Hi everyone!
I’m really excited to share this project I’ve been working on for a while now. It’s called YomiBito, a Japanese e-reader designed to make reading native material less intimidating/difficult while helping you to develop strong reading skills. It’s currently in beta, so I’d really appreciate anyone willing to give it a try and share their feedback!
Some of the features include:
- EPUB, TXT, PDF, DOCX and web novel (syosetu and kakuyomu) support (with manga support coming soon!).
- Automatically generated, per chapter - vocabulary and grammar decks filtered against your existing knowledge, so you only study what you need.
- Built-in FSRS flashcards
- AI-powered popup dictionary with one-click flashcard creation
- Full-sentence DeepL translations
- Adaptive furigana based on what you already know
- Dynamic word and kanji confidence tracking that adapts to your progress and personalizes your reading experience
- Built-in text-to-speech
- Subtitle generator for videos
If you’re interested in the story behind the project, I recently wrote a short blog post about why I decided to build YomiBito:
Why I Built YomiBito
I’m also always looking for feedback, feature ideas, or just to chat with other Japanese learners. If you’d like to join the community, you’re more than welcome to stop by our Discord!
Yomibito Discord
I’d love to hear what you think! If you have any questions, suggestions, or ideas for features you’d find useful while reading Japanese, please let me know.
Thanks for reading!
I’ve made a note to check this later - I’m a bit overwhelmed at the moment with online learning apps and sites, and don’t want to overload myself any more than necessary.
But I did want to mention one thing, perhaps slightly off-topic.
I’m currently visiting Japan, and will be here for the next two months.
One thing that I’ve been doing is saving up Japanese writing that I’ve come across through my daily activities, whether that be packaging or instruction manuals for items that I’ve bought (including things as pedestrian as potato chip bags), or signs that I’ve seen “in the wild” and photographed for later study (including storefronts and displays in supermarkets), and travel brochures.
That’s somewhat different from reading light novels and manga.
I haven’t yet gotten my hands around how I will organize and handle that material, but it’s something that’s currently on my mind.
Not sure whether that may also be an interest of yours, just dropping this info here in case it might resonate.
Thanks for the reply, Please do check it out!
In term of the in the wild photo’s, usually I used like the camera in google translate to do that. But i’m sure I recall there being an app that auto saved them If i can find it again I will update you. I even had an app that you could use to scan a product’s barcode and it would help you by explaining the product.
Those sound useful (and I remember seeing a barcode lookup app), but part of my goal is to learn the kanji and vocab on the packaging and instructions, and not just to translate it.
Hey all,
Just letting everyone know some of the new updates with YomiBito:
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Yomibito now highlights places/peoples names and provides furigana specifically for them. So if your like me and struggled with that early on this helps!
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We made some improvements on how we process sentences. So for e.g. Yomitan doesn’t recognize 一線を画す as one unit (try it yourself) so you would never guess what it actually means. But we do! 一線を画す - 1. to draw a line (between); to make a distinction (between); to distinguish (between).
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Hover mode has been added for Kanji animations:
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Header + Footer bar in reading pane blocking text has been fixed.
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Keyboard support implemented for scroll up/down and left/right for prev/next chapter.
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Gesture support added for swipe right/left for prev/next chapter as well. (Still calibrating but seemed to work fine so far)
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Grammar cards now have furigana in both the card front as well as in the example sentences as the focus for grammar cards is grammar not vocab.
