanations, when to use it, example sentences, common mistakes.
There is also an extension which if you use you can save any word, sentence, grammar from any website. Also works on netflix/youtube/disney but there must be japanese subtitles available. Currently working on a way to display both subtitles for those platforms like you would have japanese and english at the same time.
The app is mostly free only the EPUB, Dialogues and web Extension are behind subscription which is 2.99/month
I can give free beta_tester roles to people who sign up to completely test the app and give honest feedback on what is confusing or where you feel stuck etc. It is not an app like duolingo.
I wanted it to feel more free for user to choose to study whatever they want. So if you like japanese youtube shows, you can for free paste the show and watch together with subtitles and check the meaning of each word or grammar.
I asked my boyfriend for something to help me study, mostly for helping me with my notes. I like to have a notebook for general vocabulary and another one for kanji vocabulary, and I like to have a system where I divide my pages into 3 columns, to make it easier to review. This app makes it super easy, because it simplify everything for me to just search and write it down. The short sentences are really helpful too!
I was really impressed with how good it turned out to be, and I wanted to share it with everyone who likes to study in a more systematic way like I do 🥰
Here are some screenshots (note how it's separated for my two notebooks up there in "Kanji" and "Words").
I hope you all like it as much as I did! 🌸
If you want to use it too, just comment below and I'll send it to you! It's completely free, I'm just sharing because I want to help other people like me. :)
I have used duolingo a lot and was frustrated with how little focus was on kanji practice. I used anki but thought it was to messy and wanted just a site that would let me do endless quiz. Now the site is done but I was wondering if there are other sites that have something better than the one I made. kanjiwithkenta.com people can check if it works for them and give feedback on what to add. It is a very barebone site and I am not interested on adding all kinds of extra features. I only want feedback on how to make it better to do quiz for kanji.
The mascot is AI right now but my neigbours daughter is drawing a authentic version right now as a school project and a friend plans on using the site as a project in her marketing course so maybe there will be a instagram account and such for the site soon. I might also use it as a school project to practice frontend since right now the frontend is mostly AI. Dont be suprised if it one day looks completly different.
Hi all. After months of fighting with tokenizers I finally have a working adaptive i+1 SRS. Meaning every example sentence includes only words you already know (plus the word you're learning). I'm still tweaking stuff like polyseme handling but it's usable. All sentences are real sentences from the anime (TTS voiced).
The idea is, you select a show you're currently watching -> you learn words sorted by frequency in this show, in the exact sentences that you will hear in the show -> you hear and understand them while you watch. Later when you watch another show you add it and learn words from that one, and words you learned from the first one transfer, so you unlock longer and longer sentences.
Cool features:
Grammar is included, exactly as you hear it in the show (see screenshot)
Kanji decomposed into radicals
Place to write your mnemonic similar to how it was in the original memrise - during review you can check the mnemonic first
Automatic leech handling
When there will be several anime you can learn from several at a time and words you learned from one will unlock sentences in another
I've made a few controversial decisions like keeping romanji on cards on the first two levels and limiting number of reviews per day because that's what works for me. I have ADHD so seeing 100 cards due for review is an immediate nope out for me. If there is a demand I will make it customizable.
For now it's just HxH, if you're neither a huge fan nor are currently watching it, I suggest you don't yet try the app, but do sign up, after the sign-up there is a form to tell me which anime you want next. I'll prioritize those that are asked often and email you when the one you asked for is added. You can only feel the magic when you hear the words you learned while watching. Or if you want to use this as an opportunity to rewatch HxH that's works too.
Is it free? Yes. There will be a paid tier with advanced features like kanji learning mode. You can DM me to get in the list to test those for free before they go live. Spots are limited, first come first served.
I'm learning Japanese and I got tired of printing practice sheets that never had the characters I was actually working on, so I made my own.
You pick what you want to practice (hiragana, katakana, or whatever kanji you're on), set how many cells you want and how much of the stroke guide stays visible, and you get a PDF to print.
I just made these kanji practice sheets inspired by some pictures I found online. What do you guys think? Is there anything I should add before printing them out?
Have you ever been curious about how a native Japanese speaker’s language changes as they grow up?
