Learn Japanese: JLPT & Manga

Kotonoha

Contains adsIn-app purchases

About this app

Kotonoha is two things in one app: a full JLPT course from N5 to N1, and a reader for the Japanese books and manga you already have. Study a word in the morning and meet it again that evening, in something you actually wanted to read.

STUDY — N5 TO N1
• Vocabulary, kanji and grammar, each with its own review schedule. A word comes back to you just before you would have forgotten it.
• Practise kanji stroke order by hand. The brush follows how fast you draw, and every character has a reference page of its own.
• See what each kanji is built from, so you learn the parts instead of memorising thousands of separate shapes.
• Grammar grouped by what each point does, not by textbook order, with drills for the pairs learners mix up.
• Example sentences with furigana — the reading of a kanji, printed in kana above it.
• Tap any kana in the chart to hear it. To hear spoken vocabulary, download a voice pack inside the app. They are large, 120 to 160 MB, so use Wi-Fi.

DICTIONARY
• Tap any word, anywhere in the app, to see what it means.
• A conjugated word is traced back to its dictionary form for you.
• Optional extra dictionaries, JMdict and KANJIDIC2, add wider coverage.

READ WHAT YOU ALREADY OWN
• Import your own books and manga: EPUB, PDF, CBZ, CBR and 7z.
• In manga, Kotonoha reads the printed text inside speech bubbles, so you can tap a word in the artwork itself. Clean print works best; handwritten or heavily styled lettering may not be read. The model downloads once and then runs on your phone. Your pages are never uploaded.
• Kotonoha comes with no books and no manga. The files are yours.

WORKS OFFLINE
No account and no sign-up. Your vocabulary, kanji, grammar and review schedule stay on your device. A connection is needed only for the optional extras: dictionaries, voice packs, the manga model and backup.

YOUR PROGRESS
Streaks, XP, a character that grows as you study, and scenes that change around you. You can back your progress up to your own Google Drive, in a private folder that cannot see your other files. There is no Kotonoha account, and no server of ours holds your data.

BEFORE YOU INSTALL
The download is about 180 MB. When you open the app for the first time, it unpacks its study database, so give it a few minutes and keep about 1 GB free. Voice packs and extra dictionaries need more.

FREE, WITH TWO OPTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS
Kotonoha is free, and nothing in it is closed off to you. New study material unlocks with leaves, the app's own tokens: you get some each day just for opening the app, and you can collect more by choosing to watch a short video. There are no banner ads, and never an ad inside the reader.
If you would rather not collect leaves, two subscriptions remove the cost. Plus opens vocabulary, kanji and grammar up to N3 and gives you a daily reading allowance. Unlimited opens every level, with unlimited reading. Both renew automatically, are billed monthly or yearly at your country's price, and can be cancelled at any time in Google Play.

ARABIC AND ENGLISH
The whole interface is Arabic, right to left, with Arabic word meanings and Arabic translations of the example sentences — not only Arabic menus. English is supported just as fully. A few advanced grammar notes are still in English.

What’s new

Watching an ad now earns twenty leaves instead of five, and a new account is welcomed with a hundred rather than twenty. Books and manga are handled better too: a file whose pages carry real text simply opens as a book, and only a file made entirely of pictures asks whether to read its words with the engine trained on books or on manga. You can change that answer later in Settings, where any title can also be moved between the two readers. Restored and re-imported books keep their place.