JL

JL is an alternative Japanese dictionary program.

It works really, really well for visual novels.

I wrote extensively about it here:

But in short:

• It's really fast
• It has amazing features specifically for Japanese
• It requires a texthooker and is Windows only :(

I like how you can put the textbox over the visual novel, which lets you do something similar to GSM's overlay.

JL also has some stats:

And even more excitedly they have stats on how many times you looked up a word, something that no other dictionary app has.

Texthookers are lil programs that "hook" into visual novels or some games, take the text on your screen and give it to you.

They are faster and more accurate than OCR, but sometimes awkward to use.

🏆LunaTranslator

By far the best texthooker out there.

It works on everything I try in terms of visual novels.

It can hook emulated devices such as PSP, PS2, and the Nintendo Switch.

If you find a "bad" hook (one that has a lot of junk) there's a million things you can do to make it more normal.

Like filtering out curly braces, filtering out non Japanese text etc.

If this doesn't help you, you can even write a Python file to preprocess the text!

On top of this, Luna supports much more than just hooking.

• OCR
• Speech Recognition (it listens to the sound the game is making, and tries to turn those sounds into sentences)
• You can install Yomitan and use it similarly to JL (it wont overlay like GSM does though)

But there are some rumours that the author has stolen the code of other people and rebranded it as their own (I have not found evidence of this, please let me know in the comments if you have proof).

Also, when writing code people often tell you what has changed since the last release.

The Luna author does not do this, it's kind of confusing to figure out what's been added or removed.

This led to people not trusting them.

On top of this, it supports a lot. Like translation, yomitan, Japanese parsing etc.

This led to someone forking the code and creating their own version, removing all of this and keeping just the hooking part.

Agent

Agent is a much simpler texthooking program.

It has a database of hooks, and you click on the game or visual novel you want to play.

You then have a perfect hook, it's not dirty and works first time without much issue.

The problem is that it doesn't have hooks for all games and visual novels, yet.

Chen's textractor works similarly to Luna and Agent, closer to Luna in the sense that you find the hook yourself.

It's most similar to Textractor (it's a fork) which is an older texthooking program, so many people love this as its similar to what they already use and love.

Texthooking Pages

Let's say you want to use Yomitan to mine from games / visual novels without GSM / JL or Yomininja etc.

Yomitan is browser only.

You need to take the text from OCR / Texthooking and place it onto a webpage to look up words.

There's some opinions about these, so let's list the most popular ones.

🏆Kizuna

Kizuna is a texthooking paged based on another one by Renji.

Everytime your texthooker receives a line of text, it sends it to this page.

Here you can use Yomitan to look up words.

Kizuna is special because it's a social texthooking page.

It records characters read and time spent per visual novel:

And you can create "rooms" with your friends to compare your stats together and motivate each other:

It's three main downsides are that it is focused primarily on Japanese visual novels, it's not open source and it doesn't let you export your data.

Renji's Texthooking Page

Renji's page inspired Kizuna's.

It's a simple texthooking page that can be downloaded and ran entirely locally, with its source code published online.

It looks pretty much exactly the same:

Many people use Renji's because it's lightweight and has many settings to allow you to configure things.

Maybe too many settings.

Because Renji's texthooker is open source it is often bundled into other software like Game Sentence Miner which has added a few specific features.

While Kizuna has stats, Renji's does not other than characters read and time spent.

The author, Renji, actually suggests people use GameSentenceMiner for stats with their texthooker:

ExStatic

You may have noticed in the previous paragraph someone mentioned ExStatic.

This is another texthooking page but with a lot more stats.

But in terms of functionality of the page itself, it's lacking somethings that Renji's has.

Still, many people use ExStatic as an easy way to get beautiful stats. It is open source and can be run entirely locally, without an internet connection.

🏆Mokuro + Mokuro Reader - Joint 1st

Mokuro is a file format for manga. It's basically a HTML overlay over a bunch of Manga images that let you look up the words in that manga panel using Yomitan.

It does this by OCRing the manga to generate this.

Mokuro Reader is the app that lets you read these files:

The main problem with this is finding manga.

You have to find a way to buy the manga, get the raw images, and process it. There are less than legal ways to do this, but I won't talk about that here.

