Yomimaru Learn

Hiragana vs Katakana vs Kanji: When to Use Each

2026-09-29T00:00:00+09:00

Hiragana and katakana write the same sounds with 46 basic characters each, so the difference between them is the job they do. Hiragana writes native Japanese words and the grammar that holds every sentence together. Katakana writes words borrowed from other languages, foreign names, sound effects and emphasis. Kanji, the third script, carries meaning rather than sound. Learn hiragana first: you will need it in every sentence you read.

Hiragana vs katakana vs kanji compared

	Hiragana	Katakana	Kanji
Looks	Rounded, flowing	Angular, mostly straight strokes	Dense, many strokes
Basic set	46	46	2,136 on the official jōyō list
Writes	Native words, particles, verb endings, furigana	Loanwords, foreign names, sound effects, emphasis	The meaning of most content words
Example	ねこ (cat), ありがとう (thank you)	コーヒー (coffee), テレビ (TV)	猫(ねこ) (cat), 山(やま) (mountain)
Came from	Cursive brush forms of Chinese characters	Fragments of Chinese characters	Chinese characters, borrowed whole
When to learn	First	Right after hiragana	Gradually, as you read

The two kana scripts share every sound. Kanji is the one that never runs out.

How to tell hiragana from katakana at a glance

Hiragana is the rounded one, katakana the angular one. That is easy to see and oddly easy to forget: plenty of learners who read both fluently still hesitate over which name goes with which shape. Two hooks settle it, and the second one also tells you what each script is for.

Curves or corners. Hiragana came from cursive brush writing, so it curves: すし. Katakana came from pieces cut out of Chinese characters, so it has corners: スシ. Both spell sushi. If you can't read any kana yet, borrow a hook from your own alphabet: the letter K is nothing but straight lines, and so is Katakana.

The names say it. Kata (片(へん)) means a fragment, and katakana are exactly that, fragments of kanji. Hira (平(たいら)) means plain or common, and hiragana is the everyday script. Put the shape together with the job and you have the whole rule in one line: corners for words from abroad, curves for native words.

Some pairs come close across the two scripts. か has a third stroke, a small tick on the right, that カ doesn't, and り curves where リ runs straighter.

Two more tells work on real text. The long bar (ー) stretches the vowel before it, and you will meet it almost only in katakana: コーヒー, ラーメン. And one pair beats every rule: へ and ヘ, both read he, are written so nearly alike that Unicode lists them as confusable. There, only the word around the kana tells you which script you are in.

The same word in hiragana, katakana and kanji

Which script a word appears in is often the writer's choice, made for a reader and an effect. Take the cat:

猫(ねこ): the everyday adult spelling, in novels and the news
ねこ: a picture book, or a writer who wants the word to feel soft
ネコ: a field guide or a biology text, where species names go in katakana

Japanese also often has two words for one idea, a native one and a borrowed one, and the script tells you which one you are reading:

Idea	Native word	Katakana	What the switch says
Rice	ごはん (gohan)	ライス (raisu)	ライス is rice on a plate at a Western-style restaurant
Milk	牛乳(ぎゅうにゅう) (gyūnyū)	ミルク (miruku)	The borrowed word, from English milk
Work	仕事(しごと) (shigoto)	アルバイト (arubaito)	A part-time job, from German Arbeit
Amazing	すごい (sugoi)	スゴイ (sugoi)	Same word, said louder, like italics
Hello	こんにちは (konnichiwa)	コンニチワ (konnichiwa)	A robot or a foreigner speaking, in manga

Same idea, different passport.

One real sentence, three scripts

Here is a line from Never a Day Off, one of the free N5 stories in our graded library. A man in a suit comes to Take's ramen stall every night and orders the same thing:

焼(や)きラーメンを一(ひと)つ、おねがいします

One yaki ramen, please.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Fried ramen [object], one, please.

Seven pieces, three scripts. Press play to hear it.

Piece	Script	Why this script
焼(やき)	Kanji	Carries the meaning: grill, fry
き	Hiragana	The ending that turns the verb 焼(や)く into "grilled"
ラーメン	Katakana	Borrowed from Chinese lamian, "pulled noodles". The bar (ー) stretches the a
を	Hiragana	The particle that marks what is being ordered
一(いち)	Kanji	The number one
つ	Hiragana	The ending for counting things
おねがいします	Hiragana	"Please". Adults usually write it お願(ねが)いします, with a kanji

焼(や)きラーメンを一(ひと)つ、おねがいします, taken apart.

Look at the last row. 願(ねがい) is an everyday kanji, but a story written for N5 readers leaves it in hiragana, so which words get kanji depends on the reader as well as the word. Japanese also puts no spaces between words, and the switches between scripts do much of that work: ラーメン begins and ends exactly where the script changes. The rest of Take's ramen stall story opens in Yomimaru, with furigana, once you create a free account.

What hiragana is for

Hiragana is the glue. Every particle is written in it: は, が, を, に, の. So is every verb ending: in 食(た)べる (to eat), the kanji 食(しょく) carries the meaning and べる carries the grammar, and when the verb changes, only the kana move: 食(た)べた (ate), 食(た)べない (doesn't eat).

Hiragana also covers native words that are usually left in kana, such as ありがとう and ください, and it is the script of furigana, the small kana printed above a kanji to give its reading. If those are new to you, here is what furigana is and how to read it.

Textbooks for the first years of Japanese primary school, and many materials for foreign beginners, go further: they write almost everything in kana, with a space between words or phrases (分(わ)かち書(が)き, wakachigaki). Without kanji, the reader needs the gaps to see where one word stops. That is how our free beginner stories written in hiragana are set, too.

Katakana is more than loanwords

Loanwords are the famous use: テレビ (TV), ラーメン, and your own name, if it isn't Japanese. But katakana does several other jobs you will meet as soon as you read real Japanese.

Japanese companies. Suzuki is スズキ and Toyota is トヨタ, though both are Japanese names.
Sounds. ピンポン is a doorbell, ワンワン a dog barking.
Emphasis. スゴイ instead of すごい works the way italics do in English.
Species names. Field guides and biology texts write animal and plant names in katakana: ネコ, not 猫(ねこ).
Voices. In manga, a robot or a foreign character may say コンニチワ instead of こんにちは.

Key idea

Katakana marks a word as standing apart from plain Japanese. When a native word you know turns up in katakana, the writer wants you to notice it.

Loanwords even have official spelling rules. Gairaigo no hyōki (外来(がいらい)語(ご)の表記(ひょうき)), a Japanese Cabinet notice from 1991, sets the long bar (ー) for long vowels and the small ッ for a doubled consonant, as in カップ (cup). It also sets combinations like ティ and ファ for sounds Japanese did not have, as in ティーパーティー (tea party) and ファイル (file).

Where kanji fits

Kanji are Chinese characters, and they carry meaning rather than sound. The official list of kanji for general use, the jōyō list published by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs in 2010, holds 2,136 of them.

They stay because Japanese has a great many words that sound alike. こうえん can be 公園(こうえん) (park), 講演(こうえん) (lecture) or 公演(こうえん) (performance), and in writing the kanji tell them apart at a glance. Until you know a kanji, furigana fills the gap. That is why every kanji in the body of this guide carries its reading above it.

Which came first, hiragana or katakana?

Neither, cleanly. Both grew out of man'yōgana, Chinese characters used for their sound alone, and both took shape in the 9th century.

Katakana began with Buddhist monks. Reading Chinese scriptures, they wrote small pieces of characters beside the lines as reading aids, and those pieces became katakana. Hiragana grew out of handwriting: cursive forms of the same sound characters, simplified further in everyday writing at the imperial court. It was called onnade, "women's hand", and The Tale of Genji was written in it. Some of the oldest kana found in Kyoto are ink inscriptions on late 9th-century pottery, dug from the pond of a nobleman's residence.

The shapes that lost in 1900 still exist. They are called hentaigana, and you can spot them on the signs of old soba shops.

For a thousand years, a sound could be written with several different kana. In 1900, Japan fixed one shape per sound for schools. Katakana kept an official role much longer: laws were written in kanji and katakana, and the first three books of Japan's Civil Code were only rewritten in hiragana and modern language in 2004.

Should you learn hiragana or katakana first?

Hiragana. You meet it in every sentence, it carries all the grammar, beginner texts are written in it, and furigana is printed in it. Katakana's basic set then teaches you no new sounds, only a second set of shapes for the ones you already know.

It pays off early. Four rows of hiragana, あ, か, さ and た, are enough to read a whole story: The Stinky Octopus (くさいたこ), seven short lines about an octopus with smelly feet. Beyond those rows it uses only three more kana: が and だ, which are か and た with two small ticks, and a small っ.

Tomo-Sensei says
Start katakana as soon as hiragana feels steady, while the sounds are fresh. And expect four shapes to argue with you for a while: シ, ツ, ソ and ン. Two checks tell those four katakana apart, and when the rest of the script is in, a free katakana quiz tests all 104 and ends on real loanwords.

How much of Japanese is hiragana, katakana or kanji?

We counted. Across 285 articles in Yominews, the Japanese news section of Yomimaru, we sorted every character of the Japanese text into hiragana, katakana or kanji, leaving out punctuation, numbers and the furigana above the kanji. At JLPT N4 (144 texts), hiragana made up 54% of the characters, kanji 32% and katakana 14%. At N1 (137 texts), hiragana fell to 46% and kanji rose to 40%, while katakana stayed at 14%. As the level rises, kanji takes over words that beginner texts leave in hiragana, and katakana barely moves. It does swing from one article to the next, from 2% to 34% at N1, because a story about a video game is full of names. One caveat: these are graded texts written for learners, not native newspapers, and the N1 figures are the closest to native writing.

Level	Texts	Characters	Hiragana	Katakana	Kanji
N4	144	128,658	54%	14%	32%
N1	137	192,514	46%	14%	40%

Yominews articles published up to 27 September 2026. N3 had only four texts, too few to report.

Which script would you use?

Eight words, each shown where you would meet it. Pick the script a Japanese writer would choose, then see why.

On the page: Which script would you use?. Eight words shown where you would meet them. Pick hiragana, katakana or kanji, then see why a Japanese writer chose it. Open it on Yomimaru.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

Japanese Grammar AI Explainer: How It Works

2026-06-25T00:00:00+09:00

Tomo-Sensei is the Japanese grammar AI explainer built into Yomimaru's reading interface. Highlight any sentence, in a library text, in something you pasted in, or in a document you uploaded yourself (a novel as an EPUB, a PDF), and you get a structural breakdown of that exact sentence: what each particle is doing, where the embedded clauses begin and end, who the dropped subject is, and what the conjugation chain means. A grammar reference explains the pattern. This explains your sentence.

The gap that grammar books cannot fill

Every serious learner owns a grammar reference: Genki, Tae Kim, A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar, Bunpro. They are good at what they are for: telling you what te-form is, what a passive looks like alone. The gap opens when you meet a real sentence, recognise every pattern in it, and still cannot say what it means.

長年(ながねん)その問題(もんだい)を避(さ)けてきたとされる政府(せいふ)の対応(たいおう)が、ようやく見直(みなお)されつつあるとの報告(ほうこく)が出(で)た。

Read it once. Now say who has been avoiding the problem, and where the main clause starts. Every word is one an N2 reader knows. The sentence is still a wall.

What stopped you is the shape. Dictionaries describe patterns. None will take this sentence and tell you how its patterns are stacked. That is the job Tomo-Sensei does.

Ask a grammar dictionary about a sentence like this and you must already know which entry to look up. Knowing that is most of the work.

What actually makes a Japanese sentence hard to parse

Two features do most of the damage, and neither is a grammar point you can look up.

The verb arrives last. 「ケンはりんごを食(た)べた」 gives you Ken, then the apple, and only then 食(た)べた. Across five words that costs nothing. Across four lines it costs plenty: you hold every noun and particle in memory without knowing what they are for, because the word that assigns their roles has not arrived. Lose one particle on the way and you cannot get it back.

Modifiers come before the noun, and nothing marks where they start. English announces the description with a joining word: the book that my friend read yesterday. Japanese puts the clause in front and announces nothing.

昨日(きのう)友達(ともだち)が読(よ)んだ本(ほん)

The book my friend read yesterday.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Yesterday friend read book.

Four words, and only the last is the thing being talked about. No "that", no comma, no signal that a clause has opened. You find out when you hit 本(ほん).

Common mistake

Reading a long pre-nominal clause as if it were the main sentence. You see 昨日(きのう)友達(ともだち)が読(よ)んだ, you find a subject and a past-tense verb, you close the sentence in your head, and then 本(ほん) turns up and nothing fits. Nest two of these and you go back to the top twice before working out that neither verb was the main one.

That is what Tomo-Sensei is built for.

What Tomo-Sensei actually tells you

Particle disambiguation in context

は marks the topic, が the subject, を the object. That stops being enough the moment a sentence carries two verbs: the question is no longer what が means, but which verb this が belongs to.

私(わたし)が好(す)きな人(ひと)は日本(にっぽん)にいます。

The person I like is in Japan.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

I (subject) like person, as for, in Japan is.

That が has nothing to do with います. It belongs to 好(す)きな, inside the clause describing 人(ひと). Misread it as the main subject and you are the one in Japan.

Embedded relative clause structure

One noun can carry three stacked clauses in front of it, each with its own verb and particles. Alone, each is recognisable. Stacked, they are not, and that is where intermediate readers stall. Here is the sentence from the top, in pieces.

長年(ながねん)その問題(もんだい)を避(さ)けてきたとされる政府(せいふ)

the government, which is said to have spent years avoiding the problem

The whole first half is one modifier. It is not making a claim about a government. It is naming one.

政府(せいふ)の対応(たいおう)が、ようやく見直(みなお)されつつある

the government's response is finally being reconsidered

Now the が. What is under review is 対応(たいおう), not the government you spent the first half reading about. 見直(みなお)されつつある is passive plus 〜つつある: under way, no agent named.

〜との報告(ほうこく)が出(で)た。

A report to that effect has been published.

And there is the main clause, four words, at the very end. Everything before it was a quotation carried by と. The sentence is about a report.

Notice what did not help you here: knowing the words. You knew all of them before you started.

Dropped subjects and implicit speakers

Japanese drops the subject whenever context can supply it, and in a novel the context can be two pages back.

部屋(へや)に入(はい)ると、もう帰(かえ)っていた。

When I went into the room, he had already left.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Room-into entered-when, already had-gone-home.

Two verbs, two different people, neither named. You cannot write the English without deciding who they are. Tomo-Sensei reads the surrounding text and tells you who each is.

Passive and causative constructions

Passive (〜れる/〜られる), causative (〜せる/〜させる) and causative-passive (〜せられる/〜させられる) stack onto the tail of a verb and rearrange who is doing what to whom. Newspapers compress them, and at speed they mislead.

部長(ぶちょう)に残業(ざんぎょう)させられた。

My manager made me work overtime.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

By the department head, made-to-do overtime, was.

Causative-passive. That に is not a destination. It marks the person who made it happen. Two kana, させ, and the agency moves from you to him.

Conditional nuances

〜たら, 〜ば, 〜と, 〜なら. The books explain the difference in theory, the only place it is ever clean. Tomo-Sensei names which one is in your sentence and what it implies there: a neutral if-then, a hypothetical, an expectation, a recommendation.

Formal written register patterns

N2 and N1 prose runs on written patterns almost nobody says out loud. They look like three or four words and behave like one.

〜にすぎない: is no more than, is merely
〜にもかかわらず: in spite of, despite
〜をめぐって: over, concerning (a dispute or a debate)
〜に基(もと)づいて: on the basis of, according to

Parse 〜にすぎない piece by piece (に, すぎる, ない) and you get "does not exceed", which is neither English nor the point. Tomo-Sensei reads them whole.

How Tomo-Sensei differs from other grammar tools

	Grammar dictionaries	Bunpro	DeepL / Google Translate	ChatGPT (standalone)	Tomo-Sensei
Works on a specific sentence	✗	✗	Translation only	✓	✓
Integrated into reading interface	✗	✗	✗	✗	✓
Works on text you bring yourself (pasted or uploaded)	N/A	N/A	✓	✓	✓
Preserves reading flow	✗	✗	✗	✗	✓ (inline)
Context-aware (reads surrounding text)	✗	✗	✗	Sometimes	✓

The last two rows matter most. Every other tool on that table asks you to leave the page: copy the sentence out, paste it elsewhere, read the answer, come back, find your place. Four context switches for one sentence you were already struggling to hold.

How to use Tomo-Sensei effectively

Reach for it when a sentence is a wall: read twice, every word known, clauses refusing to connect. Vocabulary is not its job: tap the word instead.

Read the sentence. If the meaning comes, keep going.
If it blocks you, parse it yourself first: the main verb at the end, then the bare subject-object-verb frame under the modifiers.
Highlight it and compare the breakdown against your attempt. The gap is the lesson.
Re-read the Japanese with the right structure in your head. That is the pass that sticks.

Tomo-Sensei says
Guess before you ask me. A wrong guess you then correct will outlive ten explanations you merely read, because a correction has somewhere to land.

By JLPT level: what Tomo-Sensei helps with most

Level	What starts blocking you
N4 and N3	Embedded relative clauses, dropped subjects, te-form chains, the first passives.
N2	Stacked modifying clauses in formal texts, hedging and perspective markers, compound conditionals, vocabulary that works as one unit.
N1	Arguments layered across paragraphs, honorific and humble chains, academic hedging, sentence-final nuance particles.

The blocker climbs the sentence: first the clauses, then the register, then the argument.

Tomo-Sensei as a grammar pattern database

Every explanation is tied to the sentence you highlighted, so across an hour of reading you meet the same construction three or four times and see it explained in each. A grammar list tells you what a pattern is. Only reading native Japanese content shows what it does.

Key idea

The point of the breakdown is that you stop needing it. A sentence you parse with help this week is one you parse unaided next month, because you watched the pattern work in a real sentence rather than read about it in an entry.

Test yourself: the adaptive grammar challenge

The challenge below pulls a particle or a conjugation out of a real sentence and asks you to put it back: five questions, adapting to the level you clear. Spotting clause structure under pressure is a different skill from reading about it, and guessing on the embedded-clause items is the gap Tomo-Sensei closes while you read.

On the page: Adaptive Grammar Challenge. Five cloze questions that pull a particle or a conjugation out of a real sentence and adapt to the level you clear. Open it on Yomimaru.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

Migaku Alternatives: 4 Options Without Anki

2026-06-25T00:00:00+09:00

The best Migaku alternatives for Japanese reading in 2026 are Yomichan/Yomitan (a free browser extension, no Anki required), Language Reactor (Netflix and YouTube immersion without Migaku's setup), LingQ (web-based word tracking, no extension), and Yomimaru (a reading platform for text you import yourself, with adaptive furigana and AI grammar breakdowns, no extension and no Anki). Which one is right for you comes down to a single question: does your Japanese arrive as video, as web pages you stumble across, or as texts you deliberately sit down with?

Yomimaru vs. Migaku at a glance

If your goal is reading rather than watching, this is the comparison that decides it. Price, free tier, setup, and what you actually have to install before you can read a sentence.

	Yomimaru	Migaku
Free tier	Ronin: free forever, no credit card. Reading, dictionary lookups and adaptive furigana included	Limited free tier with usage caps
Price (paid)	From $9.99/mo ($7.99/mo billed annually)	~$9/mo (or ~$96/yr); $399 lifetime
Setup	None. Open a browser, paste text, read	Chrome extension + Anki + Migaku Anki add-on
Requires a browser extension	No	Yes (core feature)
Requires Anki	No. Built-in study lists, with Anki export if you want it	Recommended (built as an Anki companion)
Works on iPhone / iOS	Yes, in any mobile browser	App only, significantly more limited than desktop
Custom text import	Yes. Paste any text, or upload a file (.txt, .md, .pdf, .epub, .docx, .odt)	Yes (via the extension or OCR)
Adaptive furigana by JLPT level	Yes	No
AI grammar explanations	Yes, on any sentence	No
Netflix / YouTube integration	No	Yes, the strongest in the category
Languages	Japanese only	11 languages

Key idea

Migaku is the stronger tool for video immersion inside an Anki workflow. Yomimaru is the stronger tool for reading texts you bring yourself, with no extension and no Anki. Almost everything below is a consequence of that one split.

What is Migaku?

Migaku is a Japanese learning platform built around a browser extension that turns Japanese content into something you can click: webpages, Netflix subtitles, YouTube videos, manga. Hover a word for its reading and meaning, click once to turn it into a flashcard, and the extension scores how much of the page you already know. The card goes to Anki, and Anki is where you review it. Meet a word in the wild, capture it, drill it later. That loop is the whole product, and it is a good loop.

Migaku covers 11 languages. This page judges it only on Japanese, which is the fair comparison against a Japanese-only tool and also the hardest one for a multi-language product to win.

It suits learners who already have an Anki habit and want their anime and manga to feed it. The Netflix and YouTube integration is among the most capable in the category, and the OCR import (photograph a page of Japanese, read it interactively) solves a problem no other free tool on this list solves.

The reason people go looking for a Migaku alternative is rarely that Migaku is bad. It is that the tooling around it stopped fitting.

Where Migaku falls short

Four things send learners to this page, and none of them is that the extension does not work. It works. It just asks for a lot before it does.

Setup requires Anki and a browser extension

Getting Migaku fully working means installing a Chrome extension, installing Anki (a separate desktop application), adding the Migaku Anki add-on, and connecting the two. If Anki is already open on your machine every morning, that is twenty minutes of admin and then it is done forever. If it is not, you have been handed a second product to learn before you can read your first sentence.

Migaku has improved its standalone review system over time, but it was built as an Anki companion first, and the review experience without Anki is noticeably thinner than what you get from tools designed from the ground up to carry their own SRS.

Limited iOS and mobile experience

The extension is a Chrome extension, and Chrome extensions do not run on iOS Safari, the default browser on every iPhone. There is an iOS app, and it does some of what Migaku does, but the interactive overlay that makes a webpage, a Netflix subtitle or a YouTube video clickable needs the desktop. If your study happens in the ten minutes before the train arrives, the flagship feature is sitting on a machine you left at home.

Multi-language design dilutes Japanese-specific features

Migaku supports 11 languages. That is real engineering, and it also means the Japanese-only work (tokenizing a script with no spaces between words, layering furigana against a learner's level, the grammar structures that turn up in the JLPT reading section) is not where the deepest investment goes. A tool that only ever has to be right about one language can push further into what that language specifically punishes you for: the kanji you half-recognise, the subject that is simply not on the page.

No curated library of authentic Japanese texts

Migaku makes content interactive, but sourcing the content is your problem. The web, Netflix, a book you already own: you bring it, Migaku layers on top of it. If you already keep a reading list, that is exactly what you want from a tool. If you do not, the hardest part of reading Japanese is still ahead of you, because finding material at your level is most of the battle, and Migaku does not fight that one for you.

The best Migaku alternatives

Yomichan / Yomitan: best free browser extension

Yomichan, now maintained as Yomitan, is the closest thing to Migaku's core extension with none of the apparatus around it. Install it in Chrome, Firefox or Edge and any Japanese webpage becomes interactive: hover a word for its reading, meaning, JLPT level and pitch accent. It talks to Anki if you want it to and ignores Anki completely if you do not. It is free, it is one of the most actively maintained tools in the Japanese learning ecosystem, and for hover-lookup on the open web it is hard to beat.

What it is not is a place to read. It is an overlay, not a reading environment: no library, no media integration, no AI grammar explanations, and no idea what your level is, so it shows you everything you hover whether you needed it or not. It is desktop-only, which is another way of saying it does not exist on your phone.

Language Reactor: best for video-centric immersion

Language Reactor (formerly Language Learning with Netflix) is a Chrome extension that puts dual subtitles, click-to-lookup and one-click vocabulary saving onto Netflix and YouTube. It covers the same use case as Migaku's media features, watching anime or Japanese TV with the dictionary right there, with less machinery and no Anki requirement. The dual-subtitle mode, Japanese subtitles running alongside English with any word clickable, is why people install it, and for audiovisual learners it genuinely works.

It does that one thing. There is no reading of articles, books or pasted text, no curated content, no AI grammar explanations, and the standalone SRS is limited. It is a desktop Chrome extension, so it is not on your phone either.

LingQ: best web-based word tracking

LingQ is a platform where you read and listen while marking every word as known or unknown. "LingQing" a word saves it with the sentence it came from, and over months your database of known vocabulary builds itself out of whatever you happened to read. No browser extension. It runs in the web and has iOS and Android apps.

The known-word count is really the product, and it is a motivating one, because progress in Japanese is otherwise invisible for long stretches. The trade-offs: content quality varies, since much of it is user-uploaded with inconsistent difficulty labelling; there is no adaptive furigana and no AI grammar explanation; full dictionary access needs a paid plan; and the interface is busier than anything else on this list.

Yomimaru: best for reading-first learners without Anki

Yomimaru starts from the opposite premise. Migaku layers a reader over content you found somewhere else. Yomimaru is where the content already lives, and where you bring your own: paste a Japanese text or upload a file and the full reading environment switches on over it. No extension, no add-on, no desktop requirement. It runs in a browser, Safari on an iPhone included.

The free tier caps imports at 10 for the life of the account. Reading the library, the lookups and the adaptive furigana are not capped.

Furigana is the clearest split. Yomitan shows readings on everything you hover; Migaku does not calibrate readings to your level at all. Yomimaru asks for your JLPT level once and then puts furigana only above it. Set N3 and this is what a news sentence looks like:

首相(しゅしょう)は記者(きしゃ)の質問(しつもん)に答(こた)えなかった。

The prime minister did not answer the reporter's question.

At N3, furigana appears over 首相(しゅしょう) and 記者(きしゃ) and nowhere else. 質問(しつもん) and 答(こたえ) sit below your level, so they stand bare and you have to actually read them. That is one sentence. A news article is two hundred, and the whole app knows your level, not just this page.

The readings you cannot get are one tap away, and the tap returns every reading the word has, its part of speech and its numbered English meanings. Star the word and it lands in your list in the form you met it in, conjugation and all, ready for spaced-repetition review inside Yomimaru. Already have a deck? Export to Anki. Anki is an option here, not a prerequisite. If you are comparing furigana tooling more broadly, the furigana reader roundup covers the free options too.

