Changelog

Text pasted straight from an Aozora Bunko text file now comes back clean, with the rare characters that file can only describe in a note restored in place. A number of old spellings also convert correctly now, including 左樣なら, 曾つて, 唯だ and 尾根づたひ, and words such as 首飾りや毛糸 and 億劫なほど are no longer changed by mistake.

The Classical Kana Converter now handles text written with katakana endings, the style of old laws, imperial rescripts and classical Chinese readings. 其ノ者ヲ以テ之ニ代ラシム comes back as その者を以てこれに代らしむ. Common old spellings such as 此の, 此れ and 或は also convert correctly now.

Links to PDFs whose address does not end in .pdf, such as the article downloads on many journal sites, now give you a vocabulary list like any other PDF. A link to an image or another kind of file now tells you right away that it is not a page that can be read.

The Classical Kana Converter now takes text as well as a link. Paste a passage written in historical kana, even a single line, and get it back in modern kana. Giving it the link to an Aozora Bunko book card now converts the story itself instead of the card.

A search engine for pages that help you learn Japanese, from your first kana to reading novels. Grammar guides, kanji study, graded readers, easy news, dictionaries, courses, apps, podcasts, video lessons, test preparation, pronunciation, blogs, forums, and pages on Japanese culture, travel, calligraphy and martial arts written for learners. Every page is checked, sorted into categories, given keywords and a short description, and ranked by how much it offers. Search by word, browse a category or a keyword list, and mark any page that should not be there. Know a page we are missing? Suggest it.

The Topic, Kanji and Site vocabulary lists now share one Lists entry in the menu, which made room for the new one.

A Japanese word game using hiragana tiles. Place tiles, build kana words on the board, and score more for rarer kana and for bonus squares. Play alone against your best score, against the computer, or with a friend. Every word played is shown with its kanji and meaning. Signed-in players can come back to a game later, see their games in My History, and compete on the leaderboard.

23 September 2026 (v0.99.37): a fourth way to play, Computer only: two computers play at the level you choose while you watch, at slow, medium or fast, and you can pause it or step through it a move at a time. Games are livelier to watch now as well, with tiles dropping into place one at a time, the word just made lighting up with its points, and the score counting up. Sounds were added for tiles landing and words scoring, with a Sound box beside the board to turn them off.

23 September 2026 (v0.99.38): each way to play now has its own address, so a link you share opens the game ready to go instead of on the menu: play alone, against the computer, with a friend, or watch two computers play. Opening one while a game is in progress takes you back to that game rather than starting a new one.

28 September 2026 (v0.99.40): a Hint button when you play alone. Press it and one tile comes out of your rack onto a square where it makes a common, everyday word. The first hint towards a word costs 3 points, the next one 4, and so on, and the button shows what the next one will cost. Once your tiles make a word the hint says so and leaves you to press Done, and the word then scores in full as usual, with the next word's first hint back to 3 points. The Done button also glows gently whenever the tiles you have placed make a word, whether a hint put them there or you did.

28 September 2026 (v0.99.41): on Learning Resources, the counts beside each category now follow the Include pages in Japanese and other languages box. Tick it and every count rises to take in the Japanese pages, so the totals always match what a search will actually return.

5 October 2026 (v0.99.42): your first game of CrossTango now shows you how to begin. A note beside the board explains that the first word has to connect to the tile in the middle, suggests a word you can make with your tiles, and points out which tile to play and the square to put it on. The Done button has moved up beside Small, so it stays in view on smaller screens.

Watch Japanese vocabulary words one at a time, shown big with readings and English meanings, optionally spoken aloud in both languages. Filter by JLPT level (N5 to N1) or part of speech, set the pace and the reading speed, and keep the words you like in your own channel list. Signed-in users can also play their own saved lists, kanji lists and topic lists through the channel.

Film the pages of a Japanese book with your phone, drop the clip on the Book Video tab, and the site reads the pages and builds a vocabulary list. You can also open the book straight into Stream Vocab so you can read it phrase by phrase with every word defined. Novels and manga are both supported (a manga comes out one phrase per speech bubble), a second clip can add or repair pages to the set, and a "Page location" switch in Stream Vocab shows a small picture of the scanned page with the current phrase boxed. Signed-in users can leave a running scan and find it in My History when it finishes.

17 September 2026 (v0.99.30): a scanned page whose phrase boxes were only partly found is checked again, and a saved list that was missing some of its boxes gets them the next time it is opened.

A Play button in Stream Vocab reads the current phrase aloud in a natural Japanese voice, lighting each word as it is spoken. Choose one of five voices and a reading speed, or press Play all to hear the whole text. Works for any streamed text, not only a scanned book. Paste a passage, fetch a page from a URL, or open a saved list and press Make List & Stream.

Lists made while signed in are saved automatically and listed under My History next to your quiz history, so a list made from a URL, a file or a book video can be reopened later. Stream Vocab now has its own address for every phrase.

Sixty example sentences, each with a native speaker's recording and additional voices at normal and slow speed, with an English translation. Record yourself and compare. The Sounds score tells you whether the right sounds were said, and an Intonation score compares your pitch to the native pattern on a graph with the tolerance band drawn in. Signed-in users keep a history of their takes and can see their best score per sentence.

