Oops, I accidentally learned Japanese.

A Chrome extension that teaches you Japanese out of the pages you were going to read anyway. Words you are ready for get swapped into the English around them. Nothing asks for your evening.

The ねこ sat by the まど and watched the あめ. Rest the pointer on a word until it turns gold and it counts as read. Click it if you would rather just be told.
Download Source

Free. Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc and other Chromium browsers, version 114 or newer.

How it works

Every spaced repetition app has the same problem. Reviews are a chore you schedule, so the app competes with the rest of your life, and it loses.

This one has no reviews. It reads what you do with a word sitting in a page you already chose to read. Hold one until the glow fills and you have said you read it. Click it and you have said you could not. Neither costs you anything.

It gets more Japanese, never harder

Reading research puts unaided comprehension at about 98% of the words being ones you know. So the words you cannot read yet are capped at two in a hundred, and the words you can read are not capped at all. The hard share stays where it is for years. The Japanese share grows behind it.

The reading fades one character at a time

Furigana is no use if you cannot read kana. So each sound is spelled in kana once you can read it, and in letters until then: neko, then ねko, then ねこ, then nothing.

It runs on your machine

Substitution is a dictionary lookup and it happens in your browser. Two things are optional, off by default, and use your own API key: asking a model about a word, and translating a whole sentence with DeepL.

Accounts

Optional. Everything works without one. An account copies your progress to your other browsers, and nothing else. You can delete it, and everything in it, from the extension's own settings.