When the sentence itself is the problem rather than a word in it, Tomo-Sensei takes it apart: which particle is doing what, where the relative clause starts, who the missing subject is. It is not a pre-written note bolted onto specific content, so it works on whatever you imported, not just on material someone prepared in advance. That is the AI grammar explainer in practice.

And there is something to read before you import anything: Aozora Bunko classics (Sōseki, Akutagawa, Dazai and hundreds of other Aozora writers), the day's real news from NHK, Mainichi and Asahi rewritten to your level, curated sets per level, and AI-generated stories about whatever you are actually interested in.

Migaku vs. alternatives: feature comparison

The same ten questions, asked of all five tools.

	Migaku	Yomichan / Yomitan	Language Reactor	LingQ	Yomimaru
Free tier	Limited	Free	Free (basic)	Limited	Free forever + paid
Requires extension	✓ (core feature)	✓ (only option)	✓	✗	✗
Works on iOS	App (limited)	✗	✗	✓ app	✓ mobile browser
Anki required	Recommended	Optional	✗	✗	✗
Netflix / YouTube integration	✓	✗	✓	✗	✗
Custom text import	✓	✗	✗	✓	✓
Adaptive furigana by JLPT level	✗	✗	✗	✗	✓
AI grammar explanations	✗	✗	✗	✗	✓
Built-in SRS (no Anki)	Limited	✗	✗	✓	✓
Languages supported	11	All	All	60+	Japanese only

: Migaku and its four closest alternatives, compared on the things learners actually switch for.

Which should you choose?

Choose on the week you actually had, not on the week you meant to have.

Pick for the input you already consume
Look at the last seven days honestly. If most of your Japanese reached you as subtitled video, buy the video tool. If most of it was text you sat down with, buy the reading tool. The tool that matches the habit you have is the tool you will still be opening in March.

Pick for the learner you intend to become
The Anki setup bought in January for the immersion routine that starts "next week" is the one that never gets configured. A tool cannot give you a habit. It can only make the habit you have cheaper to keep.

Still torn? The cheapest test is the free one. Yomitan costs nothing and Ronin costs nothing. Run both for a week and see which one you actually open.

If most of your Japanese comes from anime, Japanese TV or YouTube, you already review in Anki, and you study at a desk in Chrome: stay with Migaku. Nothing else on this list touches its subtitle layer, and switching would cost you the one part of your routine that is working.

If you want Migaku's hover-lookup on Japanese websites without paying and without touching Anki: install Yomitan. Free, immediate, and for that single job it is the lowest-friction thing that exists.

If your immersion is Netflix and YouTube but you never wanted the Anki half of the deal: use Language Reactor.

If you want a running count of the words you know across everything you read, and a busier interface does not bother you: use LingQ.

If the Japanese you actually read is Japanese you bring yourself, the article a friend sent you, a chapter of a book you own, this morning's news, and you want furigana that respects what you already know plus a grammar breakdown on any sentence, with nothing to install: use Yomimaru. Ronin is free forever, no card needed.

Plenty of learners never choose at all. Yomitan in the browser for whatever they stumble across, Yomimaru for the reading they sit down to do on purpose. Those two are complementary rather than competing, and running both costs nothing.

What to Read After WaniKani Level 60

2026-06-25T00:00:00+09:00

You know 2,000 kanji. You finished all 60 levels. You open a real Japanese book and stall on page one. Almost every WaniKani graduate hits that wall, for the same reason: WaniKani trained you to recognise characters, and a page of Japanese asks you to parse sentences. What closes the gap is daily extensive reading at JLPT N4 to N3 (NHK Web Easy, よつばと! manga, graded readers), where you recognise every kanji and the grammar is the only work. Read with adaptive furigana and grammar help one tap away, then step up to novels and unsimplified news once a paragraph stops feeling like work.

What WaniKani gives you, and what it doesn't

WaniKani is exceptionally good at one thing: kanji recognition through spaced repetition. By Level 60 you reliably recognise roughly 2,000 kanji and 6,000 associated vocabulary items. Almost every Japanese text you will want to read is built from some subset of those characters. That is an enormous asset.

What it leaves out	What that costs you
Grammar	Items are word-and-meaning pairs. Particles, conjugations and clause structure are out of scope. You can know every word in a sentence and not know what happened in it.
Reading fluency	A kanji on a review card is not a kanji at speed inside a dense paragraph. Only reading builds that.
Vocabulary in context	Clean English glosses, stripped of the collocations you get from meeting a word in a hundred real sentences.

Three gaps, and only one is about kanji. That one is not what stops you.

None of this makes the two years wasted. Those 2,000 kanji are why you can even attempt page one. They are just not, on their own, the ability to read it.

This is not a knock on WaniKani. It is honest about its scope. But the gap is predictable, and Level 60 graduates walk into it the same week: you decode Japanese far faster than you read it.

The WaniKani graduation gap

Here is the moment, and finishers describe it in near-identical words. You open a book. You recognise nearly every kanji on the page. You still cannot tell what the paragraph says. You are decoding, not reading.

読(よ)めない漢字(かんじ)が一(ひと)つもないのに、何(なに)が書(か)いてあるのか分(わ)からない。

There is not a single kanji here I can't read, and I still have no idea what it says.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Kanji that cannot be read, not even one exists, and yet, what is written, [I] do not understand.

Every kanji there is N5 or N4, known to you for over a year. What stops you is のに, the 〜てある that turns a verb into a state somebody left behind on purpose, and a subject nobody wrote down. None of that was ever on a WaniKani card.

That is the WaniKani graduation gap. The kanji were never the problem. They were the part of the problem you could see.

Start where your grammar is, not where your kanji is

The most common mistake WaniKani graduates make is choosing material at their kanji level.

Common mistake

Buying a novel because you can read every kanji on the back cover. Kanji on the cover is not comprehension inside it. You get four pages in, look up eleven grammar points, shelve the book, and conclude that two years of WaniKani did not work. They worked. You are reading the wrong thing.

Your kanji is roughly N2. Your grammar, if you never studied it separately, may still be N5 to N4. Choose for the weaker of the two, which puts you at N4 to N3: every character familiar, the grammar manageable with lookup, the text short enough to finish. For a few weeks, reading at the right level will feel like reading beneath yourself. That is cheaper than the shelved novel.

What to read: by type and difficulty

A WaniKani graduate's kanji usually runs ahead of their grammar, which is why "read something at your level" is such an unhelpful instruction. Two shelves that work well here: JLPT N2 texts if you want prose that pushes you, and N1 literary Japanese once you stop needing the furigana. Both are free, graded, and show furigana only above the level you set — which is exactly the WaniKani-graduate problem solved.

Five options, roughly in the order graduates move through them. Pick the row where you recognise the kanji and the grammar still costs you something.

Material	Band	What it gives you	Where it stops
NHK Web Easy (free)	N4 to N3	NHK news rewritten simpler. Furigana on the kanji, and genuine news rather than fabricated learner content.	Ceiling around N3. When the sentences feel easy, go.
よつばと! manga	N4 to N3	Everyday vocabulary, conversational N4, pictures that carry you when the grammar drops the thread.	Highly colloquial: speech patterns, not the written register of novels and news.
Graded readers (Nihongo Tadoku, ASK)	N5 to N3	Written for post-beginners at known JLPT levels. Difficulty is a dial you set, not a gamble.	Written for learners. Native writing is still a jump.
Light novels (ライトノベル)	N3 to N2	Young-adult adventure, fantasy and romance in the contemporary vocabulary of anime and modern manga. Furigana on most kanji, sentences simpler than literary fiction.	Assumes some grammar study. Not your first stop after Level 60.
Authentic news and web (NHK News Web, newspapers, Wikipedia, blogs)	N2 to N1	Nothing simplified. Formal vocabulary, written-register grammar, the endgame.	Most graduates need six to twelve months at lower levels first.

The band is where the material sits, not where you have to be.

Recommended starting points: 転生(てんせい)したらスライムだった件(けん), a standard first light novel, written in the contemporary vocabulary of the anime and manga you already know. For a real novel rather than a light one, コンビニ人間(にんげん) is short, plainly written, and the kind of book you actually finish.

Every simplified text exists to make itself unnecessary: a bridge to native content, not a substitute for it. For more free sites at that first level, see the best NHK Web Easy alternatives.

Graded readers are the one thing here you are meant to outgrow. When a book stops teaching you anything, that is the series working.

Tomo-Sensei says
If you make me pick one row, take よつばと!. It is not the most efficient thing on that list. It is the one you will still be reading in three weeks, and that matters more.

Why WaniKani graduates specifically benefit from Yomimaru

After WaniKani you do not need help recognising kanji. You need help with the space between them, without leaving the page.

Yomimaru shows furigana only for kanji above your set JLPT level. Set it to N2 and readings appear on N1 kanji, the ones that still ambush you in running text, while the 2,000 you own stay bare and your eye learns to take them at speed. Furigana on everything builds lookup dependency; furigana on nothing stalls you at the first gap. Adaptive furigana matches what you spent two years doing.

Highlight a sentence that beats you and Tomo-Sensei takes it apart in English: which particle is doing what, where the embedded clause opens and closes, what the dropped subject is. → What Tomo-Sensei explains

政府(せいふ)は、来月(らいげつ)から始(はじ)まる新(あたら)しい制度(せいど)について、必要(ひつよう)な準備(じゅんび)が整(ととの)っていない自治体(じちたい)もあると認(みと)めた。

The government admitted that some municipalities are not ready for the new system starting next month.

One sentence, four things happening, main verb (認(みと)めた) last. Every kanji sits inside your 2,000. The work is holding 〜について open across a relative clause until that verb tells you what to do with it.

It works on library texts and on anything you bring yourself: paste in a Wikipedia article you care about, or upload the book you already bought as a file (.epub, .pdf, .docx, .txt and more; ten imports on the free tier). Every word you tap comes back with its readings, its part of speech and its English meanings, without the paragraph closing behind you.

Key idea

After WaniKani, judge a reading tool on one question: when a sentence beats you, how fast does it hand you the grammar and put you back on the page? Kanji help is not what you are short of.

A 90-day reading plan after WaniKani

Month 1: habit. Fifteen to twenty minutes daily, NHK Web Easy or よつばと!. Do not stop for every grammar point. Finish the article or the chapter. You are building a habit, not studying.
Month 2: grammar. When a structure blocks you, get the breakdown and note the pattern: the same ten recur. The guide to reading native Japanese content covers stepping the difficulty up without falling off.
Month 3: step up. Light novels, or N3-level authentic news. Your speed should be visibly better than Month 1. You will still hit unknown grammar. It should block you less often.

What to take away

Grammar and parsing speed are the gap. WaniKani was never selling those.
Choose for the weaker level. Expect it to feel beneath you for a while.
Ninety days of daily reading closes more of the gap than another deck.

Furigana Reader Online: 5 Tools Compared (2026)

2026-06-24T00:00:00+09:00

The best free furigana readers online in 2026 are Yomichan/Yomitan (hover-over furigana on any Japanese web page, desktop browsers only), Jisho.org (word-by-word lookup), ichi.moe (a sentence parser that glosses every component), Kuroshiro (a library for developers) and Yomimaru (adaptive JLPT-level furigana on any text you import). Which one is right depends on the unit of Japanese that stopped you: a word, a sentence, a page somebody else published, or a document you brought yourself. For that last case, reading something you chose from beginning to end, Yomimaru is the tool built for it, because the readings land on the kanji you have not learned and stay off the ones you have.

What is a furigana reader?

A furigana reader is any tool that prints a kanji's reading above it in kana, so you can decode a word whose characters you have never met. The readings are hiragana or katakana, the scripts learners pick up first, which is why furigana works from your first week.

Japanese publishing does this for children and then stops. Manga, picture books and school textbooks print furigana over kanji the reader is not expected to know yet. Newspapers, novels, websites and the back of a bag of rice do not: they assume you already have the couple of thousand everyday kanji. A furigana reader closes that gap artificially.

政府(せいふ)は新(あたら)しい制度(せいど)の導入(どうにゅう)を検討(けんとう)している。

The government is considering introducing the new system.

Every word here is ordinary newspaper Japanese. Two compounds are all it takes to stop you.

Here is the same line the way an adult Japanese reader gets it: 政府は新しい制度の導入を検討している。 If 導入(どうにゅう) and 検討(けんとう) are not already in your head, that is a wall, and no amount of grammar gets you over it. That wall is the whole problem a furigana reader exists to solve.

Key idea

Furigana keeps you inside the Japanese writing system. Romaji replaces it. A kanji you read with its reading printed above is still a kanji you have looked at; a word you read in romaji is a word you have not.

Furigana only helps if the kana themselves are automatic. If you are still sounding out す and む, spend a week with the free kana trainer and come back.

Not every tool does the same job with it. Some print a reading for one word you clicked, some for one sentence you pasted, a few across a whole document. And exactly one of the five below decides which kanji get a reading based on what you already know, which matters more than any other row in the table.

Why learning to read without furigana is the long-term goal

Here is the paradox: the best furigana reader is the one you need less of every month.

A reading printed over every kanji trains your eye to take the cheap path. The kana are right there, they are easier, and your brain reads them instead of the character underneath. You finish the chapter, you understood it, and you cannot recall a single new kanji from it. That is not reading practice. It is hiragana practice with decorative kanji attached.

The fix is adaptive furigana: readings only on kanji above the level you have reached, nothing on the ones at or below it. This is how children in Japan read. Kanji they have been taught appear bare, kanji from a later school year come annotated, and the annotation retreats a little every year.

Furigana that fades
You set N4. 学校 and 電車 stay bare, because you know them, so your eye has to do the recognition work. 憂鬱(ゆううつ) keeps its reading, because you do not. Every page is a kanji test you happen to be enjoying.

Furigana on everything
Every kanji carries its kana forever. Your eye takes the easy line every time. Four hundred pages later the same characters still stop you, and you cannot work out why the reading never got easier.

Four of the five tools below will print a reading on every kanji you point at, with no notion of what you have already learned. That is a reasonable thing for a dictionary to do. It is a poor thing to build a reading habit on.

The best furigana reader tools online

Five tools, sorted by the unit of Japanese each one is actually good at: a page, a word, a sentence, a codebase, a document.

Yomichan / Yomitan: best browser extension

Yomichan, now continued as Yomitan, is a free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Hover over a word on any Japanese web page and a popup gives you the reading in hiragana, the English definition and the word's JLPT level. No clicking, no copy-pasting, no leaving the page. For Japanese that already lives on the web, news articles, Wikipedia, blogs, fan sites, Twitter/X posts, Yomitan is the gold standard and it is genuinely excellent.

Its limits are the limits of being an extension. It is desktop-only, because browser extensions do not work on iOS or Android. It does not reach PDF files, images, or content you paste in from another source. It shows furigana on everything you hover rather than filtering by your level, so nothing ever fades. And grammar is out of scope: when a sentence rather than a word defeats you, you go and look somewhere else.

Jisho.org: best for word-level lookup

Jisho is a free Japanese-English dictionary, and for one word it is hard to beat. Search a word, a kanji or a sentence fragment and you get readings, meanings, pitch accent and example sentences, all with furigana, fast and reliably. It works well on mobile.

What it is not is a place to read. You cannot paste in a full text and read it with furigana throughout; you get individual word lookups, one at a time, fetched by leaving whatever you were reading. There is no grammar analysis. It is a supplement, not a reading environment.

ichi.moe: best for sentence-level grammar breakdown

ichi.moe is a free web tool that takes a Japanese sentence apart. Paste one in and it returns each component with its furigana, its grammatical role and an English gloss, word by word, so you can see what every element is doing. For a beginner stuck on a sentence that will not resolve, it is excellent at showing why the thing works the way it does.

It is not a full reading interface. One or two sentences at a time is the honest ceiling, not whole articles, and the parser occasionally struggles with complex or colloquial sentences. There is no continuous reading flow: you paste, you study the breakdown, you go back.

Kuroshiro: for developers only

Kuroshiro is an open-source JavaScript library that automatically adds furigana to Japanese text. If you are building a reading tool, a browser script or a site that has to annotate Japanese, this is the engine you call.

If you are a learner, it is not for you. It requires technical setup, and it hands back annotated text: a component of a reading tool, not a reading tool. No interface, no dictionary, no grammar help.

Yomimaru: best for reading full Japanese texts

Yomimaru is a reading platform rather than a lookup tool, so you bring the text. Paste in an article, a chapter of a novel you own, a recipe, a company announcement, a message somebody sent you, and the reader opens on it with furigana already applied.

What separates it from everything above is that it knows your level. Set JLPT N5 to N1 once and the furigana obeys it: kanji at or below your level render bare, kanji above it carry their reading. An N3 reader gets no help on N4 and N5 kanji, which they are supposed to know by now, and help on everything from N2 up. The readings retreat as you improve, and that retreat is the point.

Tapping a word opens every reading it has, its part of speech and its numbered English meanings, without moving you off the page, so a lookup costs you a second instead of a tab. Star it and the word joins your list in the form you met it in, conjugation and all, ready for spaced-repetition review or an Anki export. And when the problem is the sentence rather than the word, Tomo-Sensei breaks the grammar down in place: which particle is doing what, where the relative clause starts and ends, what the subject of that passive construction actually is.

Tomo-Sensei says
Do not switch the furigana off entirely to prove a point to yourself. Set the level you honestly read at, and let the readings leave on their own. The kanji you stop needing help with is the kanji you have learned.

Note

One thing to know before you sign up: Ronin is free forever and takes no card, but it caps the texts you import at ten for the life of the account. If you plan to bring in a chapter every week, that is a paid plan.

Feature comparison

	Yomichan/Yomitan	Jisho.org	ichi.moe	Kuroshiro	Yomimaru
Free	✓	✓	✓	✓ (open source)	Free tier + paid plans
Full reading interface	✗ (hover only)	✗ (lookup only)	✗ (sentence only)	✗ (developer library)	✓
Custom text import	✗ (web only)	✗	✓ (paste)	✗ (code only)	✓ (paste or upload a file)
Adaptive furigana by JLPT level	✗	✗	✗	✗	✓
Grammar explanations	✗	✗	✓ (basic)	✗	✓ (AI, on any sentence)
Mobile support	✗ (desktop only)	✓	✓	N/A (library)	✓ (mobile browser)
Works on PDFs / ebooks	✗	✗	✗	✗	✓ (upload .pdf, .epub, .docx)
Vocabulary saving	✓ (Anki export)	✗	✗	✗	✓ (study lists + export)

Five furigana readers, compared on the things that decide which one you actually open.

A grid flattens things. Every ✗ here is a design decision rather than a defect: a dictionary is not trying and failing to be a reading app.

Which furigana tool is right for you?

If you read Japanese that is already on the open web, in a desktop browser, use Yomitan. Hover, read, keep going. Nothing on this list is more frictionless for that.

If you want the reading and meaning of one word, use Jisho.org. It is a dictionary, it is a good one, and a whole reading app is a heavy thing to open for a single lookup.

If one sentence has beaten you and you want to watch it come apart, use ichi.moe. Paste it, read the breakdown, go back. That is the job it does, and it does it directly.

If you are a developer who needs to generate furigana inside your own product, use Kuroshiro. It is a library you call from your own code, and the interface around it is yours to build.

If you want to read a text you chose yourself, beginning to end, with readings on the kanji you have not learned and nothing on the ones you have, use Yomimaru. That is the case the other four are not built for. It runs in a mobile browser, it takes anything you can paste in from a PDF or an ebook, and the furigana gets quieter as your kanji gets better. It comes into its own at N3 and above, where what you actually want to read is rarely sitting on an open web page waiting to be hovered over.

Most learners end up running two of these. Yomitan for the web they were browsing anyway, Yomimaru for the material they bring themselves. That is not a compromise or a failure to choose. Those are two different reading habits, and they want different tools.

JLPT N2 Reading: 9 Strategies to Pass 読解

2026-06-24T00:00:00+09:00

You pass JLPT N2 reading by telling a writer's own claim apart from the claims they only report, and every one of the nine strategies on this page serves that one skill. N3 passages tell you something and check that you caught it. An N2 passage cites a survey, concedes a point to the opposing view, hedges twice and then commits to its real position in a single sentence, usually late, and the question asks you to find that sentence. So you read the questions before the passage to know what you are hunting, you name the passage type from its first line, you watch for the grammar that marks a borrowed opinion, and you give two comparative texts somewhere to live other than your working memory. All of it runs inside one clock that the vocabulary and grammar questions are also draining. Everything below is a variation on one question: who actually believes this sentence?

What makes N2 reading different from N3

The jump from N3 to N2 is the biggest one in the JLPT reading section, and people misdiagnose it constantly. They assume the words got harder, buy a 6,000-word deck, and are surprised when the passages still slide off them. The words did get harder. That is not the problem.

Here is an N3-shaped sentence about technology.

技術(ぎじゅつ)が進歩(しんぽ)すると、生活(せいかつ)は便利(べんり)になる。

When technology advances, life gets more convenient.

One condition, one result, and the author standing directly behind the claim. Nothing is hiding.

And here is the same idea, written the way an N2 passage actually writes it.

技術(ぎじゅつ)の進歩(しんぽ)がもたらす利便(りべん)性(せい)は、必(かなら)ずしも人々(ひとびと)の生活(せいかつ)を豊(ゆた)かにするとは限(かぎ)らないと言(い)われている。

The convenience brought by technological progress does not always make people's lives richer, or so it is said.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

The convenience that technological progress brings, as for it, necessarily people's lives to make richer is not limited, it is said.

A relative clause buried inside the subject, a 必(かなら)ずしも〜とは限(かぎ)らない double hedge, and a 〜と言(い)われている that quietly hands the opinion to somebody who is not the author. Now ask who believes it. The passage is about to ask you.

You can know every single word in that second sentence and still not know whether the author agrees with it. That gap is what N2 is testing.

Four things changed, and all four are structural. N2 texts run in 書(か)き言葉(ことば), the formal written register that Japanese adults read in newspapers and business documents and almost never speak aloud, which is why solid conversational Japanese buys you so little here. Long passages stretch to 400 to 600 characters and pack them with embedded relative clauses, passive-causative chains, and nouns manufactured out of verb phrases. N2 also adds a passage type that does not exist at N3: comparative texts, two separate pieces on one topic whose positions differ in ways you have to hold in working memory at the same time. And the questions increasingly ask what the author implies rather than what they wrote, so the answer is nowhere in the text word for word. If you want the level below this, the N3 strategies are the foundation that the rest of this article assumes.

N2 reading section structure at a glance

Five passage types, five different reading behaviours. Treating them all as "read carefully, then answer" is the most reliable way to run out of clock.

Section	Japanese name	Passage length	What it tests
Short texts	短文理解(たんぶんりかい)	1 short notice or memo	Locating a specific instruction or fact
Medium texts	中文理解(ちゅうぶんりかい)	2 to 3 paragraphs	Following an editorial argument, identifying tone
Long texts	長文理解(ちょうぶんりかい)	4 to 6 paragraphs (around 500 characters)	Identifying main thesis, tracking argument structure
Comparative texts	統合理解(とうごうりかい)	Two texts of 2 to 3 paragraphs each	Comparing positions, finding agreements and differences
Integrated information	情報(じょうほう)検索(けんさく)	Chart or notice plus a short text	Cross-referencing two information sources

Comparative and integrated tasks exist only at N2 and N1. If you prepared with N3 material, these two are the ones you have literally never practised.

Strategy 1: Read the questions and all answer options first

At N2 you cannot skim a 500-character passage without a filter and expect to come out with anything. Read the question first. Then read all four options, before a single line of body text.

The options are the real briefing. They tell you what the passage is going to be interrogated about, which turns reading into a search rather than a summary.

筆者(ひっしゃ)は技術(ぎじゅつ)の進歩(しんぽ)を危険(きけん)だと述(の)べている。

The author states that technological progress is dangerous.

This is an answer option, not a passage sentence. Read it before the passage and you now have one job: find the author's evaluation of technology, not merely the places they mention it. Read it after, and you are back at the top of 500 characters hunting for something you already walked past.

The question stems recycle a small, fixed vocabulary. Learn it once and you stop burning exam seconds decoding the question instead of the text.

筆者(ひっしゃ)はどのように述(の)べているか: "how does the author state it": go and find the sentence, it is in there
筆者(ひっしゃ)の考(かんが)えに最(もっと)も近(ちか)いものはどれか: "which is closest to the author's view": an inference question, and the wording will not match the text
文章(ぶんしょう)Iと文章(ぶんしょう)IIで共通(きょうつう)して述(の)べられていること: "what both texts state": the comparative agreement question, and the reason Strategy 4 exists

For comparative passages, read every question before you read either text. Otherwise you will read both, discover what you were supposed to be looking for, and read both again. There is no version of the N2 clock where you can afford that.

Strategy 2: Identify the passage type in the opening sentence

Each type wants a different reading behaviour, and Japanese writers signal the type almost immediately. Two sentences is usually all it takes.

Passage type	The tell in the first two sentences	Where the answer sits
Opinion essay (論説(ろんせつ)文(ぶん))	A broad social observation, or a question the author pointedly does not answer yet	The final paragraph. Look for 〜と思(おも)う, 〜ではないか, 〜べきだ
Explanatory text (説明(せつめい)文(ぶん))	A definition, a process, a fact stated flat	The opening or closing sentence. Common in short and medium
Comparative (統合理解(とうごうりかい))	Two texts, labelled 文章(ぶんしょう)I and 文章(ぶんしょう)II	Across both of them. Strategy 4 handles this one
Integrated information (情報(じょうほう)検索(けんさく))	A chart, table, or announcement, plus a short passage	Only where the question points. Do not read this one linearly

果(は)たして、便利(べんり)さは私(わたし)たちを幸福(こうふく)にしたのだろうか。

Has convenience actually made us happy?

果(は)たして at the front, 〜のだろうか at the back. The author has just told you two things without saying either: this is an opinion essay, and their real answer is waiting for you at the bottom of the page.