A Chrome extension that shows Japanese definitions while you watch Netflix, YouTube and Crunchyroll. It reads the subtitle on screen and shows each word's reading and meaning in a movable panel over the video or in a detached window, and it can build the whole episode's vocabulary list.

17 September 2026 (v0.99.31): words with counters now show the reading as it is actually said (一回 is いっかい, 三本 is さんぼん, 1ヶ月 is いっかげつ), a numeral before 月 is read as the month, and coined words such as 案件ごと and 期間的 keep the meaning of the base word; this applies on the site as well as in the plugin. Plugin version 0.4.4 has been submitted to the Chrome Web Store with better handling of YouTube's automatic captions, a clear reminder whenever Japanese subtitles are off or set to another language, and a way to send a problem report from the plugin's options page.

Word Usage pages gain an "Examples with English translations" panel, with the translation shown under each Japanese sentence.

JLPT vocabulary quizzes for N5 through N1, with a "Words to use" selector for how large a pool to draw from, and a pause on every wrong answer so you can see what was right. Accounts are optional, sign in to keep your quiz history with a drill-down into every question. The same release added the account page, the site-wide privacy policy and one feedback page for the whole site.

Type an English word and get the Japanese words that mean it, with readings, romaji, JLPT level and a link to each word's usage page. Every English meaning has a page of its own.

Every Word Usage page shows a Synonyms row and a pitch accent diagram, including for compounds such as 日本語. A word typed in kana now lands on its kanji page.

Enter one or more kanji and get every dictionary word containing them, ranked by real-world frequency, with a position filter for words that begin with, end with, or contain the kanji in the middle.

Word Popularity Over Time and the Word Usage gauges gained three sources: anime subtitles (6 August), Japanese business documents (10 August, v0.98), and JDrama, over a thousand Japanese scripted series from 2000 to 2026 (10 August, v0.99.1). Word Usage now shows all six gauges on one row: web, forums, classic literature, anime, business and drama.

The words whose usage changes the most: the biggest risers and fallers in each source, in a Short-term mode (one to three years) and a Long-term mode (five years and more). Compounds such as 令和 are ranked alongside single words.

Chart how often a word appears year by year from 2013 to 2026 across Japanese web pages, including recent coinages the dictionary does not know. Two more sources followed within days: Forums (millions of posts from 2003 to 2026) with a popularity badge, a Recent Searches page and share links (2 August, v0.90), and Classic Literature (Aozora Bunko works from 1890 to 1970).

Anime and YouTube lists publish themselves to a shareable /list address as soon as they are made, and a shared list, site, topic, usage or timeline link shows a rich preview card on X and Facebook with the word and its top vocabulary on it.

The Aozora Word List is a vocabulary table over the whole Aozora Bunko library of classic Japanese literature, with JLPT filters, the number of stories each word appears in, and links into the stories. Word Usage gained a Literary meter and a "Use Aozora Bunko Stories" toggle that blends classic examples into a word's page. In addition a lexicon of 275 slang and casual senses, each with its origin, similar terms and a real example, was overlaid on Word Usage with a Slang badge.

Search for an anime and build a vocabulary list from one episode's subtitles or the whole series. Large lists are paginated so a full season loads quickly.

The YouTube tab builds a vocabulary list from a video's Japanese captions, or streams the video in sync with its vocabulary: every word is highlighted as it is spoken with exact per-word timing, the speed is adjustable without changing the pitch, readings can be shown in hiragana, and a Make Link button shares the synced view.

Every Word Usage page can open a Word Graph, an interactive network of a word's related words three levels deep. Click any node to center it and expand from there. This release also added the Remove Furigana page: paste text or a URL and get it back with the small ruby readings stripped out, ready for reading practice or a vocabulary list.

Look up any Japanese word and see how it is actually used: example sentences from Japanese web pages, related words, common expressions, the pages it appears on most, and an English to Japanese lookup for when you only know the English. Rarer words are filled in from the wider web, a "Did you mean?" catches mistyped kana, and the Recent Lookups page lists what others have searched.

The vocab maker recognises historical kana spelling (旧仮名遣い) in pre-war texts and converts it before extracting vocabulary, so a Meiji-era story from Aozora Bunko produces the right words. The converter page does the conversion on its own for any text, and its interface is available in Japanese as well as English.

Give it a website and it reads the site's pages and builds a vocabulary list from them, with context sentences taken from the pages themselves. Choose how wide or how deep it reads, and share the finished list by its address.

Type a topic, such as 料理 or ちいかわ, and the site searches the web, reads the Japanese pages it finds and builds the hundred most characteristic words, each with up to five context sentences and a link to the source, plus a JLPT difficulty breakdown. Lists are shared by a readable romaji address.

The site launched with the vocabulary maker at its core feature: paste Japanese text, give it a URL, upload an image (a photo of a page, held any way up), a PDF, a text, subtitle or EPUB file, or an audio recording. It creates a vocabulary list with readings, romaji, dictionary definitions, JLPT levels, frequency, part of speech and context sentences. Sort and filter the list, export it to Anki or Quizlet, quiz yourself on the words, or share it with Make Link. Stream Vocab reads a text phrase by phrase with every word of the phrase in a table beside it, synced to the audio for a transcription.