Hi everyone,
It’s been a while since I’ve been here, but I wanted to come back to my learning roots and tell you guys about a project I’ve been working on for a while now.
I started learning Japanese to be able to read books and manga in their original language, something WaniKani helped me with tremendously. But when it was time for me to start reading native material, I struggled a tremendous amount to get over the gap between learning material and native content. So I have had this idea for a while now, about the type of reading companion I wish I had, and also want to use going forward. That idea snowballed and ended up being something a lot larger than I had originally imagined.
The result is Hibiki Reader.
A few things that I think make it pretty great:
Smart automatic word highlighting. Words are automatically colour-coded by your comprehension. New words in blue, previously seen words in green, known words fade into the page. What’s cool is, Hibiki handles this automatically. After you’ve encountered a word three times without looking it up, Hibiki marks it as known and the highlight disappears. If you look it up again later, it goes back to being highlighted. You can also manually mark any word as ‘learning’, which gives it a yellow highlight, displays furigana next to it, and adds it to your SRS queue.
Our own graded stories. I really wanted more interesting reading material when I was starting out. The team at Hibiki are creative people at heart. While we love making the app itself, writing stories is something we have a deep passion for. So we write and publish stories aimed at young adults and above, each graded to a specific level. Hazuki, our head writer, is a native speaker and oversees the language, and I, Martin, proofread from a learner perspective to make sure the level of each story feels right. And while we use AI to help build the app, we use no AI for our original stories.
Bring your own books. ePUB import works for any novel, light novel, or graded reader. Full dictionary, highlighting, and furigana all work on your own imported material. You can also import your own dictionaries if you want to try monolingual reading or look up definitions in a language other than English.
Learning-aware furigana. Furigana where you need it. It only shows up on words you’re still learning, and quietly disappears once a word is known. If you want you can display it for all words as well.
Quickly review your reading. When I was learning to read Japanese I wanted to keep reading, that’s where the enjoyment is and where the learning happens. So after each reading session, instead of leaving your book to review flashcards, Hibiki will summarise what you have read and learned, and offer a quick flashcard review of the words you looked up during that session. Read, review, read, repeat. The Hibiki way!
SRS flashcards, built-in. There is a full spaced repetition flashcard system built into Hibiki Reader, which can be turned on or off depending on how you prefer to study. Results from your reviews trickle down into the smart highlighting. Words learned through flashcards are reflected the next time you open your book.
Our own Hibiki notes. Some things a dictionary can’t really explain. When you spot a pink marker on a phrase or word, that’s a Hibiki note from us: a cultural reference, an idiom, a grammar point, or just something we found fascinating about the language. Notes are tied to the phrase, not the page, so they follow you across every story and every book. Hopefully this can create some nice little surprises. Like finding notes in the margins of an old book in a library.
A leveling system. We have 60 levels at Hibiki (much like WaniKani). To advance, you need to pass both a comprehension gate (vocab + grammar + kanji coverage) and a reading volume gate. Common language, grammar and kanji take you through the early levels, and the more you read and the more advanced language you encounter, the higher the level you can attain. Your reading comprehension is, of course, subjective. But we believe we have found a way to make that growth feel real and earned.
Clean and stress-free. “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” This is really what we tried to strive for with Hibiki. A reader that stays out of your way, removing as many hurdles as possible so you can just sit and read while still gaining a lot of the amazing benefits technology can offer. Just out of sight.
Quick note on the team
We are a small but mighty team currently making Hibiki Reader — just two of us, me (Martin) and my partner and head writer Hazuki, who is a native speaker. (Our dog Shark is a crucial part of the team, but offers help in ways other than programming or writing.) 
This is a passion project. We really are making the reading app we want to use every day, so we would love to hear what you think!
When will it be ready to test?
Hibiki Reader is currently in closed beta with a small group of early adopters. We are ironing out bugs and growing our library of stories to make sure we open on the best possible foot.
Once we open we will have a free tier for anyone who wants to explore the app, and a paid Pro plan with everything unlocked. Full release is planned for early August, alongside our iOS app, with Android following shortly after.
If any of this sounds exciting to you, head over to our website and sign up to our newsletter. Once we are ready to expand the beta we will send out the first batch of early access codes there!
I’ll keep you posted here as we get closer to launch. 
Happy reading!
— The Hibiki Reader Team 