Strategy 3: Track hedging language and perspective markers

This is the section that decides your score. N2 opinion texts are layered, and the author will routinely spend a paragraph laying out somebody else's view, in careful and sympathetic detail, purely in order to take it apart. Read too fast and you will walk out convinced the author believes the thing they were about to demolish.

So stop reading for content and start reading for ownership. These are the markers that mean the claim belongs to somebody else.

〜とされている / 〜と言(い)われている: "it is said that": the author is holding this claim at arm's length
〜によると / 〜によれば: "according to": an attributed source, and sources are not the author
〜とも考(かんが)えられる: "it could also be seen that": another view being politely acknowledged, usually just before it is dropped
〜に過(す)ぎない: "nothing more than": the author dismissing somebody else's framing, so this one is the author speaking

And these are the markers that mean the author has stepped forward.

〜と考(かんが)える / 〜と思(おも)う: a flat first-person assertion, rare and therefore loud
〜のではないか / 〜ではないだろうか: indirect in form, but this is the author committing
しかし / ところが / だが: whatever came before has just been overruled
つまり / 要(よう)するに / すなわち: the author restating their own conclusion, kindly, for you

若者(わかもの)の読書(どくしょ)離(ばな)れが進(すす)んでいるとされている。しかし、実際(じっさい)には読(よ)む媒体(ばいたい)が変(か)わっただけではないだろうか。

Young people are said to be reading less. But hasn't the medium simply changed?

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Young people's turning-away-from-reading is advancing, it is said. However, in reality, the medium they read on has merely changed, is it not?

Two sentences, two owners. 〜とされている parks the first claim on somebody else. しかし plus 〜ではないだろうか takes the second one back for the author. The main-point answer is sentence two, and the distractor was built out of sentence one.

Common mistake

Reading 〜とされている, understanding it perfectly, and filing the claim under the author. This is the most expensive error on the N2 reading section, and it is expensive precisely because you understood the sentence. The test writer builds the distractor out of the cited view for exactly that reason: it is the sentence you parsed most confidently. Understanding a sentence tells you nothing about who believes it.

Strategy 4: The T-chart method for comparative passages

Comparative passages are the hardest thing on the paper, and the reason is a memory problem rather than a language one. Two authors, one topic, positions that overlap in some places and quietly diverge in others, and questions that ask you to name which is which. You are not being asked to summarise two essays. You are being asked to lay them side by side.

So build the comparison on paper as you read, rather than trying to hold it in your head and re-reading both texts when you cannot.

	文章(ぶんしょう) I	文章(ぶんしょう) II
Main claim
Key supporting point
Tone / evaluation

You will not have time to write sentences. Three or four keywords per cell is the whole budget, and that is enough, because the act of deciding what goes in the cell is what does the work. Once the grid exists, "on what point do they agree" stops being a re-read and becomes a glance.

Strategy 5: Allocate 60 minutes to the reading section

Most people who fail N2 reading do not fail because the passages beat them. They fail because they never got to the passages. They were still in the grammar section at minute 55, doing careful, honest, conscientious work on questions worth one mark each.

Decide the split before you sit down, and the exam stops being able to surprise you:

Task	Target time
Vocabulary section	15 to 18 minutes
Grammar section	22 to 25 minutes
→ Start reading	at 40 to 45 min
Short texts	8 to 10 minutes
Integrated information	5 to 7 minutes
Medium texts	14 to 16 minutes
Long texts	14 to 16 minutes
Comparative texts	10 to 12 minutes

Key idea

A grammar question you guess at costs you one mark. Arriving at the comparative passage with four minutes left costs you four to six. When the clock and your conscience disagree in that room, the clock is right.

Strategy 6: Build vocabulary coverage to 95% per passage

Research on reading comprehension consistently finds that readers need to know approximately 95 percent of words in a text to read with adequate comprehension. Below that threshold, too many gaps accumulate for context to compensate.

Read that threshold the right way round. It does not say "learn 95 percent of the words on the exam". It says that below 95 percent, none of the strategies in this article can help you, because there is nothing left for them to work on.

At N2 the gap almost never sits in the words you would call difficult. It sits in the ordinary ones that written Japanese uses differently: nominalisations of everyday verbs, abstract nouns that carry the whole argument, and the compound particles that hold formal prose together and that nobody says out loud.

取(と)り組(く)み: an effort or an initiative: the noun made out of 取(と)り組(く)む, and it is everywhere in editorial Japanese
受(う)け入(い)れ: acceptance of something, in the sense of taking it in
見直(みなお)し: a review or reappraisal, typically of a policy
立場(たちば): a position, in the "where this person stands on the issue" sense
働(はたら)きかけ: an approach made to someone, a push for them to act
概念(がいねん): a concept, in the abstract-argument sense
課題(かだい): an issue still waiting to be solved, not a homework task
手段(しゅだん): a means, a method of getting something done
観点(かんてん): the angle an argument is being made from
背景(はいけい): the background against which something happened
〜にもかかわらず: "in spite of"
〜をめぐって: "surrounding", used of debates and controversies
〜に基(もと)づいて: "on the basis of"

Coverage like that does not come out of a list, because a list hands you the word without the argument it lives inside. Reading in context produces retention rates far higher than flashcard drilling for abstract vocabulary, because you encounter words in the argument structures they appear in on the exam. If you want to see which N2 kanji and vocabulary are still missing before you start, the N2 kanji and vocabulary index will tell you.

Strategy 7: Practice inference-heavy reading daily

An inference question asks you to draw a conclusion the author never wrote down. You cannot locate that answer, you have to derive it, and derivation is a skill that only grows if you practise it on purpose.

会議(かいぎ)室(しつ)の電気(でんき)は消(き)えていたが、田中(たなか)のかばんはまだ机(つくえ)の上(うえ)にあった。

The lights in the meeting room were off, but Tanaka's bag was still on the desk.

Nothing here says Tanaka is coming back. The passage will not say it either. An inference question asks you to get exactly that far and then stop.

So work your practice passages like this:

Read a paragraph, then write one sentence saying what it implies. If your sentence turns out to be in the text, you have not done the exercise.
Ask what follows logically from the author's examples that the author never bothered to state. That gap is where N2 puts its questions.
On a 「筆者(ひっしゃ)の考(かんが)えはどれですか」 stem, throw out any option that needs a fact you brought with you from outside the passage.

Common mistake

Choosing the option that is true. Inference distractors are frequently true statements about the world, and at least one of them is usually something the author would probably agree with over a coffee. That is not the question. The question is whether this passage forces it. If you had to supply anything from your own head to get there, it is the wrong answer.

Strategy 8: Use AI grammar analysis for complex sentences

Some N2 sentences are not a vocabulary problem, they are a parsing problem. Relative clauses nest three deep, a passive stacks on a causative, and a verb phrase gets nominalised into the subject of the next clause, and you end up with a sentence where you know every word and cannot say who did what to whom.

The manual procedure, in the order that actually works:

Find the main verb. It is at the very end, and until you have it, everything you are reading is scaffolding.
Work backwards. Which noun phrase is that verb predicated on, and which clauses are modifying that noun?
Find the subject. It is usually dropped, so you will be inferring it rather than reading it.

政府(せいふ)に対(たい)して繰(く)り返(かえ)し提出(ていしゅつ)されてきた要望(ようぼう)が、今回(こんかい)ようやく制度(せいど)の見直(みなお)しという形(かたち)で受(う)け入(い)れられることになった。

Requests submitted to the government over and over have finally been accepted, in the form of a review of the system.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Toward the government repeatedly submitted-and-come requests, this time at last, in the form of a review of the system, have come to be accepted.

Run the procedure. Main verb: 受(う)け入(い)れられることになった, right at the end. What was accepted: 要望(ようぼう). Who submitted them: the sentence never says. The subject is dropped, and any answer option that names one is guessing on your behalf.

During reading practice sessions, use Yomimaru's AI grammar explanations on sentences you cannot parse. Highlight the sentence; Tomo-Sensei breaks down the structure in English, identifying which particle plays which role and where each clause begins and ends. Do this on the twenty sentences that stop you during practice and you will meet their structural twins in the exam, where nobody is going to explain anything. → What Tomo-Sensei explains and how to use it

Strategy 9: Review every wrong answer at the grammar level

Checking the answer key is not review. Review is finding the sentence that beat you. Most candidates do the first thing, mark the question red, feel briefly bad, and move on to the next practice test, which teaches them nothing they did not already know.

Find the exact sentence in the passage the question was built on. Not the paragraph. The sentence.
Name what you misread. A hedge you did not register? A contrast marker you skated over? A view you filed under the wrong speaker?
Write the pattern down. Miss 〜とされている twice and it has stopped being bad luck.

Most N2 reading errors cluster around three or four recurring patterns, and they will be your three or four. Finding them and drilling them is worth more than another full practice test, which will simply tell you again, at length, that you ran out of time.

Tomo-Sensei says
Almost nobody actually does this. I have watched people take six practice sections and never once go back to a wrong answer, because sitting the test feels like studying, and re-reading a sentence you already got wrong feels like nothing at all. The second one is where your marks are hiding. I would take twenty honest minutes of error review over an entire extra practice section, every week, without hesitating.

Putting it together: the N2 reading study month

Week 1: take one full N2 practice section under exam timing. Work every wrong answer through the three questions in Strategy 9, then name your top two recurring error patterns and write them somewhere you will see them again.
Weeks 2 and 3: read authentic Japanese every day, 25 to 30 minutes of it. Newspaper editorials (朝日新聞(あさひしんぶん), NHK News Web), recent news rewritten to your level, opinion column archives, Yomimaru passages at N2. Hunt the hedges. Try to name the author's real claim before you reach the last paragraph.
Week 4: take a second timed section and lay its errors next to Week 1's. The patterns you drilled should have shrunk. Whatever is still standing is what you take into the exam.

Self-check quiz: answer it on the page.

What to take away

Read the question and all four options before the passage. At 500 characters, reading without a target is the same as not reading.
Hedges tell you who owns a claim. 〜とされている is somebody else's. 〜のではないか is the author's, and it is usually the answer.
The clock is the real examiner. Guess a grammar question rather than lose a comparative passage.

JLPT N3 Reading: 8 Strategies to Pass 読解

2026-06-24T00:00:00+09:00

The most effective JLPT N3 reading comprehension strategies are: read each question before the passage, identify the passage type in the opening sentence, track logical connectors (しかし, ところが, つまり) to locate the author's main point, time-box each question type to avoid running out of time, and practice daily with authentic N3-level texts. Together these techniques shift your approach from word-by-word translation to extracting meaning at the paragraph level, which is the skill the N3 reading section actually tests.

What makes N3 reading different from N4

The N4 reading section uses short, direct texts. Sentences are structured cleanly. The answer is almost always stated explicitly in the passage.

田中(たなか)さんは毎朝(まいあさ)七(なな)時(じ)に家(いえ)を出(で)ます。

Tanaka leaves the house at seven every morning.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Tanaka-san, every morning at seven o'clock, leaves the house.

The N4 shape. One clause, one verb, and the fact sitting on the surface where a question can point at it.

N3 changes the rules:

Texts are longer and denser. Medium and long passages run 200 to 350 characters, with embedded relative clauses and fewer furigana cues.
Inference becomes necessary. Some questions ask what the author implies, not what they stated. The answer is not copied from the text.
Opinion passages introduce a second voice. The author may quote or paraphrase another viewpoint before disagreeing with it. Students who skim miss this and choose the wrong answer.
The time pressure is real. Grammar and reading share a single 70-minute block. Many N3 candidates never reach the long texts.

会社(かいしゃ)に近(ちか)い所(ところ)に住(す)んでいる人(ひと)ほど、朝(あさ)の時間(じかん)を大切(たいせつ)にしていないように思(おも)われる。

The closer people live to the office, the less they seem to value their morning time.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

People living in places near the company, the more so, morning time not treasuring, it seems.

The N3 shape. A relative clause buried inside the subject, a 〜ほど comparison, and a 〜ように思(おも)われる hedge that converts a fact into an impression. Nothing is stated flatly, and that is exactly what the questions exploit.

Notice what changed between those two sentences: not the vocabulary, the architecture. You can know every word in the second one and still not know who is doing what to whom.

The strategies below address all four of these challenges directly.

N3 reading section structure at a glance

Section	Japanese name	Passage length	What it tests
Short texts	短文理解(たんぶんりかい)	1 paragraph	Understanding a single claim or instruction
Medium texts	中文理解(ちゅうぶんりかい)	2 to 3 paragraphs	Following an argument, identifying tone or purpose
Long texts	長文理解(ちょうぶんりかい)	4 to 5 paragraphs	Identifying the main thesis, tracing argument structure
Information retrieval	情報(じょうほう)検索(けんさく)	Chart, notice, or table	Locating a specific fact from structured data

Four passage types, four different reading behaviours. Treating them all the same way is the most common way to run out of time.

The short and information-retrieval sections are fastest. Handle these first if time pressure is a concern.

Strategy 1: Read the questions before the passage

Before reading a single line of body text, read the question. All four answer options too.

This gives your brain a specific target to scan for. If the question asks 「筆者(ひっしゃ)が最(もっと)も言(い)いたいことは何(なに)ですか」("What is the author's main point?"), you already know to look for the final paragraph or the sentence after a contrast word. If the question asks about a specific character's action, your eyes will find that name faster than someone reading front-to-back without context.

The question stems recycle a small vocabulary. Learn it once and you stop spending exam seconds decoding the question:

筆者(ひっしゃ): the writer of the passage; the voice the main-point questions ask about
述べる(のべる): to state; stems ask what the writer is 述(の)べている
適当(てきとう): "most appropriate": the option they want, not the only defensible one

For information retrieval tasks (charts and notices), this matters even more. You will not need to read the entire document. Just locate the one fact the question requests.

Strategy 2: Identify the passage type in the opening lines

Japanese writers follow predictable structures depending on the type of text. Train yourself to identify the type within the first two sentences:

Opinion essays (意見(いけん)文(ぶん)) open with a general claim or observation, and the author's conclusion comes last. Look for 〜と思(おも)う, 〜ではないだろうか, 〜のではないか.
Explanatory texts (説明(せつめい)文(ぶん)) define or describe something. The main point is often in the opening or closing sentence, and there are no personal opinion markers.
Narrative or descriptive texts (物語(ものがたり)・描写(びょうしゃ)文(ぶん)) tell a story or describe a situation. Questions ask about character feelings, sequence of events, or implied meaning.
Information texts (情報(じょうほう)文(ぶん)) are notices, schedules and announcements. Scan for the specific fact asked rather than reading linearly.

便利(べんり)になることは、本当(ほんとう)にいいことなのだろうか。

Is becoming more convenient really a good thing?

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Becoming convenient: is it truly a good thing, I wonder?

〜のだろうか in the opening line. The author has just told you two things: this is an opinion essay, and their answer is waiting at the bottom.

Identifying the type immediately tells you where the answer is likely to be, and where to stop reading.

Strategy 3: Track logical connectors to find the main argument

Of the eight, this is the one that pays off most on N3 opinion passages.

Japanese authors use specific connecting words to signal that the important point is arriving. Learn to spot these as structural landmarks, not just vocabulary:

Contrast markers (the next sentence is the real point): しかし、でも、ところが、だが、けれども
Cause and result (what follows is the consequence): そのため、したがって、だから、その結果(けっか)
Restatement (the author is summarising): つまり、すなわち、要(よう)するに、言(い)い換(か)えると
Concession (agree before disagreeing): 確(たし)かに〜、なるほど〜... but the real argument follows the next しかし

確(たし)かに、紙(かみ)の本(ほん)には紙(かみ)の本(ほん)のよさがある。しかし、私(わたし)は電子(でんし)書籍(しょせき)のほうが読書(どくしょ)時間(じかん)を増(ふ)やすと考(かんが)えている。

Paper books certainly have their merits. But I think e-books do more to increase how much you actually read.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Certainly, paper books have paper books' goodness. However, I think e-books increase reading time more.

Two sentences, two voices. The first is a view the author is about to drop. The second is the one the question is asking about.

When you see しかし or ところが mid-passage, underline it mentally. The sentence that follows almost always contains the author's actual position, and the answer to the main-point question. The sentence before it is the trap.

Common mistake

Reading the 確(たし)かに sentence, recognising every word in it, and picking the option that matches it. It matches beautifully, because the test writer built that distractor out of the exact view the author spends the rest of the passage rejecting. Comprehension and agreement are not the same thing, and N3 knows it.

Strategy 4: For opinion passages, check the final paragraph first

This sounds counterintuitive but works consistently.

In Japanese opinion writing, the conclusion is the thesis. The opening paragraphs introduce context, complications, and cited evidence. The writer's own claim (the one the question is testing) appears in the final paragraph, or in the sentence immediately following the last contrast marker.

Key idea

English essays front-load the thesis; Japanese opinion writing lands it at the end. If you read a Japanese passage with English expectations, you will confidently extract the wrong sentence. Every time, and at speed.

When you are short on time, scan the final paragraph of a long text before reading the body. If the question is "What does the author most want to say?", the answer is likely there.

Strategy 5: Time-box each section strictly

Distribute your 35 to 40 reading minutes before you start:

Section	Target time
Short texts (2 to 3 items)	6 to 8 minutes total
Information retrieval (1 to 2 items)	4 to 5 minutes total
Medium texts (3 to 4 items)	12 to 14 minutes total
Long text (2 to 3 items)	12 to 14 minutes total

Use a wristwatch or wall clock during practice tests to build internal timing instincts. Do not let any single passage run more than 5 minutes. Leave it and come back if you have time.

Time-boxing is a practice-room habit, not an exam-day one. If the first time you try it is on test day, you will spend the section watching the clock instead of reading.

Strategy 6: Use process of elimination on confusing answers

N3 distractors are designed with near-synonym vocabulary and slightly shifted meanings. Two answer options will often be almost identical. Do not try to pick the right answer by feel. Do this instead:

Eliminate obviously wrong answers: off-topic, contradicts the passage, addresses a different subject. Usually two of the four go immediately.
Compare the two survivors word by word and find the single phrase where they diverge. There is always exactly one.
Go back to the one sentence in the passage that settles that divergence. Not your memory of the passage. The sentence.

The wrong answer almost always contains a word that is not supported anywhere in the text, or reverses the direction of a cause-effect relationship.

Strategy 7: Build reading fluency with daily authentic practice

Strategies work only if you can read fast enough to apply them. Reading fluency is not built in practice tests. It is built in daily extensive reading.

For N3, the ideal daily reading material:

NHK Easier (free): simplified news at high N4 / low N3 level
Light novels aimed at middle-school readers: conversational, with furigana on the complex kanji. Buy one and import the file; they are in copyright, so no library carries them
MATCHA Easy Japanese: cultural lifestyle articles at N3 difficulty

Read for 20 to 30 minutes daily without stopping to look up every unknown word. Your goal is to extract meaning from context, which is the same skill the N3 reading section tests.

Twenty minutes of real Japanese, every day
One article, read start to finish, at a pace that feels slightly uncomfortable. You will not understand all of it. That is the point. Passing N3 reading means comprehending a passage you do not fully understand.

Another mock exam on Sunday
Practice tests measure fluency. They do not build it. Six mock sections will tell you six times that you ran out of time, and change nothing about why.

Tomo-Sensei says
Here is the part nobody tells you: reading a passage you only 80% understand is not a failure state. It is the exam. Get comfortable being 80% sure and moving on, because that is the condition you will be reading in for the entire 70 minutes.

Strategy 8: Use adaptive furigana to target your kanji gaps

One of the biggest time sinks in the N3 reading section is encountering a kanji you cannot read, which breaks your parsing flow. A kanji you cannot read does not cost you a word. It costs you the sentence: you stall, re-enter the clause from the top, and the paragraph structure you were holding in your head is gone.

The standard study advice is "read more kanji." The targeted advice is: identify exactly which N3 kanji you don't know and practice those specifically.

Yomimaru's adaptive furigana system lets you set your JLPT level and shows furigana only for kanji above that level. If you are studying N3, you see guides only on N2+ kanji (the ones genuinely outside your target range) and not on the N4/N5 kanji you should already know. This builds recognition of your actual N3 kanji gaps during real reading, not through isolated drilling.

Putting it together: a 30-day N3 reading plan

Weeks 1 and 2: build your strategy instincts. One N3 practice reading section per week, under timed conditions. Then analyse every wrong answer with one question: which strategy would have caught it? Questions first, contrast markers marked, final paragraph checked.
Weeks 3 and 4: build your fluency base. 20 to 30 minutes of authentic Japanese daily, in Yomimaru or NHK Easier. No stopping for every unknown word. You are training for a reading rhythm at N3 density, and rhythm does not come from mock exams.

Self-check quiz: answer it on the page.

What to take away

Read the question first, then hunt. Reading the passage cold and hoping the question fits is how the long text runs out of clock.
Connectors are structure, not vocabulary. しかし is a signpost pointing at the answer; 確(たし)かに is a signpost pointing at the trap.
The thesis lands at the end in Japanese opinion writing. Read the last paragraph early.
Strategies only fire at speed. Twenty minutes of daily reading is what makes the other seven usable on exam day.

Satori Reader Alternatives: Is It Free?

2026-06-24T00:00:00+09:00

The best Satori Reader alternatives keep the parts you liked (tap-to-define vocabulary, real grammar help, difficulty that matches where you are) and fix the part you hit: a closed catalogue you can reach the end of. In 2026 the shortlist is LingQ for a bigger curated library, Todai for news-based reading, and Yomimaru for reading any Japanese text you bring, with adaptive furigana and AI grammar analysis applied on top of it.

Nobody goes looking for an alternative to a bad app. Satori Reader is not bad. It is finite, which is an entirely different problem, and it is the one this page is about.

Tool	Best for	Where it stops
Satori Reader	Graded stories, human audio on every sentence, N4 to N2	No custom import, and the hardest content caps around upper N2
LingQ	A library bigger than Satori Reader's, vocabulary through volume	Content quality is uneven, and most of it has no sentence audio
Todai	Simplified news, N4 to N3	Ceiling around N3, no import, no grammar analysis
Yomimaru	Reading whatever you choose, with AI grammar help	No human audio narration

: The shortlist, with the honest ceiling on each one.

What is Satori Reader?

Satori Reader publishes its own library of original and curated stories for learners. Every sentence carries native speaker audio, the vocabulary is tap-to-define, and the grammar notes are written by hand rather than generated. The catalogue spans genres: slice-of-life, mystery, thriller, documentary-style essays, news summaries, all written or adapted for intermediate Japanese learners.

That combination is slow and expensive to produce, which is exactly why almost nobody else produces it. Satori Reader is genuinely one of the best-designed reading platforms for Japanese study, and the audio quality in particular sets a high bar. If you are at JLPT N4 to N2 and you want a guided, structured read with a human voice on every sentence, Satori Reader delivers it, consistently, episode after episode.

The reason learners look for alternatives is not that Satori Reader is bad. It is that a hand-made catalogue is finite by construction, and sooner or later you arrive at the end of it.

Where Satori Reader falls short

Key idea

Every limitation below grows from one root. The catalogue is closed: you read what Satori Reader produced, in the order they produced it, and when you finish it you are done.

No custom content import

This is the single most common reason experienced learners leave Satori Reader, or start supplementing it. You cannot paste in a news article, a light novel chapter, or a recipe you found and read it with Satori Reader's features applied. Every text you read must come from Satori Reader's own library.

If you are N4 to N2 and happy reading structured learner content, this barely registers as a limitation. If you are N2 to N1 and you want authentic material (real novels, Japanese Twitter threads, articles about the thing you actually do for a living), one publisher's library turns into a wall that paying more will not move.

Content ceiling at upper N2

Satori Reader's most advanced content sits at roughly upper N2. There is not enough N1-level material to keep an advanced learner meaningfully challenged, and once you have worked through the available episodes at that level, there is nowhere left to go inside the platform. Whatever you read next, you will be reading it somewhere else, and that jump to native material is a skill of its own with a guide of its own.

Arriving from WaniKani instead? The ceiling question looks different from over there: what to read after WaniKani.

SRS system limitations

Satori Reader includes a built-in study list and review system, but it has well-documented friction points: you can add words faster than the system handles them, reviews are capped at 20 cards per session (making it hard to clear a backlog), and the multiple-choice format makes it easy to accidentally pass on cards you do not actually know. Many learners end up exporting to Anki, and the export process is not always smooth.

Free tier is very limited

The free version gives access to the first two episodes of each series, approximately 42 episodes total across all genres. That is enough to decide whether you like the platform. It is not enough to study with.

The best Satori Reader alternatives

LingQ: best for a larger curated library

LingQ is a language learning platform with a large Japanese content library spanning news articles, podcasts, short stories, and graded mini-stories. It uses a highlighting system to track known and unknown words across everything you read, gradually building a personalised vocabulary database. Mark any unknown word, save it with its context sentence, and the platform keeps a running count of how many words you know and how many remain. If you want a quantified progress signal, that counter is the reason to be here.

It suits N3 to N2 learners who want a library bigger than Satori Reader's and whose primary goal is vocabulary acquisition through reading exposure. The trade is quality control. LingQ's content quality is uneven, user-uploaded material varies widely in difficulty labelling and formatting, and the interface is significantly busier than Satori Reader's. There is no sentence-by-sentence native audio on most content. Grammar explanations require the mini-stories or forum discussions. They are not built into the reading interface. Paid plans start around $12 to $15 per month.

Todai Easy Japanese: best for news-based reading

Todai compiles simplified Japanese news articles from various Japanese sources, organised by topic and difficulty. It includes a built-in dictionary, JLPT vocabulary tagging, and listening practice through article audio. Because the articles come from multiple news sources rather than a single publisher, you get more topic variety than NHK Web Easy alone, and the JLPT tagging ties what you are reading to the exam you are about to sit.

It fits N4 to N3 learners who want to stay with news-based reading but want more sources, topics, and built-in tools in one app. The limits arrive quickly. The free tier is limited, and the pro version is required for dictionary access and full content. Like NHK Web Easy, the simplified news format means a content ceiling around N3, so you will not find N2 or N1 material here. There is no custom import and no AI grammar analysis. It is a news aggregator with dictionary tools rather than a full reading platform, and if news is really what you want, the free NHK Web Easy alternatives deserve a look first.

