Manabi Reader (OP's app) is way too "busy" for my personal preference. Opening a book and seeing it covered in highlighting and annotations by default is intimidating. To the extent that progress tracking is fun, I want it to be something that's done passively rather than covering every page of every book with paragraph splitting.
It also does not support Yomitan-style custom dictionaries, which is a shame but I understand why it would be a non-goal. Shiori (the other iOS reader app the post mentions) and Jidoujisho (the Android app winner) both have only partial support. The Yomitan+ttsu stack on desktop is unbeatable for learning by reading in my experience. I hadn't heard of Lumie but will try it out on the blog's recommendation.
(Edit: 2 pages into a book, I am not a fan of Lumi's text rendering compared to ttsu.)
Thanks for trying it and sharing the feedback. I hear you... I'm working on a full redesign at the moment that is almost complete. In addition to making the highlights/annotations optional, it introduces a minimal "full screen" view that activates automatically when you scroll/paginate/tap blank space and makes the annotations much less prominent and hides navigation UI. I will post a screenshot of the WIP here in a moment.
I will consider more automatic ways of tracking reading progress as well. And I will make this tracking far more valuable soon too: it will automatically review your flashcards (ones that exist and ones you create in the future) when you read the words/kanji that appear in texts. This will also automatically transition words to "known" status simply by reading and applying the FSRS algorithm to it to determine learning status maturity levels based on the resulting intervals.
Yomitan is also absolutely a goal, and high priority. I'm working on Yomitan custom dictionary import at this moment. I hope to launch this very soon. Besides bringing your own dictionaries, it will also include Wiktionary ones out of the box so that you can get monolingual lookups easily (which will also let me add more languages than English for Japanese lookups).
Thanks for sharing the screenshots! The fullscreen view looks a lot cleaner, will look forward to the updates. For monolingual dictionaries, I'm always using Yomitan's ability to look up words within definitions.
Yes I've also just started adding sub-word lookups for ranges inside of the headword and for words appearing in the definitions. I hope to launch that together with Yomitan dictionary support. There is a lot packed into this next update...
I’m glad to see Yomitan and Anki at the top. I’ve only been learning Japanese for about 10 months at this point, but I can already watch most anime and read most manga largely unassisted. I’d never have gotten here without the two.
Relatedly, the Japanese learning community has many excellent blogs and resources. Many explore theories of learning and how it applies to Japanese, too, which is interesting enough in it’s own right :)
This is an excellent list. Compared to the paper dictionaries and flashcards I saw expats struggling with 20 years ago, these tools feel almost like magic for the "Software" layer (Vocabulary/Kanji).
However, as a loan officer living in Japan, I see many people master the "Software" but fail because of the "Hardware" (Audio OS).
In Japanese, vowels (a, i, u, e, o) are standalone signals. We process them as language. But I've read that Western brains often filter them out as mechanical noise.
My advice: Use these tools to build your database, but don't forget to "update your BIOS". Unless you retune your brain to treat isolated vowels as Signal instead of Noise, the software won't run smoothly.
beautifully written advice!
a lot of focus is on data, but when it comes to conversation and pronunciation, a lot of the data seems to be missing the point.
pronunciation is vital to understanding.
Very cool! This blog post in general was somewhat eye-opening for me, as someone who set up a mediocre PC-only Ttsu + Yomitan + Anki setup, and then got frustrated enough to start writing my own. Perhaps I should have spent more time researching existing options before going down that route.
I tried unsuccessfully to find your email to chat about the topic of the Japanese language learning ecosystem further. Would you mind dropping me an email to start a conversation? (Mine's in my profile.)
This is a very cool app and list of resources for learning Japanese. Does anyone know of similar top recommendations for learning Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese?)
I believe Yomitan has Chinese dictionaries available for it but I don't know much about it. I would like to add Mandarin/Cantonese to Manabi Reader before long.
Glad to hear it's serving you well! I have a lot more coming soon... I've done a full redesign, improved quality, and added some valuable new features like Yomitan and a manga reader. The ebook reader is also a lot nicer to use in this redesign.
Ok, I edited the title! Though the hostname already makes it clear that it's from a blog.
I don't know what more prestigious annual Japanese learning tools awards you might be confusing this with?
I did also get a recommendation from Tofugu / WaniKani's Japanese learning resources blog which was pretty popular at the time, but they've stopped that series. It would be great to see other annual Japanese tool awards. I’m not aware of any.
