There’s so many out there, I always love learning about new useful tools.
I’ll start, not comprehensive, just a few I like
[Yomichan](https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/) The golden standard, browser dictionary app with great functionality and ease of use
[Textractor](https://github.com/Artikash/Textractor) makes reading with visual novels a breeze and probably the most efficient learning source, sometimes a pain to get working but so worth it. Hooks into VNs and gives you the raw text so you can seamlessly look up words as you read.
[Mokuro](https://github.com/kha-white/mokuro) OCR for manga. It’s insane how well this works, especially considering how often other OCRs leave a lot to be desired. The scan it once and then read format (as opposed to live scanning) is also amazing. This makes reading manga without furigana (and even with) 10x easier
[Animebook](https://animebook.github.io/) Browser based video player with good learning features like selectable subtitles for easy look up and easy navigating around an episode. Can save an offline version too, also decently customizable. Pairs great with Yomichan. Amazingly easy to use subtitle retimer. Other alternatives exist, but I love how easy to use this one is, and the format.
[ttsu reader](https://reader.ttsu.app/manage) browser based light novel reader, again with selectable text that pairs nicely with yomichan. Looks very nice and pretty easy to use once you get used to it.
With these you have browser stuff, VNs, Manga, Anime, and Light Novels covered. For games sadly no super easy solution exists. There’s [Jo Mako’s Japanese Guide](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ukDIWSkh_xvpppPbgs1nUR2kaEwFaWlsJgZUlb9LuTs/edit#gid=0) which has a handful of game scripts, and there’s [Game2text Lightning](https://github.com/mathewthe2/Game2Text-Lightning) which has OCR for games, but it’s not in active development anymore and it doesn’t handle non standard fonts well, even more standard ones can be very hit and miss.
What kind of stuff do you guys swear by?
8 comments
wanikani and a lot of free time to watch hololive jp
Anki, anki, anki
At least for the basics, I think it’s by far the best one.
Another one I can recommend in addition to anki is migoku. It allows you to make anki card on the fly while watching or reading japanese(or other languages)
But I’ll look into yours for immersion, the seem interesting
Youglish for Japanese, so I can repeatedly review homonyms and their varying pronunciations in context. It searches millions of indexed videos for the word you’re looking for and you can skip right to the exact timestamps needed!
Forvo to look up native pronunciation
[JPDB](https://jpdb.io/)
similar to wanikani/anki.
Off the top of my head:
Anki
Japanese Dictionary Takoboto. Best Japanese dictionary is my opinion.
NHK Easy Japanese News website/app is amazing.
nihongo no mori (YouTube channel) for grammar back in the day was amazing. Used it from beginner all the way up to N1.
Rikaikun (Chrome extension) for reading kanji on websites.
For learning kanji, nothing else I’ve tried has ever beaten Ringotan.
It’s a free *and* ad-free app that teaches you how to draw kanji. Despite being a bit more initial time-investment than just looking at kanji in WaniKani or RRTK, my experience is that it sticks *much much better* when you actually have to draw the kanji too.
The initial introduction to a kanji takes a bit longer because you have to draw it 8 (IIRC) times with successively fewer hints, interspersed with the other characters you’re learning in the same session. But actually reviewing the characters is equally as fast as RRTK, and for most of the characters, I forget them way less often than I did when I used RRTK.
I cannot recommend it enough.
YouTube for endless native, high quality content, communities, and lots of learning resources.
If you use Firefox, ten10reader is YomiChan but just significantly better in every way.
https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/
https://jisho.org
https://massif.la/ja — Example sentence database search