I’m building Furioke, a small web app for reading Japanese song lyrics with furigana, romaji, and translation.
Right now, it is very simple. It is not a full study app yet — it mainly focuses on making Japanese lyrics easier to read and understand.
Current features:
display Japanese lyrics with furigana and romaji
show translation alongside the lyrics
provide a cleaner reading view for songs
I’m still early in the project, and I’m thinking about adding more learning-focused features later, such as line replay, vocabulary notes, grammar explanations, or personal annotations.
For now, I’d love feedback on the basic idea and reading experience:
Would furigana + translation for songs be useful to you?
Is the UI comfortable for reading Japanese lyrics?
What would you expect from a Japanese lyrics viewer?
What features would make this more useful for learners in the future?
I’m mainly looking for honest feedback from Japanese learners. If this belongs in a different category or thread, please let me know and I’m happy to adjust.
I love this idea!!! As someone who got into japanese learning primarily because of music, I’d love to see this implemented. I like the UI setup, the main thing I would want added is the ability to hover over specific words or grammar particles and see the definition of that part. Sentence translations are useful but can be difficult for a learner to identify what part of the original sentence corresponds to each part of the translation.
As an avid J-pop/rock fan, I have wanted something like this for a while! Spotify only translates, and doesn’t have furigana. This is awesome. Can’t access it right now, but I’ll check it out later and leave my feedback here (if I can remember to, as I am very forgetful )
@pengyuc I tried to use it today (whoever liked this post gave me a reminder haha) and I couldn’t get it to sync to my spotify for some reason. But the UI looks very sleek! It’s easy to navigate too.
Ah sorry Spotify didn’t sync properly — that part has still been a little annoying to get right. Do you remember where it got stuck? Like connecting Spotify, finding the song, or the lyrics not lining up?
Also thank you for saying that about the UI, that made me really happy. I’m working on the iOS app now too, so hopefully that version feels a lot smoother.
Note: I used Safari on an iPhone 16. I’m going to test it later on Chrome with my Windows PC too.
It had me approve the connection of my Spotify account, and then I put on a song, tried refreshing a few times (that may have broke the connection, but I’m unsure), but it wouldn’t sense a song being played or show lyrics. I tried the search feature, but that wasn’t working either. It seems like the Spotify API is a bit complicated, so I wish you luck in trying to get that to work.
Also, today I tried using the YouTube music option, and I had to try the search feature a few times, but then it worked. I played with it briefly.
Again, the UI is super clean and I find the lyrics and furigana easy to read with the layout you chose. I haven’t tried the flash card feature yet, but I’m going to later. It looks pretty cool at a glance. One thing I can’t figure out is how to go back to a line. In Spotify, I can just click the line and it will go back to its timestamp in the audio. In Furioke, if I click a word in the line, it prompts me to create a flash card. One feature that would be cool to add is turning a translation off or on (not sure if you’ve already added that or said you were going to ).
Overall, it’s an amazing web app, even in these early stages of development. I’ll probably continue using it, even now.
Do you happen to have Spotify Premium? I suspect that might be part of the issue, especially on mobile Safari. Spotify’s API has been a bit tricky, but I’ll keep working on making it more reliable.
That’s also a great point about jumping back to a lyric line. I’ve added a way to differentiate between saving a word and jumping/replaying a line, but if that isn’t obvious from the UI, please let me know! I might need to make it clearer.
For translation on/off, it’s currently in the top-right dots menu, but I agree that it should probably be easier to find.
Since you’re on iPhone, you can also try the iOS beta here (hopefully Spotify doesn’t have an issue this time):
Yes, I have Spotify Premium through a family plan. I figured out the double click/tap line skipping a little later, but yeah, I don’t think it’s very obvious with the UI. Maybe you could add a dot or number or something beside the line that when clicked on would jump to that line so it would differentiate from clicking on a word for the flash card/furigana feature. And I figured out the translate feature.
I also had trouble with Spotify (also Spotify premium). Thought the problem was that I was on the web version (I have an Android) so I gave up. I’ll give it a try later with yt music.
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