If you're sharing a 3rd-party post like this, then you need to use the article's original title, rather than editorializing it to draw attention to your own project.
The right way to share news about winning an award like this would be to write your own blog post, giving the audience some narrative about your journey from conceiving the project to winning the award. That could be a great post.
It's up to you how you communicate your work and achievements to the world, of course, but anything submitted to HN needs to adhere to the guidelines.
I quit my job a couple years back to work on this app full-time, as well as its companion flashcard app, Manabi Flashcards. The goal is to help you learn through immersion and eventually replace some of your flashcard reviews time with reading (once I finish auto-reviews for flashcards)
What's special about it? Manabi Reader became popular as an Japanese-focused alternative to services like LingQ in that it locally tracks and analyzes all the words and kanji you read and study. It shows you which words are new and which you're currently learning via flashcards, so you can easily find content that suits your level and see what flashcards to prioritize adding.
The pricing is also unique: students or low-income earners can elect to pay less, without verification. This has helped with word of mouth growth.
It also passively accumulates an on-device (and in your personal iCloud) corpus of example sentences from your reading. It’s also one of few ways to mine sentences including pitch accent directly into Anki on iPhone.
I had built this part-time while working over many years (starting with flashcards and then the reader app) but going full-time gave me the time to do a full rewrite: SwiftUI, native iOS + macOS, and an offline-first architecture that syncs with iCloud and my server in the background.
Although it has an optional companion SRS algorithm (FSRS) flashcard app, it's also a popular choice for mining Anki cards. This works with AnkiMobile on iOS and AnkiConnect on desktop.
You can use it like a web browser for the web, or subscribe to RSS feeds. It comes with a bunch of curated content by level. Recently I added EPUB support, pitch accents, and note-taking with todos.
I'm now almost done adding a manga mode via Mokuro, and Netflix/streaming video support via realtime captioning of audio streams. I've fine-tuned a manga-specific MLX-based OCR model (since Apple's OCR cannot tolerate vertical text) and have it working on iPhone, so I also plan to have it work on-demand and in-browser for sites like Bookwalker where you can purchase and find free manga.
In terms of growth, it's been mostly word of mouth so far - to scale this with UGC/influencer marketing I need to make it more beginner friendly. Currently it assumes you can read kana at least. But I have gotten interest from a bunch of influencers who already use the app or like it enough to recommend it generously (I'm starting with commission deals) so I am optimistic as I begin that campaign.
Well I'm sad than you plan a full rewrite in Swift, it means that I'll never have the chance to use it on my Android Best of luck for your app though, it seems nice
It was already fully native Swift and I began the apps before React Native existed. But it’s not true what you say! I have begun prototyping experiments in running my Swift and SQLite in the browser via WASM, and I’m also evaluating https://skip.tools for running SwiftUI on Android. I will go cross platform without ditching Swift.
But to be honest I am more likely to pursue web than native Android (Skip runs Swift natively on Android and binds SwiftUI to Compose) because Google is such a nightmare on top of Apple compared to the revenue Android apps tend to bring - I’ve seen others recently port 6 digit MRR apps to Android and make less than 1/100 as much for instance. But maybe for valuable language learning apps it wouldn’t be so bad. Anyway I am thinking to prioritize web apps first that could run on mobile too and perhaps later upgrade that into an Android app (whether with Skip for native UI or as a wrapper around web UI).
Manabi Reader (OP's app) is way too "busy" for my personal preference. Opening a book and seeing it covered in highlighting and annotations by default is intimidating. To the extent that progress tracking is fun, I want it to be something that's done passively rather than covering every page of every book with paragraph splitting.
It also does not support Yomitan-style custom dictionaries, which is a shame but I understand why it would be a non-goal. Shiori (the other iOS reader app the post mentions) and Jidoujisho (the Android app winner) both have only partial support. The Yomitan+ttsu stack on desktop is unbeatable for learning by reading in my experience. I hadn't heard of Lumie but will try it out on the blog's recommendation.
(Edit: 2 pages into a book, I am not a fan of Lumi's text rendering compared to ttsu.)
Thanks for trying it and sharing the feedback. I hear you... I'm working on a full redesign at the moment that is almost complete. In addition to making the highlights/annotations optional, it introduces a minimal "full screen" view that activates automatically when you scroll/paginate/tap blank space and makes the annotations much less prominent and hides navigation UI. I will post a screenshot of the WIP here in a moment.