Yomimaru: best overall alternative for N4-N1 learners

Yomimaru answers Satori Reader's one structural constraint: you are never reading out of somebody else's finished catalogue. Import any Japanese text (a news article, a novel chapter, a manga transcript, a recipe, the letter your landlord slid under the door) and the reading tools land on it. Paste it in, or hand over the file itself: .epub, .pdf, .docx, .odt, .md, .txt. Bring your own book, literally, as an .epub, and read it here with nothing retyped. Furigana tuned to your level, one-tap lookups, grammar analysis of any sentence you point at, on a text nobody graded for you.

Fair warning about the free plan: imports are capped at ten for the life of the account. If importing is the entire reason you are switching, that is the number to look at.

That import is the feature Satori Reader users request most often, and here it is the whole design rather than a bolt-on. Paste the text or upload the file, and you are reading in seconds, in a browser, on any device including an iPhone. No extension to install. No Anki to configure first.

The furigana is what people notice second. Satori Reader lets you toggle furigana on or off globally. Yomimaru knows your JLPT level and puts readings only above the kanji sitting above it, so an N3 learner gets help on N2 kanji and nothing on the ones they already fought for. The kanji you know stay bare, which is the only honest way to find out whether you really know them.

And when a sentence stops you cold, you do not go hunting for a pre-written note that may not exist. Tomo-Sensei, the built-in AI tutor, takes the sentence you are actually stuck on, in the context you are actually reading it in, and pulls it apart.

母(はは)が子供(こども)のころに住(す)んでいた家(いえ)は、もう取(と)り壊(こわ)されてしまった。

The house my mother lived in as a child has already been torn down.

Two clauses, a buried head noun, and a passive with nobody in it. Tomo-Sensei marks where the relative clause ends, explains what が is doing inside it, and points out that nothing here tells you who tore the house down. A static note cannot help you with this sentence, because it was written for a different one.

There is also no level to age out of. Satori Reader's hardest material caps around upper N2. Yomimaru works the same way on a beginner N5 set and on a dense N1 essay, because the difficulty comes from the text you picked rather than from what a publisher has shipped so far. The library is there for the evenings when you do not want to choose (Aozora Bunko classics unabridged, Sōseki and Dazai and Akutagawa among hundreds of others; the day's real news from NHK, Mainichi and Asahi, rewritten to your level; curated per-level sets; AI-written stories about whatever you happen to care about), and your own texts are there for the evenings when you do. Star a word and it is saved in the form you met it in, conjugation and all, comes back on a spaced-repetition schedule, and exports to Anki if that is where you keep things.

Satori Reader vs. Yomimaru: side-by-side

	Yomimaru	Satori Reader
Free tier	Free forever, no credit card (imports capped)	First 2 episodes of each series (~42 episodes)
Price (paid)	From $9.99/mo (or $7.99/mo billed annually)	~$9/mo (less on annual)
Content library	Aozora classics, the day's news at your level, curated sets, plus anything you import	1,200+ curated episodes
Custom import	✓	✗
Native audio	✗ (text-based)	✓ every sentence
Grammar help	AI analysis on any sentence (dynamic)	Pre-written notes (static)
Furigana control	By JLPT level	Global on/off
Best JLPT range	N4 to N1	N4 to N2
SRS / flashcards	Built-in study lists + SRS review	Built-in (limited)
Mobile	Web (any browser, iPhone included)	iOS + Android app
Anki export	✓	✓ (can be finicky)

: The audio row is the one Satori Reader wins outright, and it is not close.

Which should you choose?

If you are N4 to N2, you learn with your ears as much as your eyes, and you want a human voice on every sentence with a hand-written note underneath it, choose Satori Reader. Not as a fallback. It is the best product in the category at exactly that job, and no AI tool, this one included, has anything that sounds like a person reading to you.

If you do not want to pick your own material, choose Satori Reader as well. Some learners simply want to be handed the next good chapter, and a curated queue is a genuine feature, not a limitation. "Read whatever you like" is a real cost for a lot of people, and it is fine to refuse to pay it.

If you have hit upper N2 and run out of episodes, choose Yomimaru. The ceiling is the one problem Satori Reader cannot solve for you, because solving it means writing more books.

If the text you want to read already exists and is in nobody's catalogue, choose Yomimaru. Paste it in and it becomes the lesson.

If grammar rather than vocabulary is what keeps stopping you, choose Yomimaru. Pre-written notes answer the questions the author anticipated; Tomo-Sensei answers the one you actually have, about the sentence in front of you right now.

If price is the thing holding you up, start with Yomimaru: Ronin is free forever and does not ask for a card. Then pay for whichever tool you are still opening a month from now.

Test each one on the text you actually want to read
Take the thing you have actually been putting off, the chapter or the article or the untranslated game script, and try to get through one page of it tonight. The tool that carries you to the bottom of that page is the tool worth paying for.

Test each one on its demo content
Every reading app looks brilliant on its own sample text. Making the sample text feel easy is what the sample text is for.

Plenty of learners end up using both, and that is not a cop-out: Satori Reader for the audio experience on structured content, Yomimaru for the authentic material they bring themselves. The overlap is small enough that neither purchase wastes the other.

Compare Yomimaru pricing →

NHK Web Easy Alternatives: 4 Better Sites (2026)

2026-06-16T00:00:00+09:00

The best NHK Web Easy alternatives are tools that let you read Japanese at your level, with furigana support and vocabulary help, but without being locked into NHK's news-only content. In 2026, the top choices are NHK Easier, MATCHA Easy Japanese, Satori Reader, and Yomimaru, each suited to a different learner type and JLPT level.

Yomimaru vs. NHK Web Easy at a glance

NHK Web Easy and Yomimaru solve the same problem (reading Japanese with furigana support) in very different ways. Here is how they compare on the points learners ask about most: content, price, free tier, and difficulty range.

	Yomimaru	NHK Web Easy
Free tier	Ronin: free forever, no credit card. Reading needs a free account	Completely free, no registration
Price (paid)	From $9.99/mo for heavier AI use (or $7.99/mo billed annually)	Free (no paid tier)
Content	Any Japanese text: news, novels, blogs, recipes, anything you paste in	Simplified news articles only
Difficulty range	N5 to N1, no ceiling; you choose the text	Fixed around N3-N4
Furigana	Adaptive by JLPT level: shown only above your level	On all kanji (toggle on/off)
Built-in dictionary	Yes, instant lookup while reading	No, use a separate tab or extension
AI grammar explanations	Yes, on any sentence	No
Audio	No (text-based)	Yes, on most articles
Interface language	English UI	Japanese only

Key idea

NHK Web Easy is a great free N3-N4 news reader. Yomimaru removes the news-only limit, the N3 ceiling and the missing dictionary, so it keeps working from N5 all the way to N1.

What is NHK Web Easy?

NHK Web Easy (available at nhk.or.jp/news/easy/) is a free simplified news website run by Japan's national broadcaster. It rewrites real news stories using easier vocabulary and shorter sentence structures, and adds furigana (small hiragana characters above kanji) to every article. Audio playback by professional readers is available for most articles. The site has been a standard beginner and intermediate reading resource since 2012.

Free, no account, updated daily, running since 2012, with audio read by professionals. Very little else in Japanese learning gives you all of that for nothing.

At its best, NHK Web Easy is genuinely useful, and the simplification is real work done well. A story that would take a paragraph of dense newspaper prose comes out like this:

きのう、東京(とうきょう)でとても強(つよ)い雨(あめ)が降(お)りました。

Heavy rain fell in Tokyo yesterday.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Yesterday, in Tokyo, very strong rain fell.

One clause, common words, nothing hidden. At N4 this is readable on the first pass, and that is exactly the point of the site.

That sentence is a gift to a learner who has never finished a real Japanese text before. It is free, it arrives daily, and it is written at a difficulty you can actually clear. Nothing below is an argument that you should stop reading it.

Tomo-Sensei says
Don't quit NHK Web Easy because a comparison page told you to. It's free, it's daily, and the habit is worth more than the tool. Keep opening it. Just stop treating it as the finish line. Read the easy version, then go and look at what the original sentence actually said.

But most learners who search for alternatives have already been using NHK Web Easy for a while, and they have hit a wall.

Why learners look for NHK Web Easy alternatives

NHK Web Easy does one thing exceptionally well. It does not, however, do many other things. Here are the limitations learners consistently report:

1. News-only content

Every article is a simplified news story: politics, weather, sports, international events. If you would rather read about Japanese food, travel, anime, history, or fiction, there is nothing for you here. For learners who are not naturally interested in current events, this makes it hard to stay motivated enough to read consistently.

2. No interactive vocabulary lookup

NHK Web Easy shows furigana when you hover over kanji, but there is no built-in dictionary. Looking up an unfamiliar word means switching to a separate tab or browser extension, which breaks reading flow. The workarounds work, but they are workarounds.

3. Content ceiling at N3

All articles are rewritten to a similar difficulty level, roughly N3. Once your reading ability exceeds N3, the content stops stretching you. You will still understand the articles, but you will stop growing. There is no harder tier to progress into within NHK Web Easy itself.

And the gap between the simplified version and the real one is not a small step up. Here is the same weather story as a regular Japanese news outlet would write it:

東京(とうきょう)都内(とない)では昨日(きのう)未明(みめい)から断続(だんぞく)的(てき)に激(はげ)しい雨(あめ)が降(ふ)り、気象庁(きしょうちょう)は土砂(どしゃ)災害(さいがい)への警戒(けいかい)を呼(よ)びかけている。

Intermittent heavy rain fell across Tokyo from early yesterday morning, and the Meteorological Agency is urging vigilance against landslides.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Within Tokyo, from before dawn yesterday, intermittently violent rain fell, and the Meteorological Agency is calling for vigilance against landslide disasters.

Same event. One sentence, two clauses joined mid-air, four compound nouns, and no pause for breath.

The vocabulary is not harder in some abstract way. It is a different register: words that only ever appear in news writing, and that simplified news deliberately removes:

未明(みめい): the small hours, before dawn — a word you will never meet in easy news
断続的(だんぞくてき): intermittent, on and off
警戒(けいかい): vigilance, being on alert
呼びかける(よびかける): to call on, to urge (the public to do something)

Common mistake

Reading "I get through NHK Web Easy comfortably" as evidence that you are nearly ready for native news. Comfort means you are below the ceiling, not near it. Once every article feels easy, the site has stopped teaching you and started confirming you.

4. Japanese-only interface

NHK Web Easy has no English UI. Buttons, headings, and navigation are all in Japanese. This is fine once you reach N3, but it creates a frustrating barrier for early N4 learners who are not yet comfortable navigating a purely Japanese interface.

These four gaps are exactly what the alternatives below address, in different ways and at different price points. The move that works is not swapping one easy site for another:

Read up, not sideways
Keep the daily habit, then spend ten minutes on one paragraph of the original, unsimplified article, with a dictionary and grammar help one tap away.

Wait until you "finish" easy news
There is nothing to finish. The articles are rewritten to the same level forever, so waiting to feel ready is waiting for a day that never arrives.

1. NHK Easier: best for staying with NHK articles

NHK Easier is a free third-party tool that re-presents NHK Web Easy articles with a better reading interface. You get the same daily news content from NHK, but with one addition that matters: hover over any word to see its definition and reading in a pop-up, without needing a browser extension.

Who it is for: N4-N3 learners who enjoy NHK Web Easy's content and just want a built-in dictionary so they do not have to open a separate tab for every unfamiliar word.

Standout feature: Zero setup. Visit nhkeasier.com, click any article, and hover-to-define works immediately.

Limitations: NHK Easier only works with NHK Web Easy articles. It does not provide its own content library, audio features, or grammar explanations. It solves the dictionary problem but not the content variety or difficulty ceiling problem.

2. MATCHA Easy Japanese: best for cultural content

MATCHA (matcha-jp.com/easy) is a free Japanese lifestyle magazine written for foreign visitors and learners. Articles cover Japanese food, travel destinations, traditional culture, seasonal festivals, and daily life topics, all written in simple Japanese with furigana.

Who it is for: N4-N3 learners who are bored by hard news topics and want to read content that reflects the Japan they are actually interested in (food, culture, travel) rather than political or economic news.

Standout feature: The topics are inherently more engaging for many learners than NHK's news focus. Reading about ramen or cherry blossom festivals in Japanese stays motivating in a way that political news does not.

The unglamorous truth about reading practice: the best text is the one you will actually finish. Interest beats difficulty-tuning more often than learners expect.

Limitations: There is no built-in dictionary or vocabulary lookup. The simplified writing style works well at N4-N3 but does not grow with you. Once you pass N3, you will outgrow the content. There is also no audio.

3. Satori Reader: best for structured story reading

Satori Reader is a paid reading application ($9/month) that offers serialised stories and essays written specifically for Japanese learners at multiple difficulty levels. Each episode comes with sentence-by-sentence audio by native speakers, click-to-define vocabulary, and detailed grammar notes that explain why a sentence is structured the way it is.

Who it is for: N4-N2 learners who want to read engaging serialised stories (mysteries, slice-of-life narratives, historical essays) rather than news articles, and who want grammar support built into the reading interface.

Standout feature: The audio + grammar note combination is unique. Hearing a sentence read aloud by a native speaker while reading a detailed explanation of its grammar is genuinely effective for grammar intuition-building.

Limitations: You are restricted to Satori Reader's library. You cannot import your own articles or paste in content from elsewhere. The library, while high-quality, has a ceiling. Advanced N1-level readers tend to finish the available content and move on. At $9/month, the value depends on how quickly you work through the material. For a detailed comparison, see our full Satori Reader alternative guide.

4. Yomimaru: best overall alternative for N4-N1 learners

Yomimaru is a web-based Japanese reading platform that removes every limitation described above. You can read any Japanese text: NHK Web Easy articles at N3, news articles at full native difficulty, light novel chapters, blog posts, anything you paste in. AI grammar explanations, adaptive furigana, and instant vocabulary lookup are built in.

Why it resolves NHK Web Easy's core limitations:

Any content. There is no content library ceiling because Yomimaru does not restrict you to its own library. You import whatever you want to read. Paste in a recipe, a Wikipedia article, a manga chapter's text, or a full news article from any Japanese source. The reading interface applies the same features regardless of what you put in.

Adaptive furigana. Instead of showing furigana on every kanji (NHK Web Easy's approach), Yomimaru shows furigana only for kanji above your JLPT level. Set your level to N3, and you will see reading guides only for N2+ kanji, the ones you have not yet learned. As you improve and raise your level, the furigana fades away naturally rather than all at once.

AI grammar explanations. When you hit a complex sentence with embedded relative clauses or an unusual conjugation (the 気象庁(きしょうちょう)は土砂(どしゃ)災害(さいがい)への警戒(けいかい)を呼(よ)びかけている kind), highlight it. Tomo-Sensei, Yomimaru's AI tutor, explains the grammatical structure in English, identifies hidden subjects, and gives you a natural translation. This is something a hover-over dictionary cannot do.

No content ceiling. The same interface that works for a beginner reading N4-level news works equally well for an advanced learner reading dense N1-level essays. The tool grows with you across all JLPT levels.

Several stories a week, already levelled. If you want the NHK Web Easy habit without the ceiling, Yominews publishes real Japanese news rewritten for learners at several JLPT levels. N4 reads about where NHK Web Easy sits, N1 is close to unsimplified, and every story carries furigana and an English summary. Free to read, without an account.

Best for: N4-N1 learners who have outgrown simplified sites and want to read authentic Japanese at their actual level, with full vocabulary and grammar support.

So the switch does not have to be a switch at all. It can be an afternoon:

Read today's NHK Web Easy article the way you always do. Keep the habit. It costs you nothing.
Find the original, unsimplified version of the same story and paste it into Yomimaru.
Set your JLPT level, read one paragraph, and let Tomo-Sensei take apart the sentence that stopped you.

Which alternative is right for you?

Start with the honest case for staying put. If you are early N4 and what you want is a free, short, furigana'd news story every morning and nothing more than that, NHK Web Easy is already the right tool and you should not switch. Every other row below is for the learner who wants something NHK Web Easy cannot give them: a dictionary inside the page, topics that are not the news, or a text that is actually hard.

Your situation	Best choice
You are early N4 and want free, short, furigana'd daily news, nothing else	Stay on NHK Web Easy
You love NHK Web Easy but want hover-over definitions	NHK Easier
You want to read about Japanese culture, not news	MATCHA Easy Japanese
You want structured stories with audio and grammar notes	Satori Reader
You want to read any Japanese text at your level	Yomimaru
NHK Web Easy is starting to feel too easy	Yomimaru
You are studying for N2 or N1	Yomimaru

What to take away

NHK Web Easy is genuinely good at one thing: free, daily, reliable N3-N4 news with furigana and audio. Keep it.
It stops serving you where it stops changing: news only, no dictionary, N3 forever, Japanese-only interface.
What comes next is not an easier tool. It is a harder text with better support.

Self-check quiz: answer it on the page.

What Is Yomikana? Yomimaru's Free Kana Course

2026-05-26T00:00:00+09:00

Yomikana is Yomimaru's free course for learning to read hiragana and katakana, and it assumes you can't read a single Japanese character yet. It teaches the two alphabets every learner starts with, a few characters at a time. You hear each one, watch how it's written and get a little trick to remember it by, then play quick games until it sticks. If you learned them once and a few have slipped, it works just as well for getting those back. It all runs in your browser, and you can start without an account.

You can open the first lesson in another tab and follow along.

What will you learn in Yomikana?

Japanese uses three sets of characters. Hiragana and katakana, together called kana, are the two alphabets, with one character per sound. Kanji are the characters borrowed from Chinese. You learn the kana first, because every Japanese sentence uses them (our beginner's guide to hiragana and katakana explains what each one is for). Yomikana teaches both, hiragana first:

Chapter	What you learn	Lessons
Hiragana basics	The 46 basic characters, from あ a to ん n	10
Hiragana with marks	Small marks that change a sound: か ka → が ga, は ha → ぱ pa	5
Hiragana combinations	Two characters read as one sound: き + ゃ = きゃ kya	11
Katakana basics	The same 46 sounds in katakana, from ア a to ン n	10
Katakana with marks	ガ ga, パ pa and the rest	5
Katakana combinations	キャ kya, シュ shu and the rest	11

52 lessons in all. You can switch between hiragana and katakana at any time.

In textbooks you'll see the small marks called dakuten and handakuten, and the combinations called yōon.

Each lesson teaches about five characters that sound alike, like かきくけこ (ka ki ku ke ko). You meet each one with its sound, an animation of how it's written, a memory trick and a first word that uses it. Then a short quiz checks that they stuck.

Left, the card that introduces あ: its sound, how it's written, a memory trick and a first word. Right, a quiz from the か lesson: type the sound of こ.

How does the Yomikana course work?

The course is a single path, and the next step is always highlighted, so you never have to wonder what to do next. You can replay anything you've finished.

The start of the hiragana path. The first lesson, the five vowels, is up next, and the steps after it unlock as you go.

Lessons. A few new characters, then a short quiz on them.
Matching games. Every two lessons, a game mixes all the characters you've learned so far, and never one you haven't. Later games add look-alike answers, so guessing stops working.
Your first words. After the second lesson, you start learning everyday words you can already read, five at a time, each with a picture: いえ (house), かさ (umbrella), ねこ (cat). You see each word, pick its meaning, then build it from character tiles.
Typing words from memory. Further along, you see a word's meaning and type it with your normal keyboard, and it turns into kana as you type: neko becomes ねこ.
A review at the end of each chapter, including a drill on the characters beginners mix up most, like さ and き, or シ and ツ.

Learning words: you meet each one with a picture, such as いえ (house), then build it from tiles, here おおきい (big).

How does Yomikana help you remember the kana?

By showing you each character again, less and less often as you get it right. That method is called spaced repetition, and in Yomikana it happens inside the games: every time you answer, Yomikana notes whether you knew that character and decides when you'll see it again. A character you just learned, or keep getting wrong, comes back soon. One you keep getting right comes back after a day, then three days, a week, three weeks, and finally two months.

There's no separate pile of flashcards to get through: reviewing is just playing the next game.

You play. A lesson quiz, a matching game or a review.
Each answer counts. A right answer pushes the character further away, a wrong one brings it back sooner.
Yomikana waits. Ten minutes for a new or missed character, up to two months for one you know well.
What's due comes back. On your path, in the quiz, or by email if you asked for it.

Then you play again, and the loop starts over.

When ten or more characters are due, a card at the top of your path says how many, and one tap starts a quiz of exactly those.

With 32 characters due, the card lists them, and Review starts a quiz of exactly those.

The schedule in detail, for spaced-repetition fans
Each kana sits in one of six boxes, the system Sebastian Leitner described in 1972 (the Leitner system). A right answer moves it up one box, a miss moves it down two, and each box has its own wait:

Box The kana comes back
0 In 10 minutes
1 Tomorrow
2 In 3 days
3 In a week
4 In 3 weeks
5 In 2 months
From box 3, the course counts a kana as mastered.

A kana climbs at most one box a day, except out of box 0, so three games in one evening move it no faster than one. Without that cap, a kana could go from new to "mastered" in ten minutes, which would measure recognition in the moment and not memory. So a kana counts as mastered after right answers on three separate days, which is day five at the earliest. A kana waiting for review stays waiting until you answer it: nothing expires.

Box	The kana comes back
0	In 10 minutes
1	Tomorrow
2	In 3 days
3	In a week
4	In 3 weeks
5	In 2 months

Can I use Yomikana if I already know the kana?

Yes. Lessons never lock, so you can go straight to katakana or to the combinations, and "I already know these" at the start of a lesson marks it done in one tap. From there, Yomikana is a place to practise whatever slips:

The ones you forget. Open the full chart, tap a line such as ナニヌネノ, and quiz yourself on just those. Every miss goes into your reviews, so a shaky ヌ or ヲ keeps coming back until it sticks.
The ones you mix up. The look-alike drill asks only the pairs people confuse most, like さ and き, ぬ and め, わ, ね and れ, or シ and ツ.
The harder combinations. The chart and the quizzes cover every combination too, so you can drill きゃ, しゅ or ちょ on their own.
A quick warm-up. The quiz takes any set: all hiragana, all katakana, the hiragana you get wrong most, or whatever is waiting for review. You can tap the answer or type it. The match game leans toward the characters you miss.

For a test on paper, the hiragana quiz page and the katakana quiz page each have one you can print.

What does Yomikana save without an account?

Everything, in the browser you study in. A free Yomimaru account adds your progress on every device, and lets you carry what you learned into Yomimaru's reading app.

What	Without an account	With a free account
Your progress through the course	Saved in this browser	On every device
Your review schedule	Saved in this browser	On every device
Your daily streak	Saved in this browser	On every device
Words you've practised	Saved in this browser	Added to your Yomimaru vocabulary
Email reminders	Yes	Yes
After the kana	The free library and news	Yomimaru's step-by-step reading course starts where you left off

Clearing your browser data erases progress saved without an account.

Signing up from inside the course doesn't start you over: everything you did as a guest moves into your new account.

Can Yomikana remind me to practise?

Yes, by email, with or without an account: a card at the end of a lesson offers it. It arrives the day after you study, at the same time you started studying. If you take a break, it slows to once a week, and after four of those with no study, it stops until you come back. Every email has a link to turn it off, and asking for reminders doesn't sign you up for anything else.

When can I read a real story?

After four lessons. The first four lessons teach the あ, か, さ and た groups of hiragana, and that's enough to read a whole short story in Yomimaru's library: くさいたこ, a story about a stinky octopus. It also uses a couple of characters you'll meet a bit later, like が, which is just か with two small marks.

ちいさいたこがいた。

There was a little octopus.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

little octopus (subject) was

The first line of the story.

Once you've finished the chart, the library's beginner shelf has more short stories, free to read, with the pronunciation printed above every kanji.

Who makes Yomikana?

Yomikana is part of Yomimaru, made by Maxime Pitaval and published by Redmoon Systems OÜ, the Estonian company he founded in 2026 to build it. Yomimaru earns its money from paid plans in the reading app, and nothing in Yomikana is behind them.

A word from me, since my name is on this page: I'm a French developer who learned Japanese the slow way, alone at first and then at a language school in Tokyo. I'm not a linguist, so I checked every claim here against the code that runs the course. If something is wrong, or the course breaks on you, write to me at maxime@yomimaru.app. I read everything that comes in.

How does Yomikana compare with Anki, Tofugu, RealKana and Kana Pro?

Anki, Tofugu's Kana Quiz, RealKana and Kana Pro each do something better than Yomikana. We tried all four on 1 October 2026, and prices change, so check before you pay.

Tool	Cost	How it works
Yomikana	Free, no account, no ads	Lessons and games, with your reviews planned for you
Anki with a kana deck	Free; $24.99 on iPhone	You grade your own recall, and it schedules every card
Tofugu Kana Quiz	Free, no account	Checks typed rōmaji, and saves nothing
RealKana	Free with ads; $5 to remove them	Checks typed rōmaji, and keeps high scores
Kana Pro	Four stages free, with limits; Premium $4.99	Checks taps, pairs and typing (drawing in Premium), and syncs when you sign in

Checked on 1 October 2026. Prices are US prices.

Where each one is better:

Anki with a kana deck, if you want one review schedule for kana, kanji and vocabulary, for years. It is free on desktop and Android (AnkiMobile costs $24.99 on iPhone) and works offline. You grade your own answers (Again, Hard, Good or Easy), and you hear audio only if the deck has it. Shared decks such as "Tofugu: Learn Hiragana Deck" are free to download.
Tofugu's Kana Quiz, for a fast test of a whole script in one sitting. Every kana of the set sits on one screen and you type the rōmaji, with no account, no audio and nothing saved. It tests one script at a time, includes the extra katakana used for foreign words, and sits beside Tofugu's free Learn Hiragana guide.
RealKana, for reading kana in many typefaces. Each card is drawn in one of nine fonts, a native speaker's recordings can be switched on, and there are drills on words, sentences and kanji. It is free with ads, $5 once to remove them, and its iPhone app sells extra packs.
Kana Pro, for handwriting and listening. Four stages are free (multiple choice, the reverse, pairs and typed answers), and Premium ($4.99 on the US App Store) lifts the free version's limits and adds listening, stroke order and drawing the kana, in apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android and on the web.
Yomikana, if you're starting from zero and want a course that teaches the kana in order and plans your reviews for you, free and with no account. Your first words and your first story come along the way.

