H2K - I made a browser extension to improve your katakana reading speed

If you’ve been learning Japanese for a while, you might notice that your katakana reading speed is slower than your hiragana reading speed, because you get way more practice with hiragana. To help fix this, I made a very simple extension that automatically converts all the hiragana in a webpage to katakana, so you’ll be able to improve your katakana reading speed. It also has a mode that converts katakana to hiragana, which will be useful for people who haven’t learnt katakana yet.

The extension (called H2K) has a bunch of configuration options - you can make it run only when the page loads, or also whenever the content updates, and you can set up overrides for specific sites. For example, by default you can have it convert only on initial load, but for YouTube you can enable conversion on content updates so that the video subtitles will get converted. It also has keyboard shortcuts, so you can have automatic conversion disabled, and convert whenever you want by pressing the keyboard shortcut.

If you use Firefox, you can install it from the Mozilla add-ons store.

If you use Chrome/Opera/Brave/Edge or any other Chromium-based browser, you need to install it from source (which is still pretty simple). Download the latest source code as a zip file from here, and extract it. Then, in your browser, enter chrome://extensions, and enable developer mode. Click the ‘Load unpacked’ button that shows up, select the extracted folder, and the extension will be installed.

Here’s a GIF demonstrating the installation process on Chrome. It also shows how to change the default keyboard shortcuts.

Here’s a screenshot of wikipedia after conversion.

Any feedback or criticism is highly appreciated, and feel free to ask me questions!

18 Likes

Cool!

2 Likes

I concur; very cool.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.