Toku Japanese & Chinese Reader

Toku Reader

In-app purchases

About this app

Toku Reader turns real Japanese and Chinese into something you can actually read. Open a podcast, a news article, a novel, a web page, a PDF, an EPUB, or your own audio file — then tap any word you don't know. The reading and the meaning appear straight away, without leaving the page and without stopping the audio. Japanese words get furigana and pitch accent. Chinese words get pinyin with the real tone changes applied, in Simplified or Traditional characters, whichever you prefer.

Everything happens on your phone. The Japanese and Chinese dictionaries ship inside the app, so tapping a word in a Japanese podcast or a Chinese news article works on a plane, on the underground, and in a country with no signal. You never have to create an account, and nothing you read is ever uploaded. That is the difference between Toku Reader and every other Japanese reading app or Chinese reading app that needs you to sign in first.

READ ANYTHING
• Paste or share text from any app
• Browse real Japanese and Chinese websites with the readings added in place
• Photograph a sign, a menu, or a page and read it
• Import your own text files and PDFs

LISTEN AND READ ALONG
• 100+ Japanese and Chinese podcasts, built in
• When a show publishes no transcript, your phone writes one — it takes a few minutes and uses no data
• Follow the transcript line by line as it plays, and tap any word without losing your place
• Shadow practice: repeat a sentence, slow it down, loop it, record yourself
• Watch your own videos, or paste a YouTube link, and read along with the captions

A REAL DICTIONARY
• Japanese and Chinese, in one search
• Look up in English too, when you know the meaning but not the word
• Draw a character you can't type — handwriting recognition works offline
• Simplified and Traditional Chinese, whichever you prefer

REMEMBER WHAT YOU LOOKED UP
• Save a word with one tap and it enters spaced review
• Cards come back exactly when you're about to forget them
• Every word keeps the sentence you found it in
• Import an Anki deck you already have

NO ACCOUNT, AND IT WORKS ON A PLANE
The dictionaries are inside the app. So is the reading engine, the speech recognition, and the character recognition. There is no account and no sign-up. Reading, listening, tapping a word, saving it and reviewing it all happen on your phone, and none of it is sent anywhere.

ASK WHY — OPTIONAL, AND OFF UNTIL YOU TURN IT ON
Some sentences stay confusing even when you know every word in them. Switch on AI explanations and you can ask why a word means what it does here, or what a sentence is actually doing. That one sentence is sent away to be explained — nothing else is, and the app shows you exactly what it sends before the first time. Leave the switch off and none of it happens.

Free to use, with 15 word lookups a day and 5 AI explanations a month. Reading, listening and review are never limited.

Japanese and Chinese are supported side by side — the app works out which one you're reading and adapts.

What’s new

If Toku's menus are in Chinese, the last English scraps are gone: grammar tags on the word card, storage messages and sizes now read in Chinese.