What Yomikana does not do
Yomikana doesn't check your handwriting, so writing practice happens on paper. Each kana plays a recording made with one speech-synthesis voice, but example words are said by your device's built-in text-to-speech, which can sound flat. It skips the extra katakana combinations used only for foreign words, like ファ (fa). There's no app in the stores, though it works in any modern browser. And it stops at the kana and your first words: for kanji and vocabulary after that, Yomimaru's reader or Anki take over.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

Hiragana and Katakana: A Beginner's Guide

2026-05-26T00:00:00+09:00

Japanese has three writing systems and exactly one of them ends. Kanji does not: you will still be meeting new characters in year five, and in year ten. Kana does. It is 46 characters, then 46 more that spell the same 46 sounds, and then you are finished with it for the rest of your life.

Those two sets are ひらがな (hiragana) and カタカナ (katakana), and together they are called 仮名(かな) (kana). They are phonetic, which means there is nothing to interpret. か is ka. It is ka on every page, in every word, forever.

So this is the trade on offer: one focused week (three days if you are stubborn about it) against a symbol set you never have to think about again. Pay it, and a Japanese page stops being a wall of shapes and becomes a language you cannot speak yet, which is a completely different problem and a far better one to have.

The cognitive split: why Japanese has two phonetic alphabets

Unlike English, which uses a single alphabet, Japanese runs two phonetic syllabaries side by side. Each contains exactly 46 basic characters, and both spell the exact same set of sounds. Two scripts, one sound system, no new pronunciation to learn the second time around.

Why have both? Japanese is written without spaces between words, so the script a word is written in does some of the work a space would do. A switch from soft curves to straight lines tells you that a new word has started, and tells you something about what kind of word it is.

The "46" is a convenient lie. Each script has 46 base characters, but the diacritics and the small-kana combinations push the total sound count past a hundred. You never memorize a hundred shapes. You memorize 46 and two accessories.

Key idea

Katakana teaches you no new pronunciation whatsoever. It is 46 fresh shapes for 46 sounds you already own from hiragana, which is why the second script costs about half what the first one did.

1. Hiragana (ひらがな): the grammatical spine

Hiragana is soft, curved and looping, and it is the native spine of the language. It writes the words that were always Japanese (やま, たべる), the particles that hold a sentence together (は, が, の), and the okurigana tails that hang off a kanji to show what a verb is doing. If a sentence contains any grammar at all, it contains hiragana.

2. Katakana (カタカナ): the foreign bridge

Katakana is sharp, straight and angular, and it works like visual italics. It writes what Japanese borrowed from elsewhere (カメラ, kamera; コーヒー, koohii), plus scientific vocabulary and onomatopoeia. Its value to a beginner is almost unfair: a katakana word is often an English word in a costume, so sounding it out slowly is frequently the entire translation.

ぼくはカメラをかいました。

I bought a camera.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

I (topic) camera (object) bought.

カメラ is the only imported word in this sentence, and it is the only word written in straight lines. That is the system, not a coincidence.

The 7-day action plan for visual mastery

Cognitive load theory shows that trying to memorize all 92 characters through brute-force repetition is the fastest way to burn out.

Chunk the chart instead. Five characters at a time, in rows that rhyme, quizzed the same day you meet them.

One rule holds the plan together: re-read yesterday's rows before you touch a new one, every time. A re-read feels like standing still, and it is the part that makes the new row stay. What follows is the plan with the reasoning left in, plus a faster three-day variant underneath it. If you would rather have a course keep the pace and the reviews for you, here is how Yomikana, our free kana course, works.

Days 1-3: hiragana monophthongs and consonants

Take hiragana first, and take it in row-sized chunks.

Day 1: the vowels (あ, い, う, え, お) and the K-row (か, き, く, け, こ).
Day 2: re-read Day 1's rows, then the S-row (さ, し, す, せ, そ) and the T-row (た, ち, つ, て, と).
Day 3: re-read Day 2's rows, then the N, H and M rows.

Give every character an image the second you meet it. し is a shepherd's crook. く is a bird's open beak. The image is what comes back to you under pressure, not the character.

Our free Yomikana trainer pairs every character with a mnemonic and its sound, and animates the stroke order of the basic and voiced kana, with no account needed.

Days 4-5: katakana rigid transition

Katakana costs less than hiragana did, because the sounds are already yours. You are only learning a second costume for each one, and some of the costumes barely disguise anything: カ (ka) is か with the curve ironed out and the loop dropped, and ア (a) is an angle pointing down. Learn each one against the hiragana you already know rather than as 46 fresh strangers.

Katakana is where beginners quietly stall. It shows up less in textbooks and far more in real life: menus, station signs, product packaging, half the internet. Skip it and you can read a grammar exercise but not a コーヒー cup.

Days 6-7: active contextual training

Stop drilling flashcards in isolation and start reading. Nursery rhymes, greetings, a children's story, a sign, anything at all where the characters are doing a job. Sounding out kana inside real sentences is what converts passive recognition into reflex, and no amount of chart work does that for you.

You need less kana for this than you think. Four rows of hiragana in (あ, か, さ, た) and there is already a whole story waiting: Yomimaru's first one is hand-written using only those characters.

くさいたこ

The Stinky Octopus

Every character here comes from the あ, か, さ and た rows. Four rows in, and you can read a title off the page.

Common mistake

The first real sentence you read will lie to you. Three characters change their sound when they act as particles: は is read wa, not ha; へ is read e, not he; and を is read o, not wo. Everywhere else they behave normally. Nobody warns beginners about this, and everybody spends a week saying "watashi ha" out loud.

Tomo-Sensei says
I would rather you read one badly understood sentence on day three than finish a spotless katakana chart on day ten. The chart is not the skill. The chart is the admission price for the skill, and it is cheap, so pay it fast and get inside.

The week, in one screen

Days 1 to 3: hiragana, five characters at a time, image first.
Days 4 to 5: katakana, learned as a second costume for sounds you already have.
Days 6 to 7: no new characters at all. Read something.

The 3-day intensive: a day-by-day plan to read all kana

Short on time? The seven-day plan is the comfortable pace, but if you commit to focused, mnemonic-driven sessions, the same material fits into three days: all 46 base kana plus their variants, read on sight. One rule makes it work, and it is that you never memorize a character in a vacuum. Attach a vivid image, then immediately prove it stuck with a recall quiz. Here is the exact sequence.

Day 1: the vowels and the first three consonant rows

Everything in Japanese pronunciation hangs off five vowel sounds, so start there. Learn あ (a), い (i), う (u), え (e), お (o) and say them out loud as "ah, ee, oo, eh, oh". Once those five are automatic, the first three consonant rows are nothing more than a consonant glued onto each vowel.

Row	a	i	u	e	o
vowels	あ a	い i	う u	え e	お o
K	か ka	き ki	く ku	け ke	こ ko
S	さ sa	し shi	す su	せ se	そ so
T	た ta	ち chi	つ tsu	て te	と to

Day 1: twenty characters, four rows, no exceptions yet.

Lean on images rather than raw repetition. い (i) is two eels swimming side by side. く (ku) is a bird's open beak going ku-ku. し (shi) is a fishing hook you cast into the "she"-a. て (te) looks like a bent hand, and te means hand in Japanese, which is a rare freebie.

When all twenty are in, close the chart and quiz yourself cold: shape to sound, then sound to shape. The fastest way to do this is to drill Day 1's characters in the free kana trainer, which shuffles the cards for you and says each answer aloud so a wrong guess never quietly sets in. Clear a full round with no misses and Day 1 is done.

Day 2: the remaining base rows, plus dakuten and handakuten

Day 2 closes the chart. Same method, image first and quiz second.

Row	a	i	u	e	o
N	な na	に ni	ぬ nu	ね ne	の no
H	は ha	ひ hi	ふ fu	へ he	ほ ho
M	ま ma	み mi	む mu	め me	も mo
Y	や ya		ゆ yu		よ yo
R	ら ra	り ri	る ru	れ re	ろ ro
W	わ wa				を wo / o
n	ん n

Day 2: the other twenty-six, and the base chart is finished.

Then take the shortcut that makes the rest of the syllabary nearly free. Two small strokes in the top-right corner (the dakuten ゛) voice a sound you already know, and a small circle (the handakuten ゜) turns the whole H-row into P-sounds. No new shapes to learn. Same characters, one accessory.

Base	with dakuten ゛	with handakuten ゜
か ka	が ga
さ sa	ざ za
た ta	だ da
は ha	ば ba	ぱ pa

Roughly 25 extra sounds for almost no new visual memory.

Finish Day 2 with a mixed recall quiz over everything so far, base rows and voiced variants together. Then, before you close the laptop, read a word.

Self-check quiz: answer it on the page.

Day 3: yōon combinations and the look-alike drill

Day 3 has two jobs, and the second one is the one that matters.

First, yōon, the combination sounds. When a small ゃ, ゅ or ょ follows an i-row character, the two fuse into a single syllable: き + ゃ = きゃ (kya), し + ゅ = しゅ (shu), ち + ょ = ちょ (cho), に + ゃ = にゃ (nya). There is no new shape here, only the rule that the second character shrinks and merges. Read a dozen of them aloud and the pattern clicks fast.

Common mistake

Small characters are the difference between two words, not decoration. A small っ is a beat of silence that doubles the next consonant, so きて (kite, come) and きって (kitte, a postage stamp) are different words. Vowel length does the same job: おじさん is an uncle, おじいさん is a grandfather. Beginners skim past both, because at speed they look like typos. They are the word.

Second, and this is what separates readers from guessers, spend real time on the look-alike drill. A handful of pairs trip up nearly every learner. Quiz them side by side until you never hesitate.

Confusion	The tell
シ (shi) vs ツ (tsu)	シ's strokes come in low and flat, like a smile lying down. ツ's come in high and vertical, raining straight down.
ソ (so) vs ン (n)	ソ's stroke drops steeply from the top, like a slide. ン's sweeps up from the bottom left.
ね (ne) vs れ (re) vs わ (wa)	All three share a stem and a loop. ね ends in a full curl, れ ends in a hook that flicks outward, わ has no closing curl at all.
さ (sa) vs き (ki)	き has one extra crossbar up top. Two crossbars means き.
ぬ (nu) vs め (me)	ぬ finishes in a loop. め does not.
は (ha) vs ほ (ho)	ほ has two crossbars on the right. は has one.
ク (ku) vs ワ (wa)	ワ's first stroke stands straight up, like a doorframe. ク's leans, like a tick.
ア (a) vs マ (ma)	Both start like a 7. ア's second stroke drops from under the bar like a tail; マ's is a small dash inside the fold.

The eight confusions that cost beginners the most reading time.

The シ / ツ tell is not arbitrary trivia. It comes from stroke direction: シ is written from the bottom left going up, ツ from the top going down. Hand-write each of them a few times and the difference stops being a rule you recite and becomes something your wrist knows.

Run the pairs as a dedicated recall quiz, mixed together, so your brain has to actively discriminate rather than pattern-match by position. For the four katakana, the シ, ツ, ソ and ン look-alike drill does exactly that. Once the confusable pairs feel automatic, you have read your way through the entire kana system in three days. What is left is mileage.

And the next job kana does for you is to sit above kanji. Those tiny characters printed over a compound in a manga panel or a news headline are furigana, and they are the reason a real Japanese page is readable long before your kanji is. You just learned the alphabet they are written in.

When to use hiragana vs katakana

Once you can read both scripts, the next question is why a word is written in one and not the other. In short, hiragana carries native words and grammar and katakana marks words that stand apart, loanwords above all. We wrote the full answer up separately as hiragana vs katakana vs kanji: the same word in all three scripts, one real sentence taken apart, and a short quiz.

Where kana takes you next

Kana is the only part of the Japanese writing system you ever finish. Everything after it is open-ended, which is why the week you spend here pays for years.

Two things follow. The first is kanji, and the honest entry point is the JLPT N5 kanji and vocabulary list: roughly a hundred characters and the words built out of them, every one of them spelled in the kana you just learned, which is exactly why it is now readable to you. The second is text. Not exercises, not a chart: an actual Japanese sentence somebody wrote for somebody else. Reading native Japanese content covers how to pick material hard enough to teach you something and easy enough to finish, which is the one judgement call that decides whether the habit survives its first month.

Test your reflexes: interactive kana matching game

One round of matching is worth an hour of staring at a chart, because it makes you produce the sound instead of nodding along at a character you half-recognize. If a shape does not come to you inside a second, it is not learned yet, and today is a much better day to find that out than the day you open your first news article.

To help you practice right now, try the match game below. Connect each character card with its correct sound. Tap a card to start!

On the page: Interactive Kana Trainer. Drill hiragana and katakana with stroke order and instant checks, right in the page. Open it on Yomimaru.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

What Is Furigana? Meaning and How to Read It

2026-05-26T00:00:00+09:00

Furigana (振(ふ)り仮名(かな)) are the small hiragana or katakana characters printed above a kanji to show its pronunciation. They appear in children's books, manga aimed at young readers, some newspapers, and on any kanji the author expects some readers will not recognize. For Japanese learners, furigana is the single most practical tool for making authentic texts readable before kanji knowledge is complete. But how you use it determines whether it accelerates or delays your progress.

What furigana is and where it comes from

Furigana is not an invention for language learners. It is a standard Japanese typographic convention that has existed for centuries. The word 振(ふ)り仮名(かな) (furigana) literally means "kana that is spread over": small phonetic characters distributed above (or beside, in vertical text) the kanji they clarify.

Japanese has more than 2,000 kanji in general use, mixed into the same sentences as the two kana scripts (here is how hiragana, katakana and kanji split the work). Even educated adult Japanese readers occasionally encounter unfamiliar kanji in specialized contexts: medical terminology, classical literature, archaic place names. Furigana is the solution the Japanese writing system developed. When a writer uses a kanji that readers may not recognise, they annotate it with its reading.

That's worth sitting with: furigana exists because native readers need it too. It was never a ramp built for foreigners. You're borrowing a tool the language already built for itself.

In modern Japanese publishing:

Children's textbooks and books use furigana on all kanji, since children are still acquiring their reading vocabulary.
Manga uses furigana on most kanji, a pragmatic choice given manga's wide readership across ages.
Newspapers and general magazines use furigana selectively: on kanji likely to be unfamiliar to general readers, on proper names (especially foreign-origin ones), and on kanji with non-standard or unusual readings.
Literary fiction and academic writing uses little or no furigana, because the reader is assumed to know the kanji.

This means that as a Japanese learner, the more authentic and adult the text, the less furigana you will find. The absence of furigana in a text is not a barrier designed to exclude learners. It is the default state of Japanese writing for educated readers.

How furigana works: the phonetic layer over kanji

Japanese kanji represent meaning rather than sound. A single kanji can have multiple readings depending on whether it appears alone or in combination with other kanji. The kanji 日(ひ), for example, can be read as hi, bi, nichi, jitsu, or ka depending on context.

音読み(おんよみ): the Chinese-derived reading, usually heard in multi-kanji compounds
訓読み(くんよみ): the native Japanese reading, usually heard when the kanji stands alone
振り仮名(ふりがな): literally "kana spread over": the reading printed above the kanji

Furigana eliminates this ambiguity by providing the exact pronunciation for a specific usage:

日本語(にほんご)を読(よ)むのが好(す)きです。

I like reading Japanese.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Japanese-language, reading, is liked.

Every kanji word on this page carries its reading above it, including this one. Press play to hear it.

The small にほんご above 日本語(にほんご) confirms this is nihongo (Japanese language), not hi-moto-go or any other reading combination. And you are reading furigana right now: every kanji word in this article is annotated automatically, the same way Yomimaru annotates the books in its library.

In horizontal text (the standard in digital and modern print), furigana sits directly above the kanji in a smaller font size, typically half to one-third the main text size. In traditional vertical text, furigana appears to the right of the kanji column.

For context: JLPT N5 and N4 together cover approximately 300 kanji. That is the level at which full furigana is most appropriate. N3 introduces roughly 350 additional kanji. N2 adds around 1,000 more. N1 covers all remaining kanji in common use, up to the 2,136-kanji Jōyō list. At each stage, adaptive furigana should be recalibrated to the new knowledge boundary.

Why furigana is so valuable for learners

For a learner at N5 or N4 level, encountering a word written in kanji without furigana creates a specific problem: you cannot look it up. Japanese dictionaries require you to know at least one reading to search. If you cannot read the kanji, you cannot search the kanji, so the word is completely inaccessible.

Furigana only works if you can read the kana it is written in, so fluent hiragana and katakana recognition is the real prerequisite. If the small characters above a kanji still slow you down, learn hiragana and katakana properly first and drill the shapes in our free kana trainer. Furigana is worth nothing to a reader who has to decode it. With the reading provided:

You can sound out the word and understand it if you know that vocabulary item.
You can look it up by pronunciation even if the meaning is unfamiliar.
You stay in reading flow rather than breaking to attempt a kanji search.

This is the mechanism behind Krashen's comprehensible input principle as applied to Japanese: furigana lowers the decoding barrier enough to make authentic sentences readable, exposing you to real vocabulary, grammar, and sentence rhythm at your current knowledge edge rather than a sanitized learner version.

The problem with static furigana

Here is the trap that catches many learners who rely heavily on furigana: the redundancy effect. It is the cognitive tendency to read the easier phonetic guide and visually skip the kanji below it, so the kanji never forms a lasting memory impression.

Common mistake

Reading with furigana on every kanji and assuming the kanji are going in. They are not. Your eyes are tracking the kana and treating the character underneath as decoration.

When furigana appears above every kanji on a page (as it does in children's manga, some graded readers, and most dedicated "furigana-enabled" texts), your brain takes the path of least resistance. Hiragana is easier to read than kanji, so your eyes track the furigana characters and skip the kanji below them. The kanji becomes visual background noise.

The result: you can read the whole page, but the kanji make no impression. Your kanji recognition vocabulary stagnates while your hiragana reading speed improves, which is the opposite of what you want. This is why so many learners who live in furigana-heavy texts report that their kanji feels "stuck" after months of reading. They have been reading hiragana all along.

Tomo-Sensei says
If your kanji feels stuck, don't read more. Read the same amount with the furigana turned off for the levels you've already studied. It'll feel worse for about a week. That discomfort is the kanji finally being looked at.

The three-stage furigana strategy

The solution is not to remove furigana entirely. It is to retire it in stages, level by level.

Full furigana (N5 and N4). You are building your first kanji vocabulary, and the priority is flow. You cannot afford to spend five minutes on every unknown character. Read with everything annotated, and look up only the words that seem to matter. Two places to do exactly that: Wait Here and One Umbrella, Please, both original N5 stories with furigana on every kanji.
Adaptive furigana (N3 and N2). This is where the real shift happens. Turn furigana off for the N5 and N4 kanji you have been reading for months; keep it on for the N3+ kanji that are genuinely unfamiliar. Your eye is now forced to recognise known kanji directly, and still gets help where it needs it. Kanji recognition builds fastest here.
Furigana-free (N1 and above). Most native text is readable unaided. You will still hit unfamiliar kanji: specialist vocabulary, archaic readings, proper names. A tap-to-lookup dictionary handles those without breaking flow.

Retire it by level
Drop furigana from N5 kanji once you know N5 kanji. The scaffolding comes down one floor at a time, and you always keep help where you still need it.

Flip one global switch
Turning furigana off everywhere at once makes authentic text unreadable, so you turn it back on and end up right where you started, reading kana.

How adaptive furigana works in Yomimaru

Static furigana is either on for all kanji or off for all kanji. Most learning tools offer only this binary. Adaptive furigana, calibrated to what you already know, is what Yomimaru implements.

When you set your JLPT level in Yomimaru:

Kanji at or below your level: no furigana displayed. Your brain processes the character directly and builds recognition.
Kanji above your level: furigana displayed automatically. You can read without stopping, and the reading is annotated just enough to stay comprehensible.
Unknown words of any type: tap the word to open the dictionary without leaving the text. The popover gives you its readings, its part of speech, and its English meanings, numbered by sense.

As you move up JLPT levels, the furigana threshold moves with you. An N4 learner sees furigana on N3+ kanji. An N2 learner sees furigana only on N1 kanji. The experience is the same each time: familiar kanji are clean, unfamiliar kanji are annotated. You are always reading at the edge of your knowledge rather than well inside it or well beyond it.

You can watch the threshold do its work on a real text rather than take the description on trust. Every story on the JLPT N4 shelf of our free graded library ships with furigana locked to the level you set, as does every original N5 story, such as The Room on the Mountain, and so does every story in Yominews, which rewrites real Japanese news at five JLPT levels. Both are free and neither needs an account.

Key idea

This mirrors how Japanese children are taught to read: kanji at their grade level carry no furigana, kanji above it are annotated. The scaffolding fades exactly as fast as it becomes unnecessary, and that is the whole trick.

When to remove furigana entirely

Some learners prefer to read without furigana at a certain point, partly for the challenge, partly to simulate real Japanese texts. The criteria for when this makes sense:

You have studied kanji at that level for at least three months and encounter them regularly in reading.
When you see a kanji without furigana, you retrieve the reading in under two seconds without effort.
Removing furigana does not reduce your reading comprehension noticeably. You still understand the sentences.

There is no single right moment. Many learners find that the adaptive approach (removing furigana by JLPT level rather than globally) is more comfortable than a hard switch, because it preserves some scaffolding while still building kanji-reading independence level by level.

But doesn't reading with furigana at least teach me the vocabulary?
Yes, and that is exactly what makes the trap so hard to notice. Furigana-heavy reading genuinely does build your vocabulary, your grammar intuition and your reading speed. All of that is real progress, which is why it feels like it's working. The one thing it does not build is the ability to recognise a kanji on sight, because that is the one skill you have quietly outsourced to the kana. So you end up strong everywhere except the place you were trying to get stronger.

Furigana in practice: putting it all together

The most effective furigana strategy in practice:

Start with adaptive furigana rather than full furigana or no furigana.
Use a reading tool that lets you set a threshold by JLPT level, not just a global toggle.
Import texts you are genuinely interested in. The best furigana tool is the one you use on content you want to read — or start from something already graded, like today's Japanese news with furigana or a short story at your JLPT level.
Remove furigana for lower levels as you progress. If you have been studying for a year and still have N5 furigana on, you are not challenging your kanji recognition at that level.

What to take away

Furigana is a native convention, not a learner's crutch. But it can become one.
Furigana on every kanji stalls kanji recognition. That is the redundancy effect, and it is why your kanji feels stuck.
Retire it level by level, not all at once. The scaffolding should fade exactly as fast as it stops being needed.

Self-check quiz: answer it on the page.

Test your kana reflexes

Before diving into full kanji texts with furigana, make sure you can read hiragana and katakana sounds easily. Try our live interactive matching card game below to estimate your scanning speed.

On the page: Interactive Kana Trainer. Drill hiragana and katakana with stroke order and instant checks, right in the page. Open it on Yomimaru.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

JLPT N1 Kanji List & Vocabulary (Interactive)

2026-05-22T00:00:00+09:00

Passing the JLPT N1 is the top of the JLPT ladder. There is no N0, and jlpt.jp's own description of what N1 certifies is refreshingly plain: "the ability to understand Japanese used in a variety of circumstances." In practice that means reading newspaper editorials and critiques for their logical structure and the writer's actual intent, not just their vocabulary, and following natural-speed conversations, news reports, and lectures across a broad range of settings.

The leap from N2 is real, but the numbers quoted for it vary more than at any other level. jlpt.jp hasn't published an official kanji, vocabulary, or grammar list since that 2010 revision, so every figure below is a widely-cited estimate from test-prep resources, not a specification. N1 kanji is commonly estimated at roughly 2,000+ characters, essentially the full jōyō set, the 2,136 characters designated for general use in Japan (sources disagree on N1's kanji count more than any other level, so treat it as a scale, not a checklist). Vocabulary estimates cluster around 10,000 to 12,000 words cumulatively, roughly double what's typically quoted for N2, and grammar points land somewhere north of 200, also contested.

Below, you can access our Interactive N1 Study List. Mark the Kanji and Vocabulary words you already know, click them to view full dictionary definitions, and see your N1 Mastery Gauge reach the summit!

But a list is the easy half of N1, and it's the half that ends. Almost nobody fails this level because they were forty kanji short. They fail because they can read every word of an editorial and still not be sure whether the writer agrees with the argument they just spent two paragraphs laying out. That is what N1 actually asks of you, and it's why this is the level where the exam quietly stops being the point: past here, the only thing left that moves is how much real Japanese you have read.

What is tested in the JLPT N1?

Structurally, N1 folds Vocabulary, Grammar, and Reading into a single 110-minute block, followed by a 55-minute Listening section. Each of the three scored categories (Vocabulary/Grammar, Reading, and Listening) is worth 0 to 60 points, for 180 total. You need 100 of those 180 to pass, plus a minimum of 19 in every section individually, the highest overall pass mark of any JLPT level and no room at all to coast through a weak section. And because vocabulary, grammar and reading share one clock, slow reading doesn't only cost you the reading questions. It eats the minutes you were counting on for the grammar items you already know.

Within that structure, the three scored sections put very different kinds of Japanese in front of you:

Section	What it actually asks of you
Language Knowledge (Vocabulary)	Obscure compounds, literary nuance, traditional proverbs, technical jargon.
Language Knowledge (Grammar & Reading)	Formal, written, occasionally classical grammar (〜ずにはおかない, 〜んがために), applied to abstract philosophical essays, editorial commentary, and dense prose.
Listening	Natural conversation speed, complex instructions, and quick responses across nuanced social and professional situations.

: The three scored sections, and the kind of Japanese each one puts in front of you.