I will consider more automatic ways of tracking reading progress as well. And I will make this tracking far more valuable soon too: it will automatically review your flashcards (ones that exist and ones you create in the future) when you read the words/kanji that appear in texts. This will also automatically transition words to "known" status simply by reading and applying the FSRS algorithm to it to determine learning status maturity levels based on the resulting intervals.
Yomitan is also absolutely a goal, and high priority. I'm working on Yomitan custom dictionary import at this moment. I hope to launch this very soon. Besides bringing your own dictionaries, it will also include Wiktionary ones out of the box so that you can get monolingual lookups easily (which will also let me add more languages than English for Japanese lookups).
Here is a roadmap: https://blog.manabi.io/articles/manabi-reader-roadmap/
If you have any other feedback please let me know, it's very helpful.
EDIT - some screenshots of the redesign:
The new bottom navigation, including the audio player (for which there is also synchronized text highlighting, karaoke-style): https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1383634595697918062...
The karaoke highlighting of text synchronized to audio: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1209908367821373500...
Updated lookup popover navigation with sentence and paragraph tabs: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1383634595697918062... I am also now adding sub-word lookups to this...
The full-screen view of an ebook: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1209908367821373500... (I am going to minimize this further, and will also have JLPT level underlines off by default)
Thanks for sharing the screenshots! The fullscreen view looks a lot cleaner, will look forward to the updates. For monolingual dictionaries, I'm always using Yomitan's ability to look up words within definitions.
Yes I've also just started adding sub-word lookups for ranges inside of the headword and for words appearing in the definitions. I hope to launch that together with Yomitan dictionary support. There is a lot packed into this next update...
Here is a look at the new learning status screen, too: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1209908367821373500... Overall navigation should be much easier to understand in this update.
And the new ebook bottom navigation, when it is not hidden: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1209908367821373500... (I will later move the scrollbar into the "..." menu like Apple Books to further minimize)
I’m glad to see Yomitan and Anki at the top. I’ve only been learning Japanese for about 10 months at this point, but I can already watch most anime and read most manga largely unassisted. I’d never have gotten here without the two.
Relatedly, the Japanese learning community has many excellent blogs and resources. Many explore theories of learning and how it applies to Japanese, too, which is interesting enough in it’s own right :)
That’s insanely impressive—did you do nothing but grind kanji for 10 months straight, or something?
Can you share more details about your learning methods?
This is an excellent list. Compared to the paper dictionaries and flashcards I saw expats struggling with 20 years ago, these tools feel almost like magic for the "Software" layer (Vocabulary/Kanji).
However, as a loan officer living in Japan, I see many people master the "Software" but fail because of the "Hardware" (Audio OS).
In Japanese, vowels (a, i, u, e, o) are standalone signals. We process them as language. But I've read that Western brains often filter them out as mechanical noise.
My advice: Use these tools to build your database, but don't forget to "update your BIOS". Unless you retune your brain to treat isolated vowels as Signal instead of Noise, the software won't run smoothly.
beautifully written advice! a lot of focus is on data, but when it comes to conversation and pronunciation, a lot of the data seems to be missing the point. pronunciation is vital to understanding.
Thank you. I completely agree.
Data is just the sheet music; pronunciation is the actual performance. Without the right instrument (Audio OS), the music doesn't play.
Very cool! This blog post in general was somewhat eye-opening for me, as someone who set up a mediocre PC-only Ttsu + Yomitan + Anki setup, and then got frustrated enough to start writing my own. Perhaps I should have spent more time researching existing options before going down that route.
I tried unsuccessfully to find your email to chat about the topic of the Japanese language learning ecosystem further. Would you mind dropping me an email to start a conversation? (Mine's in my profile.)
The app seems to be Manabi Reader, by the way: https://skerritt.blog/best-japanese-learning-tools-2025-awar...
Thanks yes. The homepage is https://reader.manabi.io and iOS/macOS download link is https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/manabi-reader-learn-japanese...
This is a very cool app and list of resources for learning Japanese. Does anyone know of similar top recommendations for learning Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese?)
I believe Yomitan has Chinese dictionaries available for it but I don't know much about it. I would like to add Mandarin/Cantonese to Manabi Reader before long.
Hell yeah! Congratulations, it's such a fantastic tool. When I am not actively learning it's still invaluable for day to day reading.
Glad to hear it's serving you well! I have a lot more coming soon... I've done a full redesign, improved quality, and added some valuable new features like Yomitan and a manga reader. The ebook reader is also a lot nicer to use in this redesign.
