Resources
This is the Ajatt-Tools Resources List. With the help of our community we've gathered the links to help you in your Japanese studies. We prioritize libre software and content that you can download for free. Everyone is welcome to suggest more resources in our chat.
The third party resources below may contain what Tatsumoto considers to be ineffective language learning advice. If you find something that contradicts what's written in this guide, assume it's wrong or verify by asking people in our chat.
Basics
Kana
- Kakugo. A kana training app.
- Kana Anki Deck
- Real kana. Train kana recognition online.
Kanji
- KanjiTransition. Learn words with the kanji used to write them.
- Kanjidamage. The best mnemonic-based method of learning kanji in isolation.
- Kanjidamage+ reference. KanjiDamage+ kanji list on a single web page.
- RTK search. Kanji characters with Koohii stories.
Anki decks
- Ankidrone Starter Pack
- Ankidrone Sentence Pack
- Core 6k/10k vocabulary reference
- Core 10k Anki deck
- Core 2.3k. You have to change the card template from Word Cards to Targeted Sentence Cards yourself.
- User Uploaded Anki Decks.
subs2srs
Anki decks for popular anime and movies. - steins-gate-anki. Anki deck made from Steins;Gate. Has lots of voiced example sentences. Version with Opus audio.
- Jalup. This pack has a lot of cards. Unless you love doing Anki, I don't think it's necessary.
Grammar
- Tae Kim's grammar guide. A guide to Japanese grammar. It breaks down Japanese in a logical and straightforward way and covers all the basics without going into too much detail.
- Dictionary of Japanese Grammar Reference. An online DoJG reference.
- Dictionary of Japanese Grammar Reference. Another online DoJG reference.
- DoJG Anki deck. An Anki deck that contains example sentences from DoJG.
Grammar in Japanese
- 毎日のんびり日本語教師. A website run by a Japanese teacher living in China. Grammar is sorted by JLPT levels. The entries are in Japanese (monolingual definitions) and Chinese. Provides example sentences.
- 国語文法. Japanese grammar taught by a Japanese teacher.
- 国語の文法.
- 国語-文法 playlist
JLPT
- dethitiengnhat. Here you can prepare by taking tests from previous years.
- JLPT Grammar List. Covers grammar for all JLPT levels.
- 問題検索室. Search JLPT questions by keyword.
- JTest4You. Practice tests and resources by JLPT levels.
- JLPT文法解説まとめ. Introduces you to grammar patterns that exist in JLPT. This site is much better than the rest and probably the best free way to learn grammar used in the JLPT exam.
- 毎日のんびり日本語教師. Described in Grammar in Japanese.
- The JLPT Study Page. Materials from N5 to N2. Includes vocabulary, kanji, expressions, reading comprehension, quizzes.
Examples and pronunciations
Sometimes you might find yourself in a situation where you want to add a word to your SRS but the example sentence you've found the word in is too complicated, or you've lost it because you forgot to save it. In such cases sites with example sentences come to rescue.
- Massif. Allows you to search over 30 million unique Japanese sentences.
- Sentence Search. Contains voiced sentences from various premade decks. Grab an offline version here.
- Aozorasearch. Performs a full-text search on Aozora Bunko (digital library).
- Weblio英語例文検索. Made for Japanese people learning English but can be used in reverse.
- Forvo. Has many words pronounced in isolation but not so many sentences.
- YouGlish for Japanese and CaptionPop.
Find YouTube videos with TL subtitles, download them and watch using
mpv
. - 用例.jp
- Reverso
- Jisho.org. I don't recommend Jisho because it suggests sentences from Tatoeba. Many of them come from non-native speakers.
- NHK Accent Audio. Audio files from the NHK Accent dictionary, 1998 edition.
Immersion material
Don't use streaming sites and sites for reading manga online if possible. Always download what you consume. Storing immersion material locally makes mining substantially easier.
Torrent trackers
A torrent tracker is a site that hosts user-uploaded torrent files. To download something (like an anime) using torrents you usually download a torrent file and open it with a torrent client. The torrent client then downloads the actual content. Before using the torrent sites, choose a torrent client.