That grammar row is worth paying off with a real sentence, because the patterns look harmless written out as bare formulas and behave very differently in print:

この報告(ほうこく)書(しょ)の内容(ないよう)は、関係(かんけい)者(しゃ)に再考(さいこう)を迫(せま)らずにはおかないだろう。

What this report says will force the people involved to think again, whether they want to or not.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

this report's / content / the parties concerned / a rethink / press-for / will not leave undone / probably

〜ずにはおかない is a double negative wearing a suit. It doesn't mean the outcome is likely, it means the outcome is unavoidable. Read it as "will not leave X un-done" and the sentence unlocks; read it as a vague formal ending and you lose the writer's entire point.

None of that is drillable in isolation. The only way to meet 〜ずにはおかない often enough for it to stop being a puzzle is to read authentic native books, essays, and newspapers in quantity, including on the days you don't feel like it. That is what the library in Yomimaru is for: real texts, ordered easiest to hardest, so you start where you actually read rather than where you'd like to be reading.

What actually separates N1 from N2

It's tempting to treat N1 as "N2 plus more words." It isn't. The gap is a register shift at least as much as a vocabulary one. N1 tests Japanese the way educated adults actually write and speak in print and formal settings, not language simplified for learners.

That shows up first in what kind of reasoning the passages demand. N2 reading tests whether you followed a passage. N1 reading tests whether you can tell the writer's own position apart from a counterargument they're describing only in order to knock it down, which means tracking whose opinion a given sentence is voicing, sentence by sentence, across an editorial or critique. The content is often abstract or philosophical, and the real question underneath every "what does the author think" item is whether you caught what they implied, not just what they stated outright.

Classical-influenced patterns like 〜べからず (must not) or 〜んがため (in order to) show up on N1 as recognition items in the reading and grammar sections, not as constructions you're expected to produce yourself in speech.

It also shows up in the register of the language itself. N1 vocabulary leans literary: four-character idioms (四(よん)字(じ)熟語(じゅくご)four-character idiomatic compound), traditional proverbs, and academic terms that rarely surface in daily conversation. Formal writing occasionally reaches into bungo, classical written Japanese, for grammar patterns N2 rarely touches. And keigo depth goes further than "polite vs. plain": N1 expects you to parse layered, indirect honorific constructions where the honorific form itself signals the relationship between speaker and subject, information the sentence doesn't state anywhere else.

Here's what that implication-reading actually looks like in a single sentence:

彼(かれ)の主張(しゅちょう)は一見(いっけん)合理(ごうり)的(てき)に見(み)えるが、その根底(こんてい)には看過(かんか)できない矛盾(むじゅん)が潜(ひそ)んでいる。

His argument looks reasonable at first glance, but underneath it hides a contradiction you can't ignore.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

His claim / at first glance / rational / seems, but / its foundation / at / cannot-overlook / contradiction / is lurking

看過(かんか)できない (cannot let pass unnoticed) and 潜(ひそ)んでいる (lurking beneath the surface) are critical, literary register: exactly the vocabulary an editorial reaches for when it wants to imply a judgment without stating it outright.

Miss that register shift and you can know every word in a passage and still get the comprehension question wrong, because the question was never really about the words.

So before you tick a single box, find out where you're standing. Read this cold, no dictionary: 彼の功績はもっと高く評価されて然るべきだ。 If 然(しか)るべき arrived whole, as しかるべき, "as it rightly should be", you're already living at this register. If it arrived as a character you had to stop and stare at, that isn't a verdict on you. It's a reading list.

Key idea

The N1 skill isn't "know this word." It's holding a long sentence in your head, in order, while the writer withholds their verdict until the final clause. That's a stamina skill. Stamina is built by reading things longer than a flashcard.

The mistakes that actually fail people at N1

Most N1 failures aren't vocabulary failures. They're reading-stamina failures, misread intent, or a certificate mistaken for a finish line. None of that shows up on a list, which is why reading strategies built for this level matter as much as the words themselves.

Common mistake

Reading for content instead of stance. N1 reading questions routinely ask what the author actually thinks, and editorials hedge, qualify, and imply rather than assert. If you can summarize a passage but can't say whether the writer agrees or disagrees with the position they just laid out, you've read the words and missed the point, which is exactly what the section is testing.

Time management fails just as often as comprehension does.

Common mistake

Drilling grammar to fluency while under-training raw reading speed. N1's reading section is long, dense, and unforgiving on time. Candidates who prepared mainly with grammar workbooks tend to know every pattern cold and still run out of minutes with passages half-read, because grammar drills build recognition, and only sustained reading of long native text builds the speed to use that recognition under a clock.

And the mistake that costs people the most doesn't happen during the exam at all.

Common mistake

Treating the N1 certificate as a finish line. Passing N1 confirms you can navigate broad, demanding everyday and professional Japanese. It does not confirm that you've matched native reading speed, colloquial range, or specialist vocabulary. Learners who stop reading real Japanese the week after the exam tend to plateau, and some report their comprehension sliding backward within a year or two of putting the books down. N1 is a floor for real fluency, not a ceiling.

Which is the honest thing to say about this level. Past N1 there is no next box to tick, so the exam stops being the thing you're aiming at and volume takes over. Nobody arrives at adult reading speed through a workbook. They arrive there by reading a great deal of Japanese that was never written for them, which is the whole argument for native content, and at N1 it stops being an argument and becomes the only plan you have left.

Interactive N1 kanji & vocabulary tracker

The tracker won't fix your stamina, and it can't teach you to read intent. Only volume does that. What it can do is lay out the raw material sitting underneath both, and tell you, honestly, how much of it you're still missing.

Use our interactive mastery tracker below to check off the N1 characters and vocabulary you've learned. Tap any item to open the Yomimaru Popover Dictionary, which displays Hiragana readings, pitch accents, grammatical parts of speech, English meanings, and contextual example sentences.

Tomo-Sensei says
I would rather you ticked this list honestly and found it half empty than ticked it generously and believed the number. A kanji you can only recognise inside a compound you already know is not a kanji you know: at N1 it comes back as a hesitation every few lines, and hesitation is what eats the clock. And when the gauge does fill up, don't go hunting the last few. Go and read something long.

Keep Learning: Reading Authentic N1-Level Japanese

At N1, daily reading of authentic Japanese isn't optional. It is the method. Here are your next steps:

Read JLPT N1 texts with furigana: free literary Japanese — Akutagawa, Miyazawa and more — at native level.
Japanese news at N1: unsimplified reporting with furigana and tap-to-look-up.
Every N1 grammar point: the full N1 grammar index with example sentences from real texts.
Back to JLPT N2 Kanji
Read native Japanese content at N1 level: the complete guide to finding and reading authentic material.
JLPT reading comprehension strategies: advanced reading strategies for abstract N1 passages.
What to read after WaniKani: many WaniKani graduates arrive at N1 kanji knowledge and need a reading roadmap. This guide covers first texts and progression.

On the page: JLPT N1 study trackers. Mark the N1 kanji and vocabulary you know and see exactly what is left. Open it on Yomimaru.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

JLPT N2 Vocabulary List and Kanji List, Free

2026-05-22T00:00:00+09:00

N2 is the level where Japanese stops sounding like anyone you have ever spoken to. The characters are not really the problem by now. You have met most of them, and the rest come cheap. What changes is the register: N2 lives in 書(か)き言葉(ことば), the written language of editorials, official notices, and the mail your colleague sends to a client, and almost none of it gets said out loud.

Which is why a word count is a poor way to answer the question of whether you are ready for N2. Coming off N3, the surprise is not that the words are unfamiliar. You did the work. You know the words. The sentences still slide past you.

Key idea

A better test, and it takes two minutes. Open a Japanese news article and read one paragraph out of the middle. If you can follow what happened but could not say how firmly the writer is standing behind it, whether they are asserting it, attributing it to someone else, or hedging it, then you are standing exactly on the N2 line. That gap does not close with more flashcards. It closes with more pages.

So treat this page's list as inventory rather than as the assignment. It can tell you which words are already yours. It cannot tell you what those words are doing to a sentence, and at N2 that is the whole exam.

What is tested in the JLPT N2?

Test-prep resources widely cite around 1,000 cumulative Kanji for N2 (990 to 1,150, roughly 350 new past N3) and about 6,000 cumulative vocabulary words (roughly 2,250 new since N3). Grammar is softer ground: commonly cited somewhere between 150 and 200 cumulative points, and sources disagree by nearly double, so treat it as a rough band, not a syllabus. jlpt.jp hasn't published an official Kanji, vocabulary, or grammar list since the pre-2010 exam; every figure above is inherited from that older test, not a current jlpt.jp document.

Notice what the scored areas do not include: anything you produce. N2 measures what you can take in, which is why the certificate says far less about how you will hold up at a meeting table than a recruiter assumes it does.

Officially, jlpt.jp describes N2 as measuring "the ability to understand Japanese used in everyday situations, and in a variety of circumstances to a certain degree": reading newspaper and magazine articles, commentaries, and simple critiques and following the writer's intent, and listening to near-natural-speed conversations and news well enough to track who means what. Test-prep culture has folded that into a shorthand (N2 as the practical floor for working in a Japanese-language environment), which is a widely repeated industry framing, not a line from jlpt.jp itself, but common enough that recruiters and language schools default to N2 as their business-ready checkbox.

Scored area	What it is really testing
Language knowledge (vocabulary)	Abstract concepts, synonyms, compound nouns, and formal business vocabulary.
Language knowledge (grammar) and reading	Written-only constructions such as 〜をめぐって, 〜かねる and 〜わけにはいかない, applied to newspaper articles, commentaries and business manuals where the argument runs across paragraphs rather than sitting in one sentence.
Listening	Rapid, natural business discussion, lecture summaries, and the follow-up questions that come after.

The three scored areas of the N2 exam, and the register each one is actually after.

Note

On test day this narrows to two timed sections instead of N3's three: a combined Language Knowledge + Reading block (105 minutes), then Listening (50 minutes). N2 and N1 are the only levels that fold vocabulary, grammar, and reading into one section. Each of the three scored areas caps at 60 points for a 180-point total. Passing means 90/180 overall and at least 19 in every section. Score too low in just one, and the rest of your total doesn't save you.

What's different about the N2 kanji and vocabulary list

If you've already worked through the N3 list, the N2 one won't look like more of the same. It is a different register. N3 vocabulary is the language of daily life: things you do, feel, and talk about. N2 vocabulary is largely the language you read about, built from two-kanji Sino-Japanese compounds and nominalized abstractions that fill newspapers, official notices, and business email but rarely get spoken aloud at a dinner table.

The shift shows up in a few concrete ways. Plain, everyday verbs get a formal cousin built from the same idea, packaged as a noun plus する:

Everyday register	N2 register	Where you'll meet it
助(たす)ける	支援(しえん)する	Government and NGO reporting
増(ふ)える	増加(ぞうか)する	Statistics inside a news article
変(か)わる	変化(へんか)する・〜化(か)する	Commentary on a social trend
〜と思(おも)う	〜と考(かんが)えられる・〜と見(み)られる	Attributing a view without fully committing to it

A handful of the everyday-to-formal swaps N2 study material trains you to recognize on sight.

Passages get longer and argument-driven, too. N3 reading mostly checks whether you followed a story. N2 checks whether you followed a position: editorials and opinion columns that stake a claim across several paragraphs and expect you to track it, not just decode each sentence alone. Media Japanese follows the same pattern, and NHK-style news phrasing and workplace notices favor dense noun compounds standing in for whole clauses, plus phrasing that softens a claim instead of stating it flatly.

None of this is harder Japanese in the sense of more obscure characters. It's formal Japanese, and formality is a register you build by reading it, not by drilling a list.

Self-check quiz: answer it on the page.

Where N2 learners actually trip up

N2 doesn't usually fail people on obscure vocabulary. It fails people on patterns that look manageable in isolation and fall apart under time pressure. A few show up constantly enough to name.

Common mistake

Treating near-synonyms as interchangeable. 〜おかげで and 〜せいで both roughly mean "because of," but they carry opposite attitudes: おかげで frames the cause as something to be grateful for, せいで frames it as someone's fault. N2's vocabulary-usage questions (言(い)い換(か)え・文脈(ぶんみゃく)規定(きてい)) are built to catch exactly this. The sentence is grammatically fine either way, and only the nuance tells you which one the test wants.

Domain-specific compounds are the second trap, and they're a volume problem more than a difficulty one. You have almost certainly met every individual kanji before, just not stacked together in this particular combination:

少子(しょうし)高齢(こうれい)化(か)に伴(ともな)い、社会(しゃかい)保障(ほしょう)制度(せいど)の見直(みなお)しが急務(きゅうむ)となっている。

With the population aging and the birthrate falling, overhauling the social security system has become urgent.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Declining-birthrate-aging accompanying, social security system's reexamination, urgent task, has become.

少子(しょうし)高齢(こうれい)化(か) and 社会(しゃかい)保障(ほしょう)制度(せいど) are each one unit in a native reader's head, compounds that show up whole in any N2-level article on policy or demographics. Sound each one out kanji by kanji during a timed section and you lose the sentence.

Common mistake

Relying on furigana to get through practice material, then meeting the same word bare on test day. Furigana tells you the reading; it doesn't build the instant, no-lookup recognition the real exam demands, because the real exam prints none. If a word only registers with the reading sitting above it, you haven't learned the word yet. You've learned to read the hint.

Keigo adds a third, quieter failure mode, usually in the listening section: a causative-passive form like 〜させていただく carries information about who is being deferential to whom. Miss it, and you can flip your entire read on who did what to whom in the conversation.

Every one of these is the same failure in a different coat. You can decode all the parts and still miss what the sentence is doing, and no list, this one included, will fix that for you. Only pages will.

Interactive N2 kanji & vocabulary tracker

There is one honest use for a list like this: find the holes, then go and read something that has them in it. Ticking a box is not learning a word. Meeting it in a paragraph, twice, is.

Use our interactive advanced study tracker below to check off the N2 characters and vocabulary you've learned. Tap any item to open the Yomimaru Popover Dictionary, which displays Hiragana readings, pitch accents, grammatical parts of speech, English meanings, and contextual example sentences.

Below, you can access our Interactive N2 Study List. Mark the Kanji and Vocabulary words you already know, click them to view full dictionary definitions, and see your N2 Mastery Gauge rise!

Keep Learning: Your Next Steps

N2 comes down to volume: a lot of pages, most days, at a level that stays slightly uncomfortable. Where to go from here:

Read JLPT N2 texts with furigana: free graded literary short stories at N2.
Japanese news written for N2: real reporting at N2 with furigana and an English summary.
Every N2 grammar point: the full N2 grammar index with example sentences from real texts.
Back to JLPT N3 Kanji
Advance to JLPT N1 Kanji →
JLPT N2 reading strategies (9 strategies for the N2 読解(どっかい) section: comparative texts, hedging language tracking, and the T-chart method.)
How to read native Japanese content (at N2, you are ready to start with authentic texts.)
Satori Reader alternative for N2 practice (if you use Satori Reader and are wondering what to do when you outgrow it.)

On the page: JLPT N2 study trackers. Mark the N2 kanji and vocabulary you know and see exactly what is left. Open it on Yomimaru.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

JLPT N3 Kanji List and Vocabulary List, Free

2026-05-22T00:00:00+09:00

N3 is the first level where the words stop being the problem. You can know every item in the passage, recognize every grammar point on its own, and still choose the wrong answer, because the question was never asking you to recognize anything. That is the gap N4 leaves you with, and it is why "study harder" quietly stops paying at this level.

So before you spend six months standing on a level you are not actually standing on: if N4 kanji still stop you mid-sentence, N3 will read as noise, and no amount of list-ticking will change that. If they don't, N3 is where you are, and the useful thing to do is stop preparing to read and go read.

The full N3 kanji and vocabulary list sits at the foot of this page. Tick off what you know, and the gauge will tell you how much of N3 you are already carrying.

What is tested in the JLPT N3?

jlpt.jp describes N3 as "a bridging level between N1/N2 and N4/N5": the ability to understand Japanese used in everyday situations "to a certain degree." In practice that means reading everyday materials with specific content, grasping newspaper-headline-level summaries, and working through slightly difficult writing when alternative phrasing helps you along. On the listening side, it means following near-natural-speed conversation closely enough to track both the content and how the speakers relate to each other.

Getting there is a jump in kind, not just volume. jlpt.jp hasn't published an official kanji, vocabulary, or grammar list since the exam was revised in 2010, and its own FAQ says so outright. Every number below, including ours, is a widely-cited industry estimate rather than a current requirement. Test-prep resources commonly put N3 at around 650 cumulative kanji (estimates range from 620 to 700, roughly 350 new since N4), about 3,750 cumulative vocabulary words (roughly 2,250 new since N4), and somewhere in the 150 to 180 range for cumulative grammar points. Sources disagree by nearly double on that last figure, so treat it as a rough band, not a target.

N3's numbers rest on shakier ground than the other four levels, for a specific reason: N3 didn't exist before the 2010 revision. The old four-level test had no N3 equivalent. What's now N3 and N2 both came out of splitting the old test's Level 2, because the jump from old Level 2 to old Level 3 was too steep for most learners to clear in one step. N5, N4, N2, and N1 all trace their commonly-cited counts back to an old official list. N3's figures are industry interpolation for a level that didn't used to exist.

The exam changes shape here too. Vocabulary starts asking for compound terms, formal idioms, abstract nouns, and advanced adverbs. The grammar and reading block stacks sophisticated structures and relative clauses into passages that get noticeably longer, and it starts asking you to summarize an argument rather than locate a fact. Listening moves to natural conversation speed, and wants you to track how a speaker's relationship or opinion shifts across a conversation. The grammar that carries all of this is formal, written and expressive:

たびに: each time that something happens
うちに: while a condition still holds, before it stops holding
わけがない: there is no way that this could be so

Score section	Comes from	Range
Language Knowledge	Vocabulary (30 min) + the grammar half of the 70-min block	0 to 60
Reading	The reading half of the 70-min block	0 to 60
Listening	Listening (40 min)	0 to 60

N3's official structure, per jlpt.jp. Total 0 to 180.

That three-way split is new at N3. N4 and N5 report only two scores, Language Knowledge and Reading combined, then Listening. N3 is the first level where a strong vocabulary section can't quietly cover for a weak reading one, or the other way around.

Key idea

The pass mark is 95 out of 180, but there's a floor under every section: 19 points, each of the three, no exceptions. Score 60 in Language Knowledge, 60 in Reading and 18 in Listening and you have 138 points, comfortably over the line, and a fail.

N3 is the bridge: why your study method has to change

Every level up to N3 rewards roughly the same loop: memorize a list, drill a workbook, take a practice test, repeat. N3 is the first level where that loop quietly stops being enough on its own, and jlpt.jp's own framing says as much. N3 sits between N4/N5, which measure basic Japanese mainly learned in class, and N1/N2, which measure Japanese used across real, everyday circumstances. N3 is where those two worlds start overlapping.

You can see it in a single sentence. N4 grammar mostly shows up one pattern at a time. N3 starts stacking two or three patterns into a single clause, the way real Japanese actually does it:

忙(いそが)しいからといって、朝(あさ)ごはんを抜(ぬ)くわけにはいかない。

Just because you're busy doesn't mean you can skip breakfast.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Busy-because-[they say], breakfast skip cannot-not-do.

からといって rejects a reason before it's fully granted, and わけにはいかない stacks a layer of social obligation on top of it. N4 sentences rarely combine two grammar points like this in one clause; N3 does it routinely.

A flashcard can teach you からといって. It can teach you わけにはいかない. It can't teach you what happens when a real sentence hands you both at once. That recognition only comes from meeting the combination somewhere you actually had to read it, which is a volume problem, not a memorization problem. Textbook drilling still matters at N3. The grammar list above is real, and worth learning properly. It just stops being sufficient by itself, for the first time in the sequence.

The answer to a volume problem is volume: sentences, at a level where you can still follow them, until two stacked patterns stop being an event. That is a habit, not a syllabus, and it is the whole argument for reading native material earlier than feels comfortable.

Common N3 mistakes to watch for

Most N3 mistakes aren't vocabulary gaps. They're habits from N4 that stop working once the material gets denser.

Common mistake

Trusting the reading over the kanji. 以外(いがい) and 意外(いがい) are exact homophones, both read いがい, with unrelated meanings: "except for" versus "unexpected." N3 is full of pairs like this; 気候(きこう) and 機構(きこう) (both きこう: "climate" and "organization") is another. Below N3 you could usually guess a compound from its sound alone. At N3 the reading stops being enough. You have to know which kanji you're actually looking at.

And the pairs keep coming. 機械(きかい) and 機会(きかい) are both きかい. Only one of them is an opportunity.

Common mistake

Missing the switch between formal narration and casual dialogue. N3 passages mix a narrator's polite です/ます prose with a character speaking in plain form mid-paragraph: だ instead of です, 食(た)べない instead of 食(た)べません. The grammar isn't new information at that point. Catching the switch, under time pressure, is the actual skill being tested.

The third habit costs the most points, and it isn't a gap in your Japanese at all. It's reading N3 passages the way you read N4 ones. At N4, the answer is usually a sentence you can point to. At N3, questions increasingly ask what a passage implies, or what an author who never states an opinion outright seems to think. Skim for the one explicit fact and you are left with nothing to point at when the question doesn't work that way.

Self-check quiz: answer it on the page.

None of these get tested directly. They're what turns a passage built entirely from words you already knew into a wrong answer anyway. If that's where your practice tests keep bleeding points, the reading section has strategies of its own.

Interactive N3 kanji & vocabulary tracker

Here is the list. Check off the N3 characters and vocabulary you've already learned, and the gauge will show you how much of the level you're carrying before you've studied a thing for it.

Tap any item to open the Yomimaru Popover Dictionary, which displays Hiragana readings, pitch accents, grammatical parts of speech, English meanings, and contextual example sentences.

Ticking boxes moves the gauge. Reading is what moves you.

Keep Learning: Your Next Steps

N3 is the bridge. Here is what sits on either side of it, and what to do while you're standing on it.

Read JLPT N3 texts with furigana: free graded short stories, folktales and essays at N3.
Japanese news written for N3: real reporting rewritten at N3, free and updated weekly.
Every N3 grammar point: the full N3 grammar index with example sentences from real texts.
Back to JLPT N4 Kanji
Advance to JLPT N2 Kanji →
JLPT N3 reading comprehension strategies: 8 strategies specific to the N3 読解(どっかい) section, including passage type identification, logical connector tracking, and time management.
Learn N3 vocabulary through reading in context: context beats flashcards at this stage.

On the page: JLPT N3 study trackers. Mark the N3 kanji and vocabulary you know and see exactly what is left. Open it on Yomimaru.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

JLPT N4 Kanji List & Vocabulary (Interactive)

2026-05-22T00:00:00+09:00

N4 is the level where Japanese stops being a phrasebook and starts being a language, and it is the level where most self-studiers stall. The stall rarely comes from the kanji. It comes from the sentence: an N4 sentence chains two verbs with a single て, tucks a plain-form clause inside a polite one, and hangs its only ます ending off the very end. No word list ever asked you to hold all of that at once.

The tracker at the bottom of this page is the list. Tick off the kanji and vocabulary you already own, tap anything you don't recognize for its dictionary entry, and watch how much of the level is left. Everything above it answers what a list can't: is N4 where you actually are, or are you still consolidating N5? And what do you do on the day you know every word in a sentence and still lose the sentence?

昨日(きのう)買(か)った本(ほん)は、思(おも)ったより難(むずか)しかったです。

The book I bought yesterday was harder than I expected.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Yesterday bought book as-for, than [I] thought more difficult was.

Every word in there is N5 vocabulary. What makes it N4 is 買(か)った sitting in front of 本(ほん) with no relative pronoun to warn you, and 思(おも)った turning up in plain form inside an otherwise polite sentence.

What is tested in the JLPT N4?

jlpt.jp itself describes N4 as "the ability to understand basic Japanese", the last level (alongside N5) built around what a classroom teaches rather than what daily life in Japan actually demands. In practice: reading short passages on familiar topics written in basic vocabulary and kanji, and following conversations if the other person is speaking slowly.

The 2010 revision is why no two N4 lists agree. jlpt.jp stopped publishing per-level kanji, so every list in circulation, including the one below, is somebody's reconstruction. Use it as a map, not as scripture.

Getting there from N5 is a jump in volume more than in kind. jlpt.jp hasn't published an official kanji-by-level list since the test was revised in 2010, but test-prep resources widely cite N4 at around 300 cumulative Kanji (commonly cited in the 250 to 300 range, roughly 200 new on top of N5's 100) and around 1,500 cumulative vocabulary words (roughly 700 new). Those are commonly cited ranges, not JLPT-published figures. Put plainly: N4 is roughly triple the kanji and double the vocabulary of N5. Grammar points are harder to pin down still. Sources disagree by close to 2x on how to even count a "grammar point," but most study lists land somewhere around 130 cumulative patterns. Treat all of these as ballparks for building a study list, not a checklist to empty out.

The exam expands on N5 section by section. Vocabulary starts testing compound words, basic transitive and intransitive verbs, and a wider spread of daily nouns. Grammar and reading bring in potential (〜る/られる), passive (〜れる/られる), and causative (〜せる/させる) forms, alongside compound conjunctions (like 〜ながら or 〜ておく). Reading passages also double in length, which is exactly where dedicated reading strategies start to matter. Listening keeps the situations elementary: follow instructions, answer questions about what you just heard.

Section	Time	What it scores
Vocabulary	25 min	rolled into Language Knowledge + Reading (0 to 120)
Grammar & Reading	55 min	rolled into Language Knowledge + Reading (0 to 120)
Listening	35 min	scored separately (0 to 60)

A total of 90/180 isn't enough on its own. You also need at least 38/120 on Language Knowledge + Reading and 19/60 on Listening. Ace vocabulary and bomb listening, and the exam fails you regardless of the total.

From N5 to N4: what actually changes

N5 rewards recall: greetings arrive whole, verbs arrive in ます form, and almost nothing asks you to change a word you were handed. N4 asks you to operate the language, and it does that mostly through one form.