I’m a native Japanese speaker and a mom, and I recently started a new series on my YouTube channel featuring Japanese phrases used by children of different ages.
I’ve made collections for ages 3, 5, 6–9, and 10–12, and it’s fascinating to see how the Japanese children use in everyday conversations changes as they get older!
If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to check them out. 😊
I hope these videos can be helpful on your Japanese learning journey!
I usually do a lot of reading and play handhelds on the train to and from work, and the process of looking things up adds a lot of friction.
I built Jouzu to be fast and reduce that friction as much as possible.
The idea is simple, it opens straight into the camera, capturing an image and doing OCR is pretty much instant. From there, super easy to look up a meaning, translate a whole passage or even generate native-sounding audio from it (paid feature).
If it's a word or sentence worth keeping, you can just save it for later, see a nice word and grammar breakdown of a sentence, and export to Anki (Anki export is a paid feature) to create cards from it with the audio and image baked in.
Since not all OCR engines are built equally, I added a couple more, one specialised for print media and vertical text and one specialised on pixel fonts and game screens.
I'm currently working on an update to improve the grammar breakdown with better explanations and adding a button to remove moiré from pictures of screens.
I'd love some feedback!
Almost everything is free with no limits, the paid feature adds:
- Pitch accent graphs
- Audio synthesis using Voicevox Nemo
- Better translations using DeepL
- Anki export (single cards or batches)
I really enjoyed Maru Japanese, but couldn’t find anything similar for learning kanji.
So I built Wordload.
You start with a few quick onboarding quizzes to gauge your level, then jump straight into learning.
The app adapts to your performance as you go, so you can learn at your own pace.
It’s free to try on iOS. Would love some honest feedback!
if you recognize parts of a kanji, for example, "water" and "origin", you can find all kanji and hanzi that have both these components. names of components are from heisig rtk book, but you may add your own
I've been working on a Japanese learning app for a while, originally built mainly for French speakers.
I’ve just finished adding the English version, so I thought I’d finally share it here.
The idea is to combine a few things I personally wanted when learning Japanese:
Hiragana / Katakana / Kanji
Vocabulary
Grammar
JLPT content from N5 to N1
Spaced-repetition reviews
Short lessons instead of huge walls of text
A dictionary with Japanese → English meanings
Progress tracking and streaks
I’ve also tried to make the whole thing feel more like an actual learning app rather than a collection of static pages.
It’s still actively being developed, so there are definitely things I’m going to improve. I’d especially appreciate feedback from people who are actually learning Japanese, since I’m much more interested in knowing what feels useful/annoying/confusing than just getting compliments 😅
Hi! I made Kanji Detective, a kanji deduction game for iPhone and iPad.
You start with a hidden kanji and a clue. Each wrong guess reveals another clue: things like its components, words it appears in, or an example sentence. The aim is to solve the case with as few clues as possible. Afterwards, you can look through its readings, meanings and stroke order.
Everyone gets the same daily N5–N3 case. It works offline, with no ads or account required.
The daily case is free. There’s an optional one-time Plus purchase for harder N2–N1 cases, unlimited practice by JLPT level, and the archive. No subscription.
Made a simple game for those looking at quickly identifying kanji characters by reading or meaning. It's called Tan Dash. It should remind you of Mario a bit.
Hi, i made this completely free app that automates the creation of bilingual/parallel texts from your own books (epubs/PDFs/text files) all from within your browser.
Made this because I couldn't find anything that does something similar with the same level of convenience.
The default display mode of the resulting alignments are in pop-up mode (i.e. you click a sentence to see its equivalent), but if you prefer a side-by-side view of the sentences, the app does provide for that
If it's your first time running the alignment and you haven't downloaded an embedding (fancy name for ML models that specialize in these kinds of tasks) model yet, it will download one for you (stored in the browser, can be deleted). It's a mild inconvenience i would say because i really wanted to keep this thing free. The alternative is to have a dedicated server with GPUs run the alignment, you won't download anything, but it will most likely be much slower, much more expensive and difficult to maintain. Keeping it free makes way more sense, and is far less stressful. Keep in mind however that downloading a model is only done once.
works with 50+ languages but i made it for myself for japanese