Nyaa. A torrent site with anime, manga, light novels and Japanese dramas. Contains 98% of what you need to actually learn Japanese.
Unfortunately, Nyaa is blocked in some countries. Accessing it through Tor can be difficult due to DDOS protection. If you can't access the site, use a mirror. Currently, there's only one working mirror I know, Nyaa ISS.
Tokyo Toshokan. A BitTorrent library for Japanese media.
Rutracker. Another torrent site. Has lots of Japanese movies, dramas and anime. Ongoing anime gets uploaded with a noticeable delay. Refer to Nyaa first if you watch ongoings.
This site can be accessed through Tor.
Animebytes. A private tracker. Offers content similar to what you find on Nyaa ISS.
AvistaZ. A private tracker for Asian movies and TV-shows.
AsianCinema.Me. Asian private tracker for Movies only.
JPTVTS.US. A private tracker for Japanese content only.
JPTV.CLUB. Another private tracker. You can join if you have accounts on other private trackers. Here you can find Japanese TV programs. Most uploads contain Japanese subs straight from the broadcast. It's nice to have them for mining sentences.
anisource. An aggregate site for high quality raws from Raws-4U, スカー Raws and Leopard-Raws.
Private trackers. Everything else I didn't mention.
Streaming
- Animelon. Watch anime with Japanese subtitles.
- Anjsub. A site similar to Animelon.
- B9GOOD. Watch raw anime online.
- ZORO.to. Another anime streaming site. You can switch between audio and subtitle tracks in multiple languages.
- AQStream. Watch Japanese TV.
- BiliBili. A Chinese website with a bunch of TV shows.
- jp.m3u.
A
m3u
playlist with JapaneseIPTV
channels which you can open in mpv. You can switch channels in mpv by pressing<
and>
. - News24.jp.
Lets you watch a live stream with news,
but you have to allow to run an obscene amount of nonfree JavaScript code.
To avoid running nonfree JS,
watch the stream in
mpv
by creating a desktop shortcut. - keylabo. Similarly to News24, lists a number of channels you can watch online. Unfortunately, not all of them can be opened in mpv.
YouTube with subtitles
Main article: Immersion with YouTube
Channels for pre-beginner Japanese learners.
- Onomappu.
- Meshclass Japanese
- Comprehensible Japanese. Inspired by Steven Krashen's idea of comprehensible input. The language is slow and is even easier than Tango N5.
Regular channels.
- GitHub: Japanese YouTube channels with japanese subtitles
- テレ東BIZ. News. Doesn't have subs, but has transcriptions.
- Discovery Channel Japan
- Kurzgesagt. Science topics.
Important: install Privacy Redirect or LibRedirect to safely watch YouTube videos via Invidious.
TikTok
You can watch videos from TikTok via ProxiTok.
Browser add-ons like LibRedirect
can automatically redirect
from tiktok.com
to a chosen ProxiTok
instance.
Public instances are listed here.
Find Japanese videos by tags, for example: tiktokでニュース
Browsing will lead you to more tags.
Downloads
- Japan Encodings. A site with Mega links to western movies with Japanese dubs. Install megatools to be able to download files from Mega.
- JAP DUB. A shared folder with movies and other content with Japanese dubs.
- jraws. Some jdramas.
- Compressed audio
- Condensed audio catalog
Manga
Torrent sites. Explore them first.
nhentai. For a bit of light reading. Many mangas on the site are just 25-30 pages long, which is perfect for beginners who can't bear long reading sessions yet.
Translations are also available. Make sure to only search in Japanese.
The site is behind CloudFlare. Since CloudFlare is known to be a type of MITM attack, accessing this site maybe dangerous. I often can't access it at all because it shows a banner saying
Checking if the site connection is secure
that never disappears.Bilingualmanga. Bilingual manga reader where you can switch from English to Japanese with furigana.
Raw Senmanga. View raw manga online.
- Make sure you disable JavaScript before opening the site.
- Don't click on any Discord links.