The て-form is the hinge. N5 barely touches it; N4 leans on it constantly, to chain actions into a single sentence, to make a request (〜てください), to ask permission (〜てもいいです), to forbid something (〜てはいけません). Miss it and any sentence with more than one verb in it stops resolving.

友達(ともだち)と映画(えいが)を見(み)て、晩(ばん)ご飯(はん)を食(た)べました。

I watched a movie with a friend, then we had dinner.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Friend with, movie [I] watched, [and] dinner [I] ate.

見(み)て is doing the real work here. The て-form chains two separate actions into one sentence, a pattern N5 barely tests and N4 tests constantly.

Past tense stops being a special occasion too. N5 conversations mostly sit in the present; N4 narrates what someone did, saw or ate, often stacked two or three actions deep in one sentence. The polite scaffolding comes down as well: listening sections trade the textbook ます endings for plain-form speech between friends, contracted forms, and the shortcuts nobody teaches from a word list.

Then there is what N5 lets you ignore entirely: whether the verb blames anybody. N4 puts transitive and intransitive pairs on the paper, and they look almost identical.

Self-check quiz: answer it on the page.

There's no official jlpt.jp figure for how many hours this takes; it depends heavily on your starting point, study habits, and how close your first language is to Japanese. Test-prep resources commonly put cumulative study time from zero at several hundred hours by the point a learner is ready to sit N4. If you passed N5 comfortably on vocabulary alone, budget real time for conjugation this round, not just more words.

Common N4 mistakes to watch for

Most N4 study plans are vocabulary-heavy and conjugation-light, which is backwards. The exam punishes a conjugation slip far more often than it punishes a gap in your kanji list.

Common mistake

Te-form group confusion. う/つ/る verbs take って, ぬ/ぶ/む verbs take んで, く becomes いて, ぐ becomes いで, and す becomes して. Under time pressure, learners default to one pattern for everything, and 買(か)いて instead of 買(か)って is one of the most common slips on N4 practice material.

The cruel part of a conjugation error is that nothing stops. 買(か)いて sails past the listener, past your own ear, and hardens into a habit. Nobody corrects you, because you were understood.

The second trap is register: which form you use, and where the polite one is allowed to sit.

Common mistake

Mixing plain and polite mid-sentence. Verbs inside a subordinate clause usually need the plain form, even in an otherwise polite sentence. と思(おも)います takes a plain verb before と, never the polite one: 雨(あめ)が降(ふ)ると思(おも)います, not 雨(あめ)が降(お)りますと思(おも)います. The polite ending belongs at the very end, once.

Particles cause a third, quieter kind of error: one that doesn't break the sentence, it just changes what it means.

Common mistake

しか without a negative verb. しか always pairs with a negative ending: お金(かね)しかない means "only money." Drop the ない and the sentence stops being grammatical, not just off in tone, which is easy to miss when you're translating "only" straight out of English.

None of these show up as their own question on the exam. They show up as the reason a reading passage or a listening clip quietly stops making sense halfway through.

Interactive N4 kanji & vocabulary tracker

Use the tracker below to check off the N4 characters and vocabulary you already have. Tap any item to open the Yomimaru Popover Dictionary, which displays Hiragana readings, pitch accents, grammatical parts of speech, English meanings, and contextual example sentences.

Key idea

A ticked box means you recognized a word on a list. It does not mean you will catch that word three clauses into a sentence, in the plain form, glued to the front of a noun. The list is the map. Reading is the territory.

So use it the way you'd use a map: to find the edge of what you know, and then to leave it. Once most of it is ticked, stop grinding the list and go read real Japanese at your level, with the dictionary one tap away: something native you actually want to finish, or the reading that should follow a kanji app.

Keep Learning: Your Next Steps

Where to go next, depending on which way the tracker went:

Read JLPT N4 texts with furigana: free graded short stories and essays at exactly this level.
Japanese news written for N4: real reporting rewritten at N4, with an English summary under each story.
Every N4 grammar point: the full N4 grammar index with example sentences from real texts.
Back to JLPT N5 Kanji
Advance to JLPT N3 Kanji →
JLPT reading comprehension strategies: build the reading skills to match your growing vocabulary.

On the page: JLPT N4 study trackers. Mark the N4 kanji and vocabulary you know and see exactly what is left. Open it on Yomimaru.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

JLPT N5 Kanji List & Vocabulary (Interactive)

2026-05-22T00:00:00+09:00

Fresh off kana, N5 looks like a wall: about a hundred kanji, hundreds of words, and no official list from the people who actually write the test. The scary part is the wrong part. What decides your N5 is whether you can read those characters inside a sentence you have never seen before, and that is a different skill from recognizing them on a card.

So before you memorize anything, find out where you are standing. Read this without decoding it piece by piece: 今日は晴れです. If it arrived as one sentence, you are further along than the list makes you feel. If it arrived as a row of shapes you had to assemble, that is fine, and it tells you exactly what this page is for.

N5 is a floor, not a badge. Plenty of people read comfortably at this level and never book the exam at all.

Going from flashcards to sentences is the hardest adjustment a beginner makes, and almost nobody warns you it is coming. That is why this page ends in a tracker rather than a list you scroll past. Every N5 word here is spelled in kana, so if your hiragana or katakana recognition is not yet instant, warm up with our free kana trainer. A few rounds there makes the reading tracker below far easier to work through.

Below, you can explore our Interactive N5 Study List. Mark the Kanji and Vocabulary words you already know, click them to view full dictionary definitions and grammar rules, and watch your N5 Mastery Gauge grow!

What is tested in the JLPT N5?

N5 is three timed sections in a single sitting, and the shape of it tells you more than any word count does.

Section	Time	What it checks
Vocabulary	20 min	Kana spelling and meaning of basic words
Grammar & Reading	40 min	Particles (は, が, に, を, で), verb forms (ます, て, た), short passages
Listening	30 min	Slow, everyday spoken conversations

N5's structure, per jlpt.jp. Three timed sections, ~90 minutes. Passing needs 80/180 overall plus sectional minimums: 38/120 on Language Knowledge & Reading, 19/60 on Listening. Ace vocabulary, skip listening practice, and that floor alone can still fail you.

That structure is published and current. The kanji and vocabulary counts everywhere online are not. jlpt.jp hasn't released an official N5 list since the 2010 restructure, and its own FAQ says so. "N5 = 100 kanji" is a widely-cited estimate traced to the old four-level test, not a requirement: roughly 100 cumulative kanji (80 to just over 100), about 800 cumulative vocabulary, with grammar counts disagreeing even more. Planning targets, not pass/fail lines. What jlpt.jp does commit to in writing is the ability N5 certifies, "the ability to understand some basic Japanese," the kind mainly learned in class. Textbook familiarity over real-world fluency, which is permission to stop chasing kanji you don't need yet.

Key idea

Since 2010 there has been no official N5 kanji list, so every count you meet online is somebody's estimate of somebody else's estimate. Track a number nobody has to guess at instead: how many sentences you got through today without stopping.

Which is what the last stretch of N5 really is. The same list, met again inside sentences, until the words stop being entries you recognize and start being reading you can do.

How long does N5 really take?

Ask five people how long N5 took and you will get five answers. jlpt.jp has never published a study-hours figure, and the honest answer depends on where you start. Already read Chinese or Korean characters? N5's hundred-ish kanji barely register. Starting from zero, kana included? Budget real time for that first. With that caveat: test-prep communities commonly cite a few hundred hours for a consistent beginner, a loose planning number rather than a deadline.

Roughly in order, what that time tends to look like:

Hiragana and katakana until you read both without translating in your head. A couple of weeks, not months. Our free trainer is built for exactly this stretch, and the beginner's guide to hiragana and katakana covers why the two scripts behave so differently.
Core vocabulary and grammar, with one real sentence read for every new word, on the day you meet the word. Not once the list is "done."
Short passages with furigana as a safety net, even while your tracker below is half-checked. This is the step where memorized words turn into reading ability.
Timed, past-exam-style sections in the final weeks, so pacing is not a surprise on test day.

Tomo-Sensei says
Everyone asks for the hours. Nobody asks the question that actually predicts the result: how many days in a row did you open something in Japanese and read it? Six months of immaculate flashcards can still leave you frozen in front of your first real paragraph. A smaller vocabulary plus a hundred short things read badly usually will not. Read badly, daily. The hours look after themselves.

Here's the kind of sentence step three means:

今日(きょう)は晴(は)れです。

It's sunny today.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Today, [topic], sunny, is.

です is the polite copula, and here it is carrying the entire verb slot. Nothing else in this sentence conjugates.

That is most of N5 reading: short, complete sentences built from simple pieces. If you met that same sentence bare at the top of this page and it landed, that is what your N5 looks like from the inside. Skip step three and you end up where this page started, with a hundred kanji you can name, and no sentence you can read.

Common N5 mistakes (and how to avoid them)

Some N5 mistakes have nothing to do with how many words you know. They are habits, and they quietly cap how much of what you memorized you can actually use. Four worth catching early:

Common mistake

Treating katakana as optional. N5 listening and reading lean on it harder than beginners expect (スーパー, コーヒー, テレビ), and if hiragana got five times the drilling katakana did, that is the gap that shows up first.

Common mistake

Confusing は and が because English glosses both as "is/are." は marks what the sentence is about. が marks what specifically answers the question. 私(わたし)は学生(がくせい)です states a topic; 誰(だれ)が学生(がくせい)ですか asks which person fits. They are doing different jobs, not competing for the same one.

Common mistake

Dropping だ or です, because English has no spoken "to be" you consciously reach for. 今日(きょう)、休(やす)み is not a sentence yet. 今日(きょう)は休(やす)みです is. For N5 purposes, the copula is the verb.

The は versus が question does not end at N5. Native speakers argue about the edge cases. You need it right often enough, not settled.

Common mistake

Learning a kanji's shape without attaching a sound to it. A character you can only recognize does nothing for you in Listening, and half the work in Reading. Reading real sentences, out loud when you can stand it, forces the sound to stick alongside the shape.

Interactive N5 kanji & vocabulary tracker

One rule keeps this tracker honest instead of flattering. Tick a card only when you could meet it cold, inside a sentence, with nothing printed above it. Anything looser and you are marking "I have seen this before" as learned, and the exam does not test that.

水(みず)を飲(の)みます。

I drink water.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Water, [object], drink.

Three moving parts: a noun, the particle を marking it as the thing being acted on, and a polite verb. Most of N5 reading is this shape with more words poured into it.

Use the interactive widget below to mark the N5 characters and words you can read. Tap any card to open the Yomimaru Popover Dictionary, which displays Hiragana readings, pitch accents, grammatical parts of speech, English meanings, and contextual example sentences.

If the gauge fills up faster than you expected, take the hint: you are shopping at the wrong level, and the N4 kanji and vocabulary index is where your next thousand words live.

Keep Learning: Your Next Steps After N5

Finished your N5 review? Here is where to go next.

Read JLPT N5 texts with furigana: free graded short texts you can read the week you finish this list, with furigana over every kanji.
Or start with a story written inside the N5 word list: The Invitation, where Naoko finds a temple far too big for the road it stands on; The Gap on the Shelf, about a boy who has never opened one of the books his mother buys him; or Ten Minutes Left, the last match of the season in the year of the entrance exam. Each is a 12 to 14 minute read with furigana on every kanji.
Japanese news written for N5: real reporting rewritten at N5, free and updated weekly.
Every N5 grammar point: the full N5 grammar index, each pattern with example sentences pulled from real texts.
Advance to JLPT N4 Kanji & Vocabulary →
Study hiragana and katakana first, and get the kana solid before you take on N4 kanji.
Practice kana free in Yomikana: the interactive trainer with animated stroke order, quizzes, and a match game; no login required.
What reading real Japanese actually looks like, for the day your N5 words start showing up in the wild.

On the page: JLPT N5 study trackers. Mark the N5 kanji and vocabulary you know and see exactly what is left. Open it on Yomimaru.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

JLPT Reading Comprehension: Strategies N5–N1

2026-05-22T00:00:00+09:00

Reading (読解(どっかい)) never gets a clock of its own. At N5, N4 and N3 it is bolted onto the grammar block. At N2 and N1 it shares a single block with grammar and vocabulary together, and from N3 upward it also carries a score floor you have to clear on its own marks. That is where the section is actually lost, and the problem is structural rather than linguistic. What changes as you climb is which of the six official question types can turn up on your paper, and how much of a passage you have to hold in your head at once.

Reading never gets its own clock

Which block reading lands in decides how much of the clock is really yours, and the answer changes twice on the way up.

Level	The block reading sits in	Vocabulary	Listening	Total
N5	Grammar・Reading, 40 min	separate, 20 min	30 min	90 min
N4	Grammar・Reading, 55 min	separate, 25 min	35 min	115 min
N3	Grammar・Reading, 70 min	separate, 30 min	40 min	140 min
N2	Vocabulary/Grammar・Reading, 105 min	inside the block	50 min	155 min
N1	Vocabulary/Grammar・Reading, 110 min	inside the block	55 min	165 min

Official test times, from the JLPT's Composition of Test Sections and Items. Every reading passage has to be finished inside the bolded block.

Look at what happens between N3 and N2. At N5, N4 and N3, vocabulary is fenced off in a block of its own, so it cannot eat your reading time. Only grammar can. At N2 that fence comes down, and vocabulary, grammar and every passage share one clock. It is why people describe N2 as the level where they ran out of time even though the passages were barely longer than N3's.

The official page notes that section times may change, and that listening varies slightly with the length of the recordings. Check jlpt.jp before you build a timetable around any of this.

How reading is scored, and why N3 is the cliff

The JLPT does not simply add your marks up. It scores you by section and demands a minimum in each one, on top of the overall total. Reading's status in that scheme changes at N3.

Level	Is Reading its own scoring section?	Score range	Sectional floor	Overall pass mark
N1	Yes	0 to 60	19	100 / 180
N2	Yes	0 to 60	19	90 / 180
N3	Yes	0 to 60	19	95 / 180
N4	No, merged with Language Knowledge	0 to 120	38	90 / 180
N5	No, merged with Language Knowledge	0 to 120	38	80 / 180

Key idea

N3 is where reading starts carrying its own score. Below it, a strong grammar and vocabulary result literally adds to a weak reading result, because they land in the same 0 to 120 bucket. From N3 up they do not: reading needs 19 of its own 60, and nothing else on the paper can cover for it.

Tomo-Sensei says
Look at that floor before you plan your study. Nineteen out of sixty is a low bar, and people still miss it. They answer the first four questions carefully and never lay eyes on the last passage. Most of the time, "I failed reading" turns out to mean "I never reached reading."

The six question types, and which levels use them

The JLPT publishes exactly six reading item types. They are not spread evenly, and knowing which ones can appear on your paper tells you what to practise.

Reading item type	N5	N4	N3	N2	N1
Comprehension, short passages (内容(ないよう)理解(りかい)・短文(たんぶん))	●	●	●	●	●
Comprehension, mid-size passages (内容(ないよう)理解(りかい)・中(ちゅう)文(ぶん))	●	●	●	●	●
Comprehension, long passages (内容(ないよう)理解(りかい)・長文(ちょうぶん))	○	○	●	○	●
Integrated comprehension (統合理解(とうごうりかい))	○	○	○	●	●
Thematic comprehension, long (主張(しゅちょう)理解(りかい)・長文(ちょうぶん))	○	○	○	●	●
Information retrieval (情報(じょうほう)検索(けんさく))	●	●	●	●	●

The official item-type grid (● appears on the paper, ○ does not). Three types run the whole way from N5 to N1, the rest arrive at particular levels, and one of them disappears again.

Two rows are worth staring at. Comparative reading is an N2 invention. 統合理解(とうごうりかい) puts two short texts on the same topic in front of you and asks where they agree, which is a working-memory task before it is a reading one, and nothing at N3 prepares you for it. Neither text is hard on its own. That is the trick.

Aの筆者(ひっしゃ)は、在宅(ざいたく)勤務(きんむ)は通勤(つうきん)時間(じかん)をなくすので生産(せいさん)性(せい)が上(あ)がると述(の)べている。

Writer A says working from home raises productivity because it removes the commute.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

A's writer, working from home, commuting time because it removes, productivity rises, states.

Text A, stated flatly. Every word here is N3 vocabulary.

一方(いっぽう)、Bの筆者(ひっしゃ)は、同僚(どうりょう)と偶然(ぐうぜん)話(はな)す機会(きかい)が減(へ)る点(てん)を問題(もんだい)にしている。

Writer B, meanwhile, treats the loss of chance conversations with colleagues as the problem.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

On the other hand, B's writer, with colleagues by chance talking chances decrease, that point is treating as a problem.

Text B, also easy. Now answer what A and B have in common. Neither text says it, and that gap is the entire question.

Common mistake

Reading text A, forming an answer, then reading text B to confirm it. Every option in 統合理解(とうごうりかい) is written to be true of one text or the other, so an option that faithfully restates A is still wrong when B never said it. Read both, state each writer's position in one clause, and only then look at the four options.

The other row is subtler. At N2, the only long passage on the paper is 主張(しゅちょう)理解(りかい). N1 sets both kinds of long text, N2 sets the thematic one alone. So where N3 asks what the passage said, N2 asks what the writer was arguing, and every hour of N3 practice leaves that muscle untrained.

JLPT N5 reading: sentences, not passages

The official can-do statement for N5 reading is modest and accurate: "One is able to read and understand typical expressions and sentences written in hiragana, katakana, and basic kanji."

There is no long passage at N5 and no inference. You get a short text (a note, a memo, a message), a mid-size one (a paragraph about a familiar situation), and information retrieval (find one fact in a poster or a timetable). Every answer sits on the surface of the text.

あしたの午後(ごご)三(さん)時(じ)に、二(に)階(かい)の教室(きょうしつ)に来(き)てください。

Please come to the second-floor classroom at three tomorrow afternoon.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Tomorrow's afternoon three o'clock at, second floor's classroom to, please come.

All of N5 reading is in this line. One fact, sitting on the surface, and a question that points straight at it.

What costs N5 candidates marks is decoding speed. They read kana slowly enough that the 40-minute block runs out while they are still sounding words out, and no reading strategy fixes that. Kana fluency does. Work through hiragana and katakana until recognition is automatic, then start ticking off the JLPT N5 kanji and vocabulary list.

JLPT N4 reading: the same shapes, bigger

N4 uses the same three item types as N5, and the official can-do only widens a little: "One is able to read and understand passages on familiar daily topics written in basic vocabulary and kanji."

What grows is the text. The mid-size passage becomes a real paragraph with a shape: a small narrative, or an explanation with a reason buried inside it. Information retrieval starts using documents that fight back, like a leaflet with conditions attached or a schedule with an exception printed under it.

会議(かいぎ)は水曜日(すいようび)の予定(よてい)でしたが、部長(ぶちょう)の出張(しゅっちょう)が延(の)びたため、金曜日(きんようび)に変(か)わりました。

The meeting was scheduled for Wednesday, but it moved to Friday because the section chief's trip ran long.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

The meeting, Wednesday's plan was, but, the section chief's business trip extended because, to Friday it changed.

The question asks which day the meeting is. 水曜日(すいようび) is the first day named, it sits right next to the keyword, and it is wrong.

Common mistake

Answering from the first sentence that contains the question's keyword. N4 is where the test starts punishing this on purpose: the qualifier that flips the answer is almost always in the final clause of the paragraph. Read to the full stop before you look at the options.

N4 is the last level where reading cannot fail you by itself, and the right place to spend that safety on stamina: texts slightly too long for you, read without a dictionary. Keep the N4 kanji and vocabulary list moving underneath, because N3 will not wait for it.

JLPT N3 reading: the long passage arrives

N3 is the structural break in this progression. Three things land at once: the long content passage (内容(ないよう)理解(りかい)・長文(ちょうぶん)) appears for the first time, reading becomes its own scoring section with its own 19-point floor, and the grammar-plus-reading block stretches to 70 minutes without stretching far enough.

What N3 really introduces is text that will not state its point flatly. Opinion passages quote a view before disagreeing with it, and questions start asking what the author implies. The concession-then-contrast pattern (確(たし)かに…しかし…) is the highest-yield thing to be able to spot, because the sentence before しかし is where the wrong answer comes from.

確(たし)かに、紙(かみ)の辞書(じしょ)には紙(かみ)の辞書(じしょ)のよさがある。しかし、調(しら)べる回数(かいすう)が増(ふ)えるほど、読(よ)む速(はや)さは落(お)ちていく。

Paper dictionaries have their merits, certainly. But the more you stop to look things up, the slower you read.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Certainly, in paper dictionaries there is a paper dictionary's goodness. However, the more the number of look-ups increases, reading speed falls.

確(たし)かに sets up a view the writer is about to drop, and the distractor is built out of that first sentence. The answer lives on the other side of しかし.

N3 is also the first level where a passage can be longer than what you can comfortably hold in your head. That is not a vocabulary problem, and no amount of vocabulary will fix it.

Every tactic for that (questions before passage, connector tracking, time-boxing the four passage types, and the 30-day plan to build the speed it all depends on) is worked through in the JLPT N3 reading comprehension strategies guide. If N3 is your exam, go there next, and keep the N3 kanji and vocabulary list ticking over while you do.

JLPT N2 reading: two texts, one question

At N2 the passages stop being about things and start arguing things. The official can-do names the material outright: "articles and commentaries in newspapers and magazines as well as simple critiques."

Two new item types arrive and the fences come down. 統合理解(とうごうりかい) hands you two texts and asks you to compare them. 主張(しゅちょう)理解(りかい) hands you a long argumentative essay and asks what the writer is claiming. Both reward a reader who is tracking who is speaking: the hedges that mark a cited view, against the markers that mark the writer's own.

日本(にっぽん)の労働(ろうどう)時間(じかん)は減少(げんしょう)しているとされている。しかし、それは統計(とうけい)上(じょう)の話(はなし)に過(す)ぎないのではないか。

Working hours in Japan are said to be falling. But isn't that only true on paper?

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Japan's working hours are decreasing, it is said. However, that is a matter of statistics only, is it not?

Two voices in two sentences. 〜とされている hands you somebody else's claim. 〜のではないか is the writer stepping forward. 主張(しゅちょう)理解(りかい) asks about the second one.

Meanwhile vocabulary, grammar and reading now share one 105-minute clock, so every minute overspent on a grammar question is a minute stolen from a passage.

Self-check quiz: answer it on the page.

The full toolkit is in the JLPT N2 reading strategies guide: the T-chart for comparative passages, the hedging tracker, and a realistic 105-minute budget. The N2 kanji and vocabulary list is what makes any of it survivable at speed.

JLPT N1 reading: everything, at once

N1 is the only level that uses all six item types, and the only one carrying both kinds of long passage: 内容(ないよう)理解(りかい)・長文(ちょうぶん), where the question is what the text says, and 主張(しゅちょう)理解(りかい)・長文(ちょうぶん), where the question is what the writer is doing with it. The official can-do is explicit about the material: "writings with logical complexity and/or abstract writings on a variety of topics, such as newspaper editorials and critiques."

The overall pass mark rises to 100 out of 180, the highest of the five levels, while reading's own floor stays at 19. At N1 you cannot scrape through on section minimums. You need real marks, out of a 110-minute block that also holds every vocabulary and grammar question on the paper.

What makes N1 reading hard is rarely the vocabulary and almost never the grammar. It is that the argument is distributed: a claim is set up in paragraph one, qualified in paragraph three, landed in paragraph five, and the question asks about the version in paragraph five.

Common mistake

Answering a 主張(しゅちょう)理解(りかい) question from the paragraph where the claim first appears. At N1 the opening statement of a thesis is usually the version the writer is still willing to modify, and the option built from it will look right in every particular except the one being tested. Find the last place the writer states the claim, not the first.

Holding an argument across five paragraphs is a habit you build on editorials, not on practice papers. Read 天声人語(てんせいじんご) or an opinion column daily, and make a habit of stating the writer's thesis in one sentence when you finish. If you have never read native Japanese content outside a textbook, start there rather than on a mock paper. Keep the N1 kanji and vocabulary list ticking over underneath, because N1 vocabulary is specialised by domain and only breadth fixes that.

What every level rewards

Two habits transfer the whole way from N5 to N1, and neither costs you anything.

Read the question before the passage. Every level hands you the question and all four options up front, so reading them first converts an open comprehension task into a search with a target. You stop reading in order to understand, and start reading in order to find, which is a faster and much less tiring activity.

Then treat connectors as structure rather than vocabulary. しかし, つまり, 確(たし)かに and 一方(いっぽう) are not words to translate. They are the writer telling you, for free, where the answer is about to arrive, and they behave the same way in an N3 opinion paragraph and an N1 editorial.

一方(いっぽう)、地方(ちほう)では人口(じんこう)が減(へ)り続(つづ)けている。つまり、同(おな)じ政策(せいさく)が同(おな)じ結果(けっか)を生(う)むとは限(かぎ)らない。

In the regions, meanwhile, the population keeps falling. So the same policy will not necessarily produce the same result.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

On the other hand, in the regions the population continues to decrease. In other words, the same policy the same result produces, is not necessarily so.

一方(いっぽう) announces a contrast. つまり announces that the writer is about to say the thing plainly. Two instructions about where to look, before you have understood a single clause.

Everything past those two is level-specific, which is why the depth lives on the N3 and N2 pages rather than here. What is not level-specific is the mileage. Strategies only fire at reading speed, and reading speed comes from reading.

What to take away

Budget the block, not the section. Reading has no clock of its own, so the grammar questions decide how much reading time exists.
Practise only the item types that can actually appear on your paper. 統合理解(とうごうりかい) is not on the N3 test, and 内容(ないよう)理解(りかい)・長文(ちょうぶん) is not on the N2 one.
Question first, then passage. The connectors will tell you where the answer lands.

The list nobody publishes

One last thing, because it changes how you should read every kanji count you have ever seen for this exam. The JLPT does not publish a kanji list, a vocabulary list, or a grammar list. It stopped after the 2010 revision and said why: the organisers decided that publishing "Test Content Specifications" containing a list of vocabulary, kanji and grammar items "was not necessarily appropriate" for a test that measures communicative competence rather than memorisation.