You can store all of your manga in the cloud along with progress etc and easily read from any device (you can read from any device, and use Yomitan on Android if you want to mine):

When you read manga, since it is in the browser, you can use Yomitan to look things up:

For reading it has some cool features, like a night mode to block out blue light to make night reading easier:

And a million other minor settings to alter how you read.

Of course it also has Anki support. Make a word card using Yomitan and then

Double click the screen to grab an image.

There's even stats!

In the manga itself you can see how long it'd take to read your current volume:

The stats are visually appealing

With cool per volume / series data:

My main complaints are:

• The stats are precomputed, it does not store your raw data. This means if you change your mind about something (like I don't want to count English letters, I don't want to count repeated things like aaaaaa, or I want to set my AFK timer to be lower) it's impossible to change.
• You have to use Mokuro'd manga, which is very hard to find and painful to convert if you don't have a powerful computer.

🏆MangaTan - Joint 1st

MangaTan was born out of anger.

Anger at Mokuro files being terrible to create.

Anger at current manga websites shoving 10 ads / second down your throat.

Hear it from the creator:

We can just drag and drop light novels into ttsu, hook into visual novels with ease, or load up anime with subtitles in ASB or Memento.

But manga? Manga has always been the exception.

The process often meant needing a high-end GPU just to run tools like Mokuro, and then waiting for it to finish

And don't get me started with those terrible websites that use the worst hosts in existence.

Who doesn't miss the old days of simply reading manga in bed? Before we were hardcore weebs, we didn't have to deal with our tenth ad on a limited 100kbit-speed-limited hoster while using Tachiyomi. But you can cast aside that

Mangatan aims to get rid of all the painpoints of Mokuro:

• You don't have to spend 20+ hours converting manga to mokuro files
• Or searching for Mokuro files across the web
• It works with over 1200+ sites, the second a new volume of manga is released you can read it 🥳

The setup requires some computer skills but once its done, it works alright.

Every time you load a page it will OCR it and let you look things up.

You can even crop images to send to Anki:

It's very lightweight once its running. All it does is OCR the manga and crop images for anki cards.

From the author themselves:

There's also a bunch of settings, for example you can use your own OCR server if you want:

I like setting the colour to purple and font colour to black, as it makes it look nicer to me:

There's no stats, but in this case it's a good thing. Mangatan is extremely lightweight.

It also works on Android devices.

GSM

You can also use GSM's OCR to read manga if you so wish.

Set up the OCR, and then open the overlay and you can create flashcards etc similar to how Mangatan does it.

GSM even has stats for manga:

But the downsides are that GSM isn't made for manga.

When it takes a screenshot, it can't crop the manga like Mokuro does (due to it being built for games / full screen things).

Look at this Anki card:

The image has black bars around it, whereas if it was cropped it would not.

If you already have a good GSM setup, it makes sense to use this. But if you want a really good manga setup, maybe this isn't so good.

It's also not as automatic as Mangatan, if you want nice stats you need to tell GSM you're reading something new.

Mangatan can only use Suwayomi whereas GSM can OCR any type of manga. But, Suwayomi has all the manga already so it's not that much of an improvement.

Also, GSM does not work on Android unlike Mokuro Reader and Mangatan.

Most people get into learning Japanese because of anime, so now let's talk about the best video players out there!

🏆Migaku

Despite being a paid for product, I believe Migaku offers the best service for watching videos.

Firstly let's look at this.

Migaku shows you an estimated comprehension score for the video you want to watch. It uses the frequency of the words and your known words to calculate this.

It's not as simple as "you know these words, you don't know these" – it uses an algorithm to work out the average frequency of words you do and don't know and uses that to calculate how hard a media is.

For example if the words you don't know are very high frequency, it will be a lower difficulty than a video with a bunch of words you don't know.

If the show doesn't have subtitles, you can also generate them using the top bar.

Migaku has about a million different presets for you to watch videos, or you can make your own:

As well as keyboard shortcuts so you don't even have to use a mouse:

If the UI is too cluttered you can just hide everything apart from this tab:

Migaku will highlight words in good sentences to mine with high frequency, and you can even tell it to include a lil single definition under the word to help you read the sentence:

Migaku works on Netflix and Disney+, but all of these screenshots use their local player. This is just a DVD I'm playing 😃

Its main downside is that it costs money, but I believe Migaku is easily the best video player out there in terms of features and ease of use.