Manga-zip. Manga archive.
MANGA ZIP. A site that hosts download links to manga and novels.
Rawdevart. Raw manga online.
同人あんてな. Free eromanga and doujinshi.
raw-cans. This website has scans of a lot of manga, as well as shounen jump, young jump and other manga magazines.
Manga Raw. Read manga online.
MIKARAW. Read manga online.
- The site does not work with JavaScript disabled.
マンガ図書館Z. Manga library. Read manga for free.
となりのヤングジャンプ. A site where you can read manga online.
DLRAW. Raw manga archived as zip and rar files.
RAWKUMA. Like Senmanga, hosts manga online.
- The site does not work with JavaScript disabled.
- Don't click on any Discord links.
Books
- Torrent sites. Explore them first.
- zlibrary. A library with books in any language. Has a tor version.
- Anna’s Archive. A catalog of all the books in existence.
- 聖書 on Wikisource.
Here you can read the Bible in Japanese.
The
口語訳
version is written in contemporary language and is easy to read. - 小説を読もう!. Lets you read web novels for free.
- カクヨム.
Similar to
小説を読もう!
. Search and read web novels online. - 青空文庫. An Internet library of classic Japanese literature.
- Aozora Bunko archive.
Books from Aozora Bunko in
epub
,pdf
and other formats. - Aozora Bunko stats. Books sorted by the number of kanji used.
- DL-Zip.net. Download manga, light novels, magazines and books for free.
- Itazuraneko 小説図書館. A light novel library of questionable quality.
- Nyaa. You can find books on Nyaa too.
- boroboro epubs and azw3. A list of books in Epub and azw3 formats.
- Sōseki Project. Works of 夏目漱石 with a number of tools to assist the students of Japanese.
- アルファポリス. A site where you can read novels, manga, etc., for free. You can disable JavaScript but must allow cookies for books' pages to load.
- Japanese Learner’s Anthology v2. A torrent with Japanese 30,000 ebooks.
Audiobooks
- Japanese Audiobook Collection
- Audiobooks on Itazuraneko
Podcasts
- Podcasts opml. About 200 Japanese podcasts for constant passive listening.
- AuDee Podcasts
Visual Novels and Games
There's a list of visual novels on Arch Wiki. Beware that most games that exist today are proprietary. Proprietary software should not exist and should not be used if you want to have freedom.
Japanese boards
You may need a Japanese IP address for some of these.
Japanese subtitles
- kitsunekko.net
- kitsunekko mirror
- kitsunekko archive
- Xavier's Retimed JP Sub Pack
- 日本語字幕
- Jpsubbers drama subtitles
- Jpsubbers drama subtitles — archive
- 動漫花園
- Subtitles by BritVSJapan
- Nekomoe Kissaten
- This gist
- Japanese Movie Subtitles
- Anime Japanese subtitles
Fonts
- Noto Fonts. Google Noto TTF fonts.
- Source Han. The Adobe-branded Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif and Source Han Code JP typefaces.
- IPAフォント. Install the ipa-fonts package group.
- Kanji stroke order font
- 新正楷書CBSK1. A good brush font. Supports around 13,000 characters.
- Asebi Mincho.
A font that displays all
新字体
kanji in their旧字体
(正字体
) form, including all the undocumented changes as well. - 花園明朝.
This font is made by the
glyphwiki
project and supports all Unicode characters. A perfect back-up font. - アームド・レモン
A font that imitates handwriting.
The font covers all
JIS第2水準
kanji characters. - AJT archive.
The fonts I use.
Contains
Yu Mincho
, semi-cursive fonts and stroke order fonts. You can simply extract the entire folder to~/.local/share/fonts
to install them.
Software
Recommendations
- Midek's software recommendations list
- Luke Smith's Programs and Equipment
- Stuff that rocks
- digdeeper.club. Software recommendations, reviews.
- Privacy Tools. Privacy tools and services to counter mass surveillance with encryption for better internet privacy.
- Online Spyware Watchdog. Contains articles about popular programs with explanations of the spyware features found in them.