So every "N3 = 650 kanji" figure in circulation, including the ones on our own level indexes, is a reconstruction, assembled from the pre-2010 specification and from what actually turned up in past papers. Aim at them by all means, but expect the paper to reach outside them.

Which makes which kanji can you read right now the far more useful question. Work through the grid below and it will estimate the level you are reading at, so you can pick the strategy guide that matches the exam you are actually sitting.

On the page: Kanji Coverage Map. Tap the kanji you can read and see how much of each JLPT level you already cover. Open it on Yomimaru.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

Master Japanese Vocabulary: SRS + Reading

2026-05-22T00:00:00+09:00

Vocabulary sticks when you meet a word in a sentence you wanted to read, star it there, and review it later in the form you met it in. A word learned from a list is a word you can recognise on a card. A word learned from a page is a word you can use. That gap is why a 90% score on a 2,000-word deck does not survive a novel's first page.

Every learner hits the treadmill point. Reviews green, streak intact, and then a novel where none of the drilled words turn up. Your brain discards what arrives with no context, and a card is exactly that: a string, a gloss, no situation.

The illusion of competence in vocabulary lists

A flashcard tests you under conditions the language will never offer: English prompt, dictionary form, nothing on either side. Get it right twice and you file it under known.

Take かける. Your deck says to hang. Read for a week and find it doing this:

めがねをかける: to put on glasses
電話(でんわ)をかける: to make a phone call
腰(こし)をかける: to sit down

腰(こし)をかける is worth sitting with: literally, you hang your hips on something. A deck has one line for the meaning, and the meaning is sit down.

Same with 覚(おぼ)える, on your cards since month one. To memorize. Here it is, working:

この漢字(かんじ)はどうしても覚(おぼ)えられない。

I just cannot get this kanji to stick.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

This kanji, no matter what, cannot be remembered.

覚(おぼ)える in the potential form, negated, with どうしても leaning on it. You will remember this one, because it annoyed you.

Common mistake

Learning a verb without the particle it takes. 会(あ)う means to meet, so you write 友達(ともだち)を会(あ)った. It is 友達(ともだち)に会(あ)う. No card had room to tell you: the particle only exists in a sentence.

Why reading is where vocabulary actually sticks

Read authentic Japanese native content and the useful words come back on their own: twenty pages of a novel will hand you the same few hundred words again and again, each time doing a slightly different job. Every encounter also brings luggage. The word sat in a scene, next to somebody in a mood, so later you are not searching an index of strings, you are pulling one thread of a web.

Then there is the guess. Work a word out from the sentence before you tap it, and that retrieval is the exercise. A deck hands you the answer key first, which is why it changes so little.

Key idea

The seconds you spend guessing before the lookup are worth more than the lookup. Do not let your reading tool be so fast that it takes the guess away.

The vocabulary loop in Yomimaru

Every reader can look a word up. The trick is doing it without losing the sentence you were in.

Tap the word. Tap whatever stops you in a news article or a Sōseki chapter. Its readings, its part of speech and its numbered English meanings come back over the text.
Star it. One tap, and the word goes to your list in the form you actually met it in: 食(た)べた, not 食(た)べる. The title of the text goes with it. The part you would otherwise copy out by hand, and never do.
Review it in-app. Every starred word carries a mastery score mapped onto an SRS stage, so words you keep meeting drop out of rotation.
Or send it to Anki. Export the list and each row carries the expression, its reading, its meaning, an SRS tag, a suggested interval, the conjugated form you tapped, and the title of the text it came from.

An SRS is a scheduler, not a teacher. It decides when a word comes back; what comes back is whatever you saved. So keep reading: the same words will find you again in a new sentence. That is the review no deck can fake.

Actionable tips for vocabulary mastery

Star less than you want to. At N4, star N4 and N3 words. Every obscure term you star steals a review slot from a word you would meet again this month.

Tomo-Sensei says
Five words a day, not forty. The ones worth keeping are the ones that keep coming back. If you starred something and never met it again, you did not need it yet.

Vary what you read, too. Read the day's news, a Sōseki short story, and a book you imported yourself, all in Yomimaru. A word you have only ever met in one register is a word you half know.

Keep improving your reading

JLPT N3 reading comprehension strategies. Vocabulary at work in 読解(どっかい).
JLPT N2 reading strategies. Inference and formal register, after N3.
How to read native Japanese content. Choosing texts at your level.
What to read after WaniKani. Where a big kanji vocabulary goes.

Test yourself, in context

Five questions below, each a sentence with a word missing. You pick the word it wants.

On the page: Interactive Vocabulary Quiz. Five quick questions whose difficulty adapts in real time to estimate your JLPT level and vocabulary size. Open it on Yomimaru.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

How to Start Reading Native Japanese Content

2026-05-22T00:00:00+09:00

Reading native Japanese content means reading text written for Japanese people rather than for learners: news, manga, essays, novels. You can start earlier than you think. Scaffolded native content (NHK Web Easy, graded readers) is readable from JLPT N4, and fully authentic text opens up around N2. What decides whether a text is right for you today is the 95% comprehension rule: understand roughly 95% of the words and you are where acquisition happens. Below: what to read at each level from N5 to N1, the wall almost everyone hits around N3, and how to read through it.

The problem with studying Japanese without reading

Most structured Japanese courses (Genki, Duolingo, Pimsleur, even Bunpro) share one limitation: they teach Japanese through artificial, simplified examples. Every sentence exists to illustrate one grammar point. None of it is wrong. It is just a register almost nobody writes in.

Textbook Japanese is not fake Japanese. It is a narrow slice of it, taught with enough confidence that learners assume it is the whole thing.

Real Japanese is messier in four ways, and only one of them is vocabulary. First, contraction. Textbooks teach 〜てしまう. Almost nobody says it.

宿題(しゅくだい)、忘(わす)れちゃった。

I forgot my homework.

忘(わす)れちゃった is 忘(わす)れてしまった, squeezed. 〜ではないか becomes 〜じゃん the same way. Everywhere in manga and speech, nowhere in a beginner course.

Second, omission. Japanese drops whatever it can infer, and the subject goes first.

明日(あした)は雨(あめ)だから、やめておく。

It's going to rain tomorrow, so I'll skip it.

Who is skipping, and skipping what? Neither is in the sentence. Both were two paragraphs ago. A textbook hands you 私(わたし)は. Nothing else does.

Third, architecture. One noun can carry two or three stacked clauses, and the main verb waits until the end.

去年(きょねん)の夏(なつ)に父(ちち)が買(か)ってきた古(ふる)い机(つくえ)の上(うえ)に置(お)いてある本(ほん)を読(よ)んでいる。

I'm reading the book that's sitting on the old desk my father brought home last summer.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Last summer father bought-and-brought old desk, on top of, placed book, [I] am reading.

One noun (本(ほん)), two clauses stacked in front of it, and the verb you need arrives last. English unrolls left to right; this unrolls right to left.

Fourth, register. Newspapers and essays run on 書(か)き言葉(ことば), vocabulary that is rarely spoken and rarely taught early.

本(ほん)調査(ちょうさ)の結果(けっか)、利用(りよう)者(しゃ)数(すう)は前年(ぜんねん)比(ひ)で二(に)割(わり)増加(ぞうか)したことが明(あき)らかとなった。

The survey found that user numbers rose twenty percent year on year.

本(ほん)調査(ちょうさ), 前年(ぜんねん)比(ひ), 明(あき)らかとなった. Nobody talks like this. Every newspaper writes like this, and no beginner course shows it to you.

Until you have read a lot of this, your brain stays in translation mode, converting Japanese to English one word at a time. Extensive reading, meaning large volumes of text you can mostly understand, read for meaning rather than for study, is what breaks the habit. Nothing else builds reading fluency as reliably, and none of it happens without volume. Graded readers can start it, but the gains show up once the material stops being simplified for you.

The science: why reading is the most efficient path to fluency

Language acquisition research keeps landing on the same driver: comprehensible input, material you can mostly understand with a manageable gap at the edge. Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis names it i+1: your current level plus one step.

Reading is the most practical way to get it. Each time you meet a word in a new context, your sense of it deepens: how it collocates, what register it belongs to. Fifty flashcard reps give you the same context fifty times; fifty pages give you fifty different ones. Grammar settles the same way: read enough natural text at your level and the patterns sink below the conscious layer, until you stop applying a rule and start noticing when a sentence sounds wrong.

The 95% comprehension rule: choosing the right difficulty

The 95% comprehension rule says you need to understand at least 95% of the words in a text for reading to drive vocabulary acquisition, a threshold established by vocabulary researcher Paul Nation (Victoria University of Wellington). In practice that is one unknown word every two lines, arriving with enough sentence around it to be guessable.

駅前(えきまえ)の商店(しょうてん)街(がい)は、昔(むかし)ほど賑(にぎ)わってはいないらしい。

The shopping street by the station apparently isn't as lively as it used to be.

If 賑(にぎ)わう is the one word you stop for, you are at 95%. And you can probably get it without stopping, from 昔(むかし)ほど plus a negative. That guess is worth ten flashcard reps.

You understand	What to do
Above 98%	Too easy. Step up. You are maintaining, not acquiring.
95 to 98%	The zone. One unknown word every two lines; context carries them.
90 to 95%	Where most growth happens, but only with furigana and one-tap lookup.
Below 90%	You lose the thread and re-read. Go easier, or study first.

Calibrate with this; do not gatekeep with it. An 88% text you love beats a 96% you abandon on page three.

Key idea

One unknown word every two lines is the target. At two unknown words per line, you have stopped reading and started decoding, and no amount of willpower converts decoding back into acquisition. Change the text.

Level-by-level reading progression

Here is the path from N5 to N1.

Level	Vocabulary	The shift that matters here
N5 to N4	500 to 1,500 words	Finish things. Furigana on everything, no shame in it.
N3	around 3,750 words	Read what you picked, not what a list picked for you.
N2	approaching 6,000 words	Stop looking up every word. Sustain the flow.
N1	well above 8,000 words	Read across domains, not deeper into one.

Four levels, four different jobs. The vocabulary is roughly where the JLPT puts you. The right column is the part people skip.

Nobody moves cleanly from one row to the next. You will be N2 in manga and N4 in a newspaper for a long time. Level yourself per genre, not once.

Starting out (N5 to N4)

Kanji recognition is thin, and both kana sets have to be automatic first: reading rests on that layer and nothing below it. If either still slows you down, start with the beginner's guide to hiragana and katakana and drill the shapes free in Yomikana. Authentic Japanese will sit below 95% on almost every page for you now, so do not read it cold. Read scaffolded native content: real topics, real structures, furigana available, vocabulary trimmed.

What to read:

NHK Web Easy. Real NHK news rewritten at N4 difficulty. Furigana on all kanji, simplified vocabulary. Free. Yominews at N4 does the same job with an English summary under each story, and our own beginner shelf has short graded texts if news is not your thing.
Original N5 short stories. Written inside the N5 vocabulary but built to say something, so they hold near 95% coverage in your first year without turning into textbook prose. Try Every Morning at the River, where an old dog carries a stone to the river each morning, One Line of Boot Prints, where one seven year old walks to school through the snow anyway, or Three Envelopes, same seat on the same train until the morning an opened letter is waiting. Free, with furigana.
Graded readers (Nihongo Tadoku series, ASK Publishing series). Written for defined JLPT levels. Not fully authentic, but natural enough to build the habit on.
よつばと! Household vocabulary, visual context, furigana on almost all kanji. Widely recommended as the best first manga.

Building fluency (N3)

You know around 650 kanji. News and contemporary fiction for general audiences open up, and the question stops being "can I read this" and becomes "do I want to".

What to read:

NHK Easier and MATCHA Easy Japanese. A step above NHK Web Easy in density. Culture, travel, society.
Light novels aimed at young adult readers. Contemporary vocabulary, frequent dialogue, furigana on most kanji in many series. Buy one and import the .epub into your reader; no library carries these, they are in copyright.
Slice-of-life manga without heavy action vocabulary: からかい上手(じょうず)の高木(たかぎ)さん, 日常(にちじょう), 夏目(なつめ)友人(ゆうじん)帳(ちょう).
Simple web articles. Lifestyle blogs, cooking sites, fan wikis for whatever you already care about.

Reaching intermediate-native fluency (N2)

Kanji coverage is nearly complete and most authentic Japanese is readable, with effort. The complaint changes from "I don't know these words" to "I can't parse this sentence fast enough."

What to read:

NHK News Web (not Easy). Real Japanese news at adult reading level.
Contemporary novels. 村上(むらかみ)春樹(はるき)'s early work (relatively accessible prose), 東野(とうの)圭吾(けいご) (thriller and mystery, clear structure), コンビニ人間(にんげん) (short and highly readable).
Opinion columns and essays. Newspaper editorials, Nikkei lifestyle writing, personal essays.
Non-fiction on things you already know. Familiarity pays for the vocabulary you are missing.

Common mistake

Looking up every unknown word at N2. It feels like diligence. What it does is turn a novel into a vocabulary list you happen to be reading in order, and you will abandon it by chapter three. Look up the word that blocks the sentence; skim the one you can infer.

Advanced reading (N1 and above)

The target is native reading speed and full comprehension of formal written Japanese: newspaper editorials (朝日新聞(あさひしんぶん)天声人語(てんせいじんご), NHK Commentary), literary fiction (芥川(あくたがわ)龍之介(りゅうのすけ), and contemporary), essays on economics, philosophy and history, and business Japanese.

The N1 problem is that vocabulary is specialised by domain: a reader perfectly comfortable in contemporary fiction can be lost in an economics paper. Breadth across genres, rather than depth in one, is the last stage.

How to handle the difficulty wall

Almost every learner hits a point where the material turns on them. More unknown words per page. Sentences that refuse to resolve. Comprehension that feels like it dropped overnight, on a book you were fine with last week. That is the difficulty wall, a phase transition rather than a verdict. What it is made of is usually known words in an unknown architecture.

彼(かれ)が黙(だま)っていたのは、言(い)えなかったからではなく、言(い)う必要(ひつよう)がないと判断(はんだん)したからだった。

He said nothing. Not because he couldn't, but because he had decided there was no need to.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

The fact that he stayed silent was not because he couldn't say it, but because he judged there was no need to.

Every word here is N3 or below. It is still hard, and the difficulty lives entirely in のは, からではなく and からだった. Vocabulary you have; structure you don't.

Drop down one level. Read something slightly easier than the text that stopped you, for two to four weeks. This is not going backwards; it is laying the base the harder text needed.
Switch genres. If news has become exhausting, try fiction: a different vocabulary pool, and simpler sentence structures despite feeling more literary.
Use better tools. If the wall is kanji, adaptive furigana removes that blocker and nothing else. If it is grammar, a sentence breakdown stops one bad sentence ending the session.
Read shorter things. Finishing is load-bearing. A finished article beats an abandoned chapter.

The wall is not a ceiling. That text type is slightly ahead of what you have internalised, and only volume closes the gap.

Building a sustainable reading habit

One variable predicts reading fluency better than any other: the total hours you have spent reading Japanese you mostly understand. Your dictionary, your SRS deck and your method are all downstream of that number. Twenty minutes a day beats two hours on Saturday: the Saturday session spends its first half hour remembering who the characters were, and a daily habit survives a bad week because a bad day only costs you twenty minutes.

Read what you find interesting, because motivation is the only reading habit that sustains itself. If a text bores you, close it and find another. And track completion rather than perfection: finish the article, finish the chapter, finish the book. Do not abandon something on page three because page three had unknown words.

Tomo-Sensei says
The learners who get there are not the ones who read the most in a good week. They are the ones who read on the day they did not want to. Ten minutes, one article, badly. That day is the whole game.

The Yomimaru method: active context reading

Reading a native book used to mean a paper dictionary, a stop every three lines for a kanji you could not even index, and a lost sentence. People call it painful reading, and it produces exactly the stop-start pattern that keeps fluency from forming. Yomimaru takes that friction out, so the Japanese is the only hard part left.

Tap any word to see its readings, its part of speech, and its numbered English meanings without leaving the text. No copy-paste, no drawing a character you cannot read onto a touchpad, no switching apps.

Set your JLPT level once. Kanji you already know stay bare, so your eye has to read them, which is how recognition speed gets built. Unfamiliar ones carry their reading, so a single character never stops the line.

When the blocker is grammar, highlight the sentence and Tomo-Sensei takes it apart: which particle does what, where the embedded clause attaches, who the dropped subject is. It works on library texts and on anything you pasted in yourself, which matters: the sentence that beats you is rarely the one somebody pre-annotated.

Paste any Japanese text you want to read, a news article or an email, or upload the file itself: .epub, .pdf, .docx, .txt. The whole reading environment applies to it, so a novel you bought reads exactly like a library text, furigana and lookups and all. Imports are metered on the free plan (one a month, ten in total); the graded library itself is open and unmetered.

Star a word while reading and it lands in your list without breaking the paragraph, conjugated exactly as you tapped it, next to the title of the text you found it in. The words you collect are the ones your own reading turned up rather than the ones a stranger put in a deck. That is most of why they stick.

Related guides

What to read after WaniKani. You have 2,000 kanji and nothing to point them at. First texts, and where to go next.
JLPT N3 reading comprehension strategies. The 読解(どっかい) section rewards a different reading behaviour than a novel.
JLPT N2 reading strategies. Formal written register, and the N2 passages built out of it.
What is furigana and how to use it. Why furigana on every kanji quietly stalls your kanji.
Master Japanese vocabulary through context. Turning a reading session into vocabulary without making it a study session.
The best NHK Web Easy alternatives. Free sites for the gap between graded content and fully native text.
Free hiragana and katakana trainer. Brand new? Lock in the kana first: mnemonics, stroke order, quizzes, a match game. No account needed.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

Graded Readers Fail. Native Japanese Content Wins

2026-05-22T00:00:00+09:00

Native Japanese content beats graded readers for anyone past their first few months, and not because it is harder. Graded readers are written in a controlled dialect: vocabulary capped, grammar flattened, every sentence built to stay inside a level rather than to say something. Nobody writes that way.

Graded readers (多読(たどく) - Tadoku) are the standard first recommendation, and for a beginner sounding out their first hiragana they are the right tool. The trouble comes later. Plenty of learners spend two years in that bubble and still cannot read a newspaper.

Here is what the bubble does to a sentence. Both say the same two things.

メロスはとてもおこりました。わるい王(おう)さまをころそうと思(おも)いました。

Melos got very angry. He thought he would kill the bad king.

The graded version. One verb per clause, nothing above the level list, spaces so you never hunt for a word boundary.

メロスは激怒(げきど)した。必(かなら)ず、かの邪智(じゃち)暴虐(ぼうぎゃく)の王(おう)を除(のぞ)かなければならぬと決意(けつい)した。

Melos was enraged. He resolved that he must rid the world of that king, so wicked and so cruel.

直訳(ちょくやく) Word by word

Melos raged. Certainly, that wicked and brutal king, must remove, [he] resolved.

Dazai Osamu, 走(はし)れメロス, 1940. The actual opening line, with a ぬ negative no level list licenses.

邪智(じゃち)暴虐(ぼうぎゃく) is on nobody's list. You will never be ready for it. You meet it, tap it, keep reading.

The limitations of the "learner bubble"

The simplification prevents frustration. It also leaves three deficits.

1. Artificial phrasing

Because graded readers strictly avoid intermediate vocabulary and grammar, the sentences come out stiff and repetitive. You absorb how an author thinks a student reads: a register with no native speakers.

"I finished the level 5 set" is a fact about the set.

2. High boredom factor

Daily routines, potted history, folktales for children. Material that cannot hold your attention cannot hold you.

3. The sudden cliff

Between the highest graded reader and the easiest news article sits a gap, and nothing in the reader prepared you for it. If you ground through WaniKani and still cannot open a novel, that gap is what you are feeling.

The step does not have to be a cliff, and the fix is not to skip the level but to write it properly. Yomimaru's own N5 stories stay inside the N5 word list and still have stakes: in Never a Day Off Take has not closed his ramen stall once in fifty years, and this morning he cannot get up; in The Sound the Water Makes everyone expects Sota to inherit the knife shop and he starts teaching Aya instead; in The First Day of Summer three friends follow someone else's tape into the forest. They read like fiction, not like a level.

Common mistake

Waiting until you are "ready" for native content. There is no level at which native text stops being hard, only the level at which the lookups stop coming fast enough to make you quit.

The cognitive science of authentic native content

Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis says we acquire language from messages pitched slightly above where we are: i plus one. Below it, nothing lands. Exactly on it, there is nothing to acquire.

三(さん)日間(にちかん)、雨(あめ)が降(ふ)り続(つづ)いたので、川(かわ)の水(みず)かさが増(ま)した。

It rained for three days straight, so the river rose.

If 水(みず)かさ is the only word you do not have here, you already half know it. 雨(あめ), 降(ふ)り続(つづ)いた and 増(ま)した did that. That is i plus one.

Key idea

The working threshold is about 95% word coverage: one unknown in twenty. Below it you stop reading and start decoding. A graded reader holds you at 100%, and comfortable is where progress stops.

The other effect no study plan can fake: you keep the vocabulary from a story you wanted to finish.

Yomimaru: bridging the gap to authentic Japanese

The one real objection to native content is the tax. Leave the page, type the word into a dictionary, scroll past four senses, come back, find your place: you did not read that sentence, you processed it.

Tap any word while reading in Yomimaru to see its readings, its part of speech, and its numbered English meanings instantly. You never leave the page.

Words are the easy failure. The hard one is a sentence where you know every word and still cannot tell who is doing what to whom. Highlight it and Tomo-Sensei takes it apart: particle roles, where the embedded clause closes, who the dropped subject is. On library texts, and on anything you paste in yourself.

Yomimaru hosts 16,000+ texts of authentic material, from the day's news rewritten to your level to Sōseki, Akutagawa and Dazai in the original, all graded N5 through N1 by actual readability. And what you cannot find there you can bring: paste it in, or upload the .epub, .pdf or .docx of a book you bought.

The furigana is yours too: every reading at first, then switched off level by level, so the kanji you already know arrive bare.

Transitioning to native content: your action plan

Getting out takes three things.

Lower your expectations, deliberately. Your reading speed will collapse. That is correct: you are doing a harder thing now. Treat the first month as training, not evidence.
Read what you would read anyway. Choose genres that interest you in real life. If you love technology news, read Japanese tech blogs. If you love fantasy, buy a light novel and import the .epub. High interest overrides grammatical difficulty.
Let the tools carry the last 5%. Tap the words you do not have. Hand Tomo the sentence that stopped you, and stay on the reading side of the line.

The speed comes back sooner than you expect, and never inside a graded reader.

Ready to start reading native Japanese?

Next: start reading native Japanese content, on choosing texts at your level.

Still on simplified news? The best NHK Web Easy alternatives bridge simplified and native text.

Build vocabulary through context-rich reading: a word sticks because you met it somewhere that mattered.

Finished WaniKani? What to read after WaniKani maps the texts that bridge SRS study and real reading.

Read this guide on Yomimaru — free, no login, with tap-to-look-up furigana on every Japanese example.

Yomimaru Learn

Hiragana vs Katakana vs Kanji: When to Use Each

Hiragana vs katakana vs kanji compared

How to tell hiragana from katakana at a glance

The same word in hiragana, katakana and kanji

One real sentence, three scripts

What hiragana is for

Katakana is more than loanwords

Where kanji fits

Which came first, hiragana or katakana?

Should you learn hiragana or katakana first?

How much of Japanese is hiragana, katakana or kanji?

Which script would you use?

Japanese Grammar AI Explainer: How It Works

The gap that grammar books cannot fill

What actually makes a Japanese sentence hard to parse

What Tomo-Sensei actually tells you

Particle disambiguation in context

Embedded relative clause structure

Dropped subjects and implicit speakers

Passive and causative constructions

Conditional nuances

Formal written register patterns

How Tomo-Sensei differs from other grammar tools

How to use Tomo-Sensei effectively

By JLPT level: what Tomo-Sensei helps with most

Tomo-Sensei as a grammar pattern database

Further Reading

Test yourself: the adaptive grammar challenge

Migaku Alternatives: 4 Options Without Anki

Yomimaru vs. Migaku at a glance

What is Migaku?

Where Migaku falls short

Setup requires Anki and a browser extension

Limited iOS and mobile experience

Multi-language design dilutes Japanese-specific features

No curated library of authentic Japanese texts

The best Migaku alternatives

Yomichan / Yomitan: best free browser extension

Language Reactor: best for video-centric immersion

LingQ: best web-based word tracking

Yomimaru: best for reading-first learners without Anki

Migaku vs. alternatives: feature comparison

Which should you choose?

Further Reading

What to Read After WaniKani Level 60

What WaniKani gives you, and what it doesn't

The WaniKani graduation gap

Start where your grammar is, not where your kanji is

What to read: by type and difficulty

Why WaniKani graduates specifically benefit from Yomimaru

A 90-day reading plan after WaniKani

Further Reading

Furigana Reader Online: 5 Tools Compared (2026)

What is a furigana reader?

Why learning to read without furigana is the long-term goal

The best furigana reader tools online

Yomichan / Yomitan: best browser extension

Jisho.org: best for word-level lookup

ichi.moe: best for sentence-level grammar breakdown

Kuroshiro: for developers only

Yomimaru: best for reading full Japanese texts

Feature comparison

Which furigana tool is right for you?

Further Reading

JLPT N2 Reading: 9 Strategies to Pass 読解

What makes N2 reading different from N3

N2 reading section structure at a glance

Strategy 1: Read the questions and all answer options first

Strategy 2: Identify the passage type in the opening sentence

Strategy 3: Track hedging language and perspective markers

Strategy 4: The T-chart method for comparative passages

Strategy 5: Allocate 60 minutes to the reading section

Strategy 6: Build vocabulary coverage to 95% per passage

Strategy 7: Practice inference-heavy reading daily

Strategy 8: Use AI grammar analysis for complex sentences

Strategy 9: Review every wrong answer at the grammar level

Putting it together: the N2 reading study month

Further Reading

JLPT N3 Reading: 8 Strategies to Pass 読解