NOTE: As of 2023-07, itazuraneko.neocities.org is down permanently. Make sure to update any of your bookmarks to the mirror https://djtguide.github.io

THE ABSOLUTE ESSENTIALS

These are resources you will probably need. Well, it’s technically possible to go without them, people did learn Japanese before computers existed after all! But not using them (save for some future or current replacement for them) would be unnecessarily troublesome.

• Anki - A spaced-repetition flashcard program. This is the way to memorize a large amount of content (all the med school students know all about this too!), and of course extremely useful for memorizing vocab, and well, just about everything. Many learners see this as the central node in the “Japanese learning software stack”, since the community has developed a large number of amazing programs, discussed below, that interact with it to streamline the process.
  • Install (For Android, look up AnkiDroid in F-droid or Play store)
  • Read the Manual
  • You need flashcard decks for anki of course. You can use premade decks (see the relevant section) or create cards using a card template, usually by mining words from your immersion
• Yomitan - A pop-up dictionary browser extension which can show you definitions and other information about words just by hovering over them while holding shift. It can also integrate with Anki to create cards from the sentences you come across. You will be using this constantly for reading. Note: This was formerly Yomichan. Yomichan is no longer maintained; Yomitan is the actively developed fork.
  • Install for Firefox
  • Install for chromium-based
  • How to set it up, install the needed dictionaries, etc (from TheMoeWay)
  • Recommended dictionaries and setup listed below
• A text extraction method for content outside the browser (see relevant section)
• A general purpose guide
• A grammar guide

Resources

Best ones (subjective to some extent) are bolded

Guides

I strongly recommend reading both of these guides, as well as the pages they link to, or at least having familiarity with what they discuss. A lot of the setup of the tools listed here is discussed in them. They are amazing resources.

• TheMoeWay https://learnjapanese.moe/
• Tatsumoto https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/table-of-contents
• djtguide (formerly Itazuraneko) https://djtguide.github.io/

BOTH OF THESE HAVE EXTENSIVE RESOURCES LISTS. Think of what you’re reading now as only an abbreviated version of them, intended to only showcase the best and most important stuff.

Grammar

• Tae Kim
• Japanese with Cure Dolly
• Sakubi

Anki resources

Premade decks

• Kana - if you are a beginner, you’ll need