Japanese · learn by reading
Learn Japanese from texts you want to finish.
taihaa is a reading loop for Japanese, alongside Mandarin, Cantonese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Korean. Bring an article, a story, or a class text. Read with furigana, tap a word for its reading and an English translation, save the useful ones with the sentence still attached, and review them later.
毎朝コーヒーを飲みます。
I drink coffee every morning. There are no spaces, but the reader splits the sentence into words, leaves the particle を on its own, and looks up the dictionary form of the verb.
まいあさ · maiasa
毎朝
every morning
kōhī
コーヒー
coffee
のみます · nomimasu
飲みます
飲む, to drink
Reading, then a small review queue
Bring a text you can finish
A news paragraph, a class handout, a short story, or an EPUB chapter. A starter from the library works too. taihaa does not open on a stack of unrelated example sentences.
Tap the word, not the line
Japanese has no spaces, so taihaa splits each sentence into words for you. Tap 食べました and the reader looks up 食べる. Particles such as は, を, and に are their own small words, so they never get stuck to the noun.
Review the sentence
Saved words come back with the line they came from, their reading, and romaji. Again, Learning, Known, and Easy set a simple spaced schedule. Ignore drops a word from review.
What Japanese reading needs from a reader
A word list can introduce vocabulary. It cannot show you which reading a kanji takes in a sentence you already care about. taihaa keeps the practice attached to a text: the reader for the first meeting, the saved sentence for the next ones.
Furigana over the kanji
Turn on Furigana in reader settings and each word with kanji shows its reading in small hiragana above it, the way pinyin sits over Mandarin. The reading comes from the sentence, so 今日 reads きょう and 一人 reads ひとり. Kana-only words stay clean. The word panel, vocabulary, review, and Daily add Hepburn romaji, such as たべる · taberu.
Kanji, hiragana, and katakana all find the word
A tap on 食べました, たべました, or 行きます looks up 食べる, たべる, or 行く. Words written in kana find their usual kanji spelling, and katakana loanwords such as コーヒー look up as written. A rare form can still miss. Type the translation that fits when it does.
You save the dictionary form
Vocabulary keeps 食べる with its reading, not one conjugation of it, so 食べました and 食べたい count as the same word. Review shows it in the sentence you read.
Level tags are estimates
Lessons can show an automatic CEFR tag, the same kind of estimate used for the other languages. It looks at sentence length and how much kanji a text uses. It helps you pick a text. It is not a JLPT result.
A practical first session
- Register and set the target language to Japanese.
- Open a sample lesson, a library starter, or paste a short paragraph you already wanted to read.
- Read one page. Save three to eight words, and edit any translation that does not fit the sentence.
- Come back for review. The card should still show the sentence from that page.
URL import works best on public articles. If a page is paywalled or mostly scripts, paste the text instead. English is the base language for meanings. News in the library can pull public Japanese feeds from BBC News Japan, CNN.co.jp, and nippon.com.
Start with one Japanese text.
You do not need a full course loaded in advance. One article is enough to see whether reading-first practice fits how you study.