Oops, I accidentally learned Japanese.

A Chrome extension that swaps Japanese into the English you were going to read anyway. There is some in this sentence. Rest your pointer on 言葉ことば for half a second and watch what happens.

0 words read on this page

That is the whole mechanic

Hold a word until it turns gold and you have said you read it. Click one and you have said you could not, which is just as useful to know. Every 言葉ことば on this page works, so try both.

There is no review session. No cards, no queue, nothing at nine in the evening. The grading falls out of the reading, which is why it does not compete with the rest of your 時間じかん.

It gets more Japanese, never harder

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

Which is why this paragraph has more in it. A ねこ sat by the まど and watched the あめ. You have met three of these already, so they cost you nothing to read, and the page can afford to hand you another.

The reading fades one character at a time

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

The same goes for the 世界せかい of kanji. A character does not have a reading, it has a reading here, and which one depends on the word it is sitting in.

It runs on your machine

Swapping a word is a dictionary lookup and it happens in your browser. No page you visit is sent anywhere. Two things are optional, off by default, and use your own key: asking a model about a word, and translating a whole sentence with DeepL.

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

Get it

Download the latest release Source

Not on the Chrome Web Store yet, so it installs as an unpacked extension, which takes about a minute. The release has the instructions in it.

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

That is every Japanese word on this page, read. All 7 of them, in about four seconds, without once being asked to sit down and study.