But... It does cost money and do you really need those extra features? It's up to you.

ASB Player

ASB Player is the GOAT of free video players for Japanese.

It's offline.

It works with Netflix, YouTube etc.

It extracts subtitles from them.

You can mine from it just like Migaku.

There's really not much to it. It plays videos well, has great subtitle support and lets you mine from it.

Which is why it's so good and well loved, it does one thing and does it well.

However, compared to Migaku it is missing a few features some people may want:

• Ability to generate subtitles
• Highlighting words you should mine

But if you don't care for those features, ASB Player is great.

Yomine

Yomine is a relatively new player in the field, and not actually a video player but something that supports video players.

To use their words:

A Japanese vocabulary mining tool designed to help language learners extract and study words from subtitle files. It integrates with ASBPlayer and MPV for timestamp navigation, ranks terms by frequency, and supports Anki integration to filter out known words.

So it's kinda of like the Migaku "you should mine this word" feature, but for ASB Player and free.

It basically extracts all the words from a video, checks to see if you have them in Anki and sorts them by a frequency.

From this you can then click a button to mine that word.

Here are some interesting ways people use it, which may not be obvious:

• If you saw a word you want to mine, but you were too busy to mine it you can use Yomine to search your favourite anime etc to find the word and mine it later on.
• If you want to play a video game or visual novel, you could download a Let's Play of it and generate a comprehension score or pre-mine words you need to know.
  • This is different than downloading Anki decks from Jiten and friends, because it's specifically words you need to know.
  • Also you get to watch a Let's Play which is like double immersion points 😯
• Using GSM to generate a Long Play (basically a large mp4 recording of a game you're playing with a subtitles file), loading it into Yomine and mining all the words you didn't mine during that playthrough. Useful if you want to play now, mine later.

Now let's look at some of the best websites out there.

🏆Jiten

Jiten is a website that stores thousands of Japanese media and tells you a rough difficulty for them, among other things.

They support all sorts of media, not just visual novels or anime.

In Jiten you can upload a list of vocaburary you know (syncs with Anki and other tools):

Jiten can then rank how many words in the media you know, and tell you a personalised coverage score.

Something I like to do is find visual novels with >80% external rating (external rating == reviews on vndb, anilist etc) which I have >80% coverage for (meaning I will understand most of it).

Once you've found a piece of media you like hit "statistics" and see a cool graph.

For example, in this anime to understand 95% of it you just need to know the most frequency 1944 words that appear in it.

To understand 99%, you need to know an extra 3200ish.

Learning 1944 of the words in this anime seems great, but how do we actually learn them?

No worries, Jiten lets you download Anki decks with the exact freq order of that show. Learn the words you need to know for the media you want to watch.

If doing premade Anki decks isn't your thing, download the "occurrences" dictionary to get a frequency list you can use in Yomitan to tell you how often a word appears in the show.

That way I can mine high frequent words in shows I want to watch, without watching them yet. Almost like I'm prepping for it.

Jiten also has a dictionary you can use. Search a word to see its frequency, and all the media that word is in:

Speaking of dictionaries, you can download global frequency lists on Jiten too:

And finally, Jiten has a lot of data and every single week it is improving.

Yokubi - Morg Grammar Guide

If you have spent any amount of time in Japanese spaces online you may have heard of "Morg". Especially on Discord or Reddit.

He's a really nice guy who knows a lot about grammar and wants to help you learn Japanese.

This year he took it upon himself to improve the Sakubi grammar guide, and ended up writing Yokubi.

It's a really succinct grammar guide designed to get you immersing ASAP.

🏆LumieReader

Lumie Reader came out hitting this year with a single premise:

What if we made ttsu but good?

It's entirely offline, very fast and supports a lot of features.

It has some features over other readers like:

• Bookmarks
• Extensive statistics for reading
• Cloud sync (this is the biggest one)
• Social features, like sharing what you are reading

You can tell I don't read books can't ya...

This year has been amazing for Japanese learning tools.

If you want to give back to the community but don't want to code, many of these devs have donation links listed.

What's your favourite tool? Tell me in the comments :) <3