Manabi Reader - learn Japanese by reading on iOS/maCOS https://reader.manabi.io

I quit my job a couple years back to work on this app full-time, as well as its companion flashcard app, Manabi Flashcards. The goal is to help you learn through immersion.

What's special about it? Manabi Reader became popular as an Japanese-focused alternative to services like LingQ in that it locally tracks and analyzes all the words and kanji you read and study. It shows you which words are new and which you're currently learning via flashcards, so you can easily find content that suits your level and see what flashcards to prioritize adding. It also passively accumulates an on-device (and in your personal iCloud) corpus of example sentences from your reading.

I had built this part-time while working over many years (starting with flashcards and then the reader app) but going full-time gave me the time to do a full rewrite: SwiftUI, native iOS + macOS, and an offline-first architecture that syncs with iCloud and my server in the background.

Although it has a companion SRS algorithm (SM-2) flashcard app, it's also excellent for mining Anki cards. This works with AnkiMobile on iOS and AnkiConnect on desktop.

You can use it like a web browser for the web, or subscribe to RSS feeds. It comes with a bunch of curated content by level. Recently I added EPUB support, pitch accents, and note-taking with todos.

I'm now almost done adding a manga mode via Mokuro.

Next I plan on adding more media types (video, YouTube, PDFs), AI functionality (grammar explanations, document Q&A, etc), Yomitan/Yomichan dictionaries for bilingual/monolingual EPWING and Wiktionary support, and more service integrations such as 2-way sync for WaniKani, JPDB, and existing Anki decks. I've begun work on these items and hope to share more soon.

I'd also like to make this app much more beginner-friendly so that people with zero Japanese knowledge can start learning. Currently it assumes you can read kana at least.

Previous discussion [2023]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674259