Niho: Read Real Japanese Books

Niho is a reader for people learning Japanese by reading a lot of it. Download a classic from Aozora Bunko — Natsume Sōseki, Miyazawa Kenji, Dazai Osamu, Akutagawa, Japanese folk tales, and seventeen thousand more — and the whole book is on your phone. From then on nothing needs a connection: not the text, not the dictionary, not your word book, not the quizzes. Read on the train, on a plane, or anywhere the signal gives up. READ A WHOLE BOOK, NOT A TEXTBOOK PASSAGE These are the real works, complete and free of copyright in Japan. A "Start here" shelf gathers thirty short, plainly written classics, roughly in order of difficulty, so your first Japanese book is one you can actually finish. Children's stories, folk tales, mysteries, essays and poetry each have a shelf of their own. FURIGANA WHERE THE EDITION GIVES IT Readings appear in small kana above the kanji, exactly as printed in the source edition. Switch them off when you are ready to read without them. THREE WAYS TO READ Paged, like a Kindle. One continuous scroll. Or chat, where the chapter arrives a sentence at a time and types itself out. Your place is kept in all three, so you can switch mid-chapter and carry on from the same sentence. Type size, line spacing, margins, typeface (Mincho or Gothic) and page colour are all yours to set. A DICTIONARY THAT IS ALREADY THERE Select a word the way you would anywhere else — long-press, drag the handles — and look it up. JMdict senses grouped by part of speech, JLPT level and common-word badges, and a kanji breakdown from KANJIDIC2: every kanji in the word with its meanings, on and kun readings, school grade and stroke count. Inflections resolve on their own: 食べました finds 食べる, 勉強した finds 勉強. Japanese has no spaces, so a rough selection is fine — the longest word starting there is shown first, with the shorter ones behind it. READ ALOUD Any word, sentence or passage you select can be spoken by the system's Japanese voice, at a speed you choose. A WORD BOOK THAT FILLS ITSELF Every word you look up is saved — with its reading, its definition and the sentence you met it in, which is what makes it stick. Browse your own words, or work through the JLPT N5, N4, N3, N2 and N1 vocabulary lists that ship with the app. QUIZZES FROM YOUR OWN READING Fill-in-the-blank, word → meaning, meaning → word and reading questions — type the kana for a kanji word — built from the words you actually looked up, scheduled so you meet them again just before you would forget them. Free, offline, and without an account. Book text from Aozora Bunko. Dictionary data from JMdict and KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0). JLPT lists by Jonathan Waller (tanos.co.uk).