... from some random blog. Happy users are great, but your post title is misleading and, basically, a click-bait.
I doubt any major publications are choosing the year's best Japanese learning tool for iOS.
Ok, I edited the title! Though the hostname already makes it clear that it's from a blog.
I don't know what more prestigious annual Japanese learning tools awards you might be confusing this with?
I did also get a recommendation from Tofugu / WaniKani's Japanese learning resources blog which was pretty popular at the time, but they've stopped that series. It would be great to see other annual Japanese tool awards. I’m not aware of any.
It's great that you've won this award, congrats! But this isn't the way to share it with HN.
For a Show HN post, please follow these guidelines and also consider applying the tips: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638.
If you're sharing a 3rd-party post like this, then you need to use the article's original title, rather than editorializing it to draw attention to your own project.
The right way to share news about winning an award like this would be to write your own blog post, giving the audience some narrative about your journey from conceiving the project to winning the award. That could be a great post.
It's up to you how you communicate your work and achievements to the world, of course, but anything submitted to HN needs to adhere to the guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ok got it
Will try again
Reddit discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1phbsk4/i_te... (147 comments)
My app: https://reader.manabi.io
I quit my job a couple years back to work on this app full-time, as well as its companion flashcard app, Manabi Flashcards. The goal is to help you learn through immersion and eventually replace some of your flashcard reviews time with reading (once I finish auto-reviews for flashcards)
What's special about it? Manabi Reader became popular as an Japanese-focused alternative to services like LingQ in that it locally tracks and analyzes all the words and kanji you read and study. It shows you which words are new and which you're currently learning via flashcards, so you can easily find content that suits your level and see what flashcards to prioritize adding.
The pricing is also unique: students or low-income earners can elect to pay less, without verification. This has helped with word of mouth growth.
It also passively accumulates an on-device (and in your personal iCloud) corpus of example sentences from your reading. It’s also one of few ways to mine sentences including pitch accent directly into Anki on iPhone.
I had built this part-time while working over many years (starting with flashcards and then the reader app) but going full-time gave me the time to do a full rewrite: SwiftUI, native iOS + macOS, and an offline-first architecture that syncs with iCloud and my server in the background.
Although it has an optional companion SRS algorithm (FSRS) flashcard app, it's also a popular choice for mining Anki cards. This works with AnkiMobile on iOS and AnkiConnect on desktop.
You can use it like a web browser for the web, or subscribe to RSS feeds. It comes with a bunch of curated content by level. Recently I added EPUB support, pitch accents, and note-taking with todos.
I'm now almost done adding a manga mode via Mokuro, and Netflix/streaming video support via realtime captioning of audio streams. I've fine-tuned a manga-specific MLX-based OCR model (since Apple's OCR cannot tolerate vertical text) and have it working on iPhone, so I also plan to have it work on-demand and in-browser for sites like Bookwalker where you can purchase and find free manga.
In terms of growth, it's been mostly word of mouth so far - to scale this with UGC/influencer marketing I need to make it more beginner friendly. Currently it assumes you can read kana at least. But I have gotten interest from a bunch of influencers who already use the app or like it enough to recommend it generously (I'm starting with commission deals) so I am optimistic as I begin that campaign.
Well I'm sad than you plan a full rewrite in Swift, it means that I'll never have the chance to use it on my Android Best of luck for your app though, it seems nice
It was already fully native Swift and I began the apps before React Native existed. But it’s not true what you say! I have begun prototyping experiments in running my Swift and SQLite in the browser via WASM, and I’m also evaluating https://skip.tools for running SwiftUI on Android. I will go cross platform without ditching Swift.
But to be honest I am more likely to pursue web than native Android (Skip runs Swift natively on Android and binds SwiftUI to Compose) because Google is such a nightmare on top of Apple compared to the revenue Android apps tend to bring - I’ve seen others recently port 6 digit MRR apps to Android and make less than 1/100 as much for instance. But maybe for valuable language learning apps it wouldn’t be so bad. Anyway I am thinking to prioritize web apps first that could run on mobile too and perhaps later upgrade that into an Android app (whether with Skip for native UI or as a wrapper around web UI).
Ah my bad then, but I didn't know that SwiftUI apps where good on Android. I would love to be wrong actually
It's exciting times for Swift. Viability for SwiftUI on Android and Swift in WASM has only really become possible in the last year or so.
There is also a project called SwiftCrossUI which provides UI across Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, tVOS, TUI from one codebase.