Changelog

This is a list of all major updates to Japanese Vocab Maker, highlighting new or improved features (with links to each feature).

September 2026
v0.99.27

Book Video

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.

Try Book Video
v0.99.27

Stream Vocab reads aloud

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.

Paste text and press Make List & Stream
v0.99.27

My Vocab Lists

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.

Open My History
v0.99.24

Pronunciation Practice

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.

Try Pronunciation Practice
August 2026
v0.99.15 to v0.99.23 extension 0.1 to 0.4.3

Browser Plugin

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.

Install the plugin
v0.99.19

Word Usage: examples with English translations

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

See it on 食べる
v0.99.16

JLPT Quiz and user accounts

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.

Take a JLPT quiz
v0.99.11

English to Japanese

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.

Look up an English word
v0.99.10

Word Usage: synonyms and pitch accent

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.

See it on 日本語
v0.99.0

Kanji Vocab Lists

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.

Make a kanji list
v0.97 v0.98 v0.99.1

Three more corpora: anime, business documents, JDrama

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.

Chart a word across the corpora
v0.93

Word Trends

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.

See the trends
v0.89 to v0.91

Word Popularity Over Time

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).

Chart a word Recent searches
July 2026
v0.84 v0.85

Shareable lists and social cards

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.

Make a list and press Make Link
v0.82 v0.83

Aozora Bunko word list, Literary meter, and slang

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.

Browse the Aozora word list Browse the slang lexicon
v0.80

Anime Subs tab

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.

Open the Anime Subs tab
v0.70

YouTube Stream Vocab

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.

Open the YouTube tab
June 2026
v0.65

Word Graph and Remove Furigana

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.

Open a word graph Remove furigana from a text
v0.61

Japanese Word Usage

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.

Look up a word Recent lookups
v0.59 to v0.61

Classical Japanese and the Classical Kana Converter

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.

Convert classical kana 日本語版
v0.58

Site Vocab Lists

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.

Make a site list
v0.52

Topic Vocab Lists

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.

Make a topic list
v0.5

Japanese Vocab Maker goes live

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.

Make a vocabulary list