Read real Japanese
sooner than you think
every word, and turns what you look up into vocabulary you own.
This is the whole idea
Click any word below. It's a real dictionary lookup on a real sentence. Tell Lingaku how well you know the word and watch the number at the top move.
Find something you can actually read
Explore collects Japanese articles, YouTube videos with subtitles, and web novels from Syosetu. Each one gets a level and a difficulty score — but the number that matters is the last one: how much of this text you already know.
Two people open the same article and see different percentages. That's the point.
At 95% you can just read it. At 60% you probably want something else — or you read it anyway, with the dictionary one click away.
Filter by level, length, source or coverage. Sort by how many words you already know.
Read or watch it where it already lives
You don't have to import anything. Install the browser extension and Japanese text on any website becomes clickable — the same dictionary, the same highlighting, the same tracking as on the site.
On YouTube it goes further. Japanese subtitles get furigana and become clickable while the video plays, the video pauses while you read a definition, and a transcript sits beside the player so you can click any line to jump back to it.
The side panel shows the difficulty and your coverage for whatever page you're on, plus every word you looked up there.
Every word you look up comes back
You only review words you actually met — in the sentence you met them in.
Each lookup is saved with the page it came from, the sentence around it, and — for videos — the timestamp. A word is never just a word on a list; you can always go back to where you met it.
When you want to review, pull those lookups into a deck, or study them without making a deck at all. The example sentence on the card is the one you actually read.
名古屋は有名な ラーメンの街です。
Scheduling is an SM-2 style system you can tune — session size, new-to-review ratio, card ordering, ease and intervals. Export to Anki, CSV or JSON whenever you want.
Reading teaches you, if the text fits
Three things, none of them complicated.
You can start from absolutely nothing
Never studied Japanese? You don't need to prepare somewhere else first.
- 87 lessons across 12 sections, starting from the writing systems.
- Each lesson has an explanation, a dialogue you read with the popup dictionary, its own vocabulary deck, and the grammar it introduces.
- A kana quiz for hiragana and katakana, with the full tables.
- Lessons unlock in order — skip anything you already know.
Take the placement test instead. It's about five minutes of words, and it seeds what you already know so that coverage percentages and review queues start out roughly right rather than from zero.
You can retake it later, merge it with progress you've already made, or undo it entirely.
What else is in there
The parts you'll reach for once you're in the habit.
Who builds this
Just me.
Lingaku started at university — it was my bachelor's thesis, then my master's thesis, and I have kept building it ever since. That is about ten years now.
There is no team, no investors and no growth targets. I am a long-term Japanese learner, and this is the tool I wanted to use. Every feature on this page exists because I needed it myself.
What I'm working on
- A mobile app for flashcards, so reviews work properly on a phone.
- Grammar review flashcards — example sentence to explanation.
- A conjugation practice tool.
- Full-screen search across lessons, decks and grammar.
Planned, not shipped. The order may change.
Start reading Japanese
Everything above is free to use. Make an account and pick something to read.
Lingaku