General
LibreWolf. A web browser based on Firefox that comes with an Ad Block by default.
I recommend getting LibreWolf from Chaotic or from archlinuxcn so that you don't have to build it yourself, but you can also get it from the AUR.
Additionally, there's pyllyukko user.js to harden the configuration. Before installing I recommend reading the
user.js
and commenting out the settings you don't need because nouser.js
can suit everybody's needs unmodified.Anki A free/libre flashcard application.
Trackma. Track your immersion on one of the supported sites.
Localization
- Localization/Japanese
- Fcitx input method framework
- Japanese fontconfig
Morphological analysis
- mecab.
- mecab-ipadic. IPA dictionary for MeCab.
- mecab-ipadic-neologd-git. Neologism dictionary for MeCab.
Image viewers
- nsxiv An image viewer perfect for reading manga. Arch Linux package.
- sxiv-manga-reader.
Simple manga reader made from a patched
nsxiv
. It extracts archives for you and opens them automatically withsxiv
. It keeps your progress.
Work with subtitles
- subs2srs. Takes video files and subtitle files and creates cards with screenshots and/or audio for each line in the sub file. Useful for batch extracting audio from videos.
- subtitleedit.
A subtitle editor.
It can convert image-based subtitles (
.sup
,.sub
) to text-based (.srt
) via an OCR engine such as Tesseract. - pyTranscriber. A GUI program for generating subtitles using Google Speech Recognition. You can use it to generate subtitles for video files that don't have any subtitles or for audiobooks. The produced subs will contain errors due to the nature of speech recognition.
- kitsunekko-tools.
A set of scripts for creating a local
kitsunekko
mirror.
OCR for manga
Optical character recognition (OCR) tools convert text in manga into a digital form. Main article: Mining from manga.
- transformers-ocr. A powerful tool for mining from manga. Press a configured keyboard shortcut and select the portion of the manga page to convert. The text is then recognized and copied to the clipboard. This makes it easy to look up words with Yomichan Search.
- mokuro. Can be used to OCR Japanese text instead of Tesseract.
- Poricom. Manga OCR desktop application.
- kanjitomo. An OCR program written in Java. Note that you can't use Japanese to Japanese dictionaries with it.
Reading eBooks
crqt-ng. E-book reader. AUR package.
After installation open Settings, go to "Styles" and set "Default font" to your Japanese font of choice to avoid Chinese fallbacks. Yu Mincho worked for me. Japanese
Noto
fonts did not, some text was still in Chinese. On the "Page" tab you can choose View Mode. I have it set to "Scroll View". On the "Window" tab you can tell the program to apply your kvantum theme. crqt-ng can automatically copy selected text to the clipboard, which is handy when using Yomichan Search. To enable the feature, under the "Window" tab check "automatically copy when selected."To add a bookmark, select some text and press Ctrl+B. To view saved bookmarks, press F6.
Foliate. A simple and modern eBook viewer. Arch Linux package.
If you can't open books, run the
chmod
command from their issue tracker. In Preferences, set "When a word is selected" to "Copy" and "When multiple words are selected" to "Copy". This should be enough to comfortably use Foliate with Yomichan Search. Change Layout to "Scrolled" in Advanced section of the menu to prevent lags and ensure a consistent layout.Use keyboard shortcuts, "n" to go to the next page and "p" to go to the previous page. To scroll without the mouse, press "j" and "k".
KOreader. KOreader is a book reader application that was designed to be used on E-ink devices, but it can also be used on a PC. It properly displays furigana.
The best way to install it is to use the appimage AUR package Alternatively, the koreader-bin AUR package can be used, but it may not work for everyone.
This app supports
StarDict
dictionaries. You can download the dictionaries from here, or you can use your own dictionaries, converting them to theStarDict
format with PyGlossary. The dictionaries should be placed in~/.config/koreader/data/dict
if you're on GNU/Linux. Refer to the Wiki for other platforms.Under "Font" check "Enable system fonts" (the checkbox is at the beginning of the font list) to have access to your Japanese fonts. Then in document settings set the font to
Noto Serif CJK JP
or a similar Japanese font.If you want to create Anki cards, install Anki plugin for KOreader.
Zathura. A minimalistic document viewer. Can be used to read novels. Doesn't display furigana correctly.
calibre. Ebook management application. This program is primarily used to convert from various formats (including azw3) to epub. It's not very good as a reader app.
MPV
mpv
is the best video player for language learning.
Make Anki cards in mpv:
mpd
With mpd you can listen to condensed audio, audiobooks and Japanese music.
- Passive listening how to.
- ncmpcpp. Probably the most popular mpd client.
- ncmpcpp cheat sheet — for new users.
- mpc. A CLI mpd client, great for scripting.
Torrent clients
- qBittorrent. A free/libre torrent client alternative to µTorrent. Use search plugins, they save you so much time that you'd otherwise spend going to each torrent site individually.
- KTorrent. A BitTorrent client for KDE.
- Transmission. A light-weight and cross-platform BitTorrent client. See transmission-gtk.
Downloading
yt-dlp. A command-line program that lets you download videos and audio from YouTube and more than a thousand other sites.
- See our setup guide.
- Tartube is a GUI front-end for youtube-dl.
mangadesk. Download manga directly from your terminal.
HakuNeko. A cross-platform downloader for manga and anime from various websites.
Megatools. A command line client for Mega.
Subtitle retiming
Tools for condensing audio
Tools for extracting audio
Android software
Note: Please read our recommendations regarding using an Android device.
General
- Mozc for Android. A Japanese Input Method Editor (IME) for typing Japanese text on a phone.
- AnkiDroid. A free/libre flashcard application, Android version.
- AnkiConnect for Android. A program that helps create Anki cards on Android. Probably not needed because AnkiDroid has AnkiDroid API.
Manga readers
- Tachiyomi. Free/libre manga reader for Android.
- OCR Manga Reader. Android Manga reader with Japanese OCR and dictionary capabilities. Supports EPWING monolingual dictionaries.
Book readers
- Librera Reader.
App for reading books.
Was recommended in
ラノベスレ
. - KOreader. A book reader.
- Typhon Reader. An EPUB reader for Android that lets you look up words as you read, similarly to Yomichan. Also supports EPWING dictionaries.
Video players
- mpv for Android. See the mpv section.
- VLC. A fast and user-friendly video player for Android.
- Jidoujisho. A mobile video player tailored for Japanese language learners.
Audio players
Audio players are used to play locally stored audio files. Although their primary purpose is to play music, for language learning a better choice would be to listen to audiobooks, podcasts or audio extracted from movies and TV shows.
All available players are listed on F-Droid catalog.
- Music Player GO
- Vanilla Music
- Pulse Music
- AntennaPod. A podcast player for Android.
Dictionaries
Offline
- GoldenDict. Requires dictionary files. Has Anki support.
- Qolibri. A Qt-based EPWING dictionary viewer. Requires dictionary files. Refer to setup guide.
- EBView.
A GTK2 based EPWING dictionary viewer.
Like Qolibri, EBView requires you to specify where to look for the dictionary files.
To set it up, refer to the
official documentation,
especially the
辞書グループの定義
section. - Tagaini Jisho
Popup dictionaries
- Yomichan. Yomichan is a browser extension that lets you easily look up unknown words.
- Rikaikun.
- 10ten Japanese Reader. Formerly known as Rikaichamp, this browser extension lets you look up Japanese words with the hover of a mouse or tap of a screen. It doesn't support Anki and monolingual dictionaries, but is fine otherwise.
- cabl.
Online
- Dictionariez. A popup-dictionary extension that works similarly to Yomichan. Good for learners of English.
- jisho.org
- wadoku.de. Has pitch accent.
- weblio.jp
- goo辞書
- Kotobank
- ichi.moe
- 広辞苑無料検索. Allows you to search many monolingual dictionaries.
- OJAD. A pitch accent dictionary.
- 日本語俗語辞書. A monolingual slang dictionary.
- 伏字検索.
Helps you decipher words partially occluded by symbols like
〇
and◯
(maru). - ふりがな文庫. For any given word, searches through Aozora Bunko for all instances where it was used with furigana and shows the percentage of each reading. Great for when the dictionary lists multiple readings, and you want to know which is dominant.
- 書き順. A website that shows you how to write a given kanji and how it looks written in different fonts.
- 漢字辞典. Monolingual kanji dictionary.
- Jotoba. An open source multilingual Japanese dictionary.
- 連想類語辞典. A dictionary of synonyms.
- Dictionaryphile — 日本語. A list of various online dictoinaries.
Android
Something else
Epistularum's Converted Dictionary Collection. Dictionary files. Stardict files are meant to be used with KOreader, Mdict with GoldenDict.
Translators
The quality of machine translation is very low. Your goal is not to translate Japanese but to be able to understand it the first time. Don't use translators for anything serious. You've been warned.
- SimplyTranslate
- LibreTranslate
- Lingva Translate. Alternative front-end for Google Translate .
Pronunciation and Pitch accent
- Pitch accent dictionaries for Yomichan. When you look up a word with Yomichan, they will tell you its pitch accent number.
- 韻律読み上げチュータスズキクン. Generate text-to-speech sentences with somewhat accurate pitch accent (don't assume it's correct).
- Japanese Accent Study Website. A useful site with pitch accent information for counters, verb conjugations, place names, surnames and Japanese celebrities.
- NHK日本語発音アクセント新辞典・付録. A scan of the NHK Pitch Accent dictionary, specifically the sections at the back (which aren't in the EPWING) that explain the theory, rules and patterns.
- NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典. A PDF of the NHK Pitch Accent dictionary, 1998 edition.
- 新明解日本語アクセント辞典 第2版・付録. A scan of the Shinmeikai Pitch Accent dictionary, specifically the sections at the back that explain the theory, rules and patterns.
- 京言葉. A website on Kyoto dialect.
- Dogen’s Phonetics Series. Pitch accent lessons. Yes, everybody hates Dogen because of his personality, but if your Japanese isn't good enough to read the NHK pitch accent dictionary, you can start by watching his tutorials.
- YouGlish for Japanese. Look up a word and hear a native speaker pronounce it in a YouTube video.
- 日本語標準アクセントの概要 + 詳細
- 助詞・助動詞のアクセントについての覚え書き
- 東京外国語大学言語モジュール. Listening comprehension and pronunciation training.
- 日本語の発音を知る. Pronunciation of phonemes described in Japanese. Uses IPA notation + has mouth/tongue diagrams.
- Practice Japanese Numbers. A page for training listening to numbers.
Language guides
AJATT
How to learn Japanese on your own, having fun and to fluency.
Notable articles:
- Lazy Kanji. One of the many methods of learning kanji.
- 10,000 Sentences: How. The sentence mining method Khatzumoto used for learning Japanese.
- On Grammar.
Anti-features:
- Includes links to the Amazon website. Amazon is known for spying on and politically suppressing its users.
- Contains outdated information.
- Talks about MCD, which is a flashcard format that hasn't received much adoption over the years due to being too difficult and complicated.
- Advertises unnecessary paid products.
- Tries to harvest Email addresses.
Itazuraneko
A collection of guides for those interested in learning Japanese.
Anti-features:
- Includes links to non-free software.
- Includes links to Discord servers. Discord is known for spying on and politically suppressing its users.
- Contains outdated information.
Antimoon
A site on how to learn English. Made by Poles who learned English to native-level fluency. What they used to learn English can be applied for learning any other language, including Japanese.
Notable articles:
Misc
- Matrix日本サーバ勢の公開部屋リスト. A list of Matrix rooms in Japanese. Chat with natives on various topics of interest.
- Cornucopia of resources from the old DJT site.
- Japanese Mega Learning Pack
- Japanese bookmarks by pachimon
- Mia's Japanese quickstart guide. Her guide is a little outdated but can still be useful.
- JM Project. Man pages translated to Japanese.
- 四字熟語人気ランキング
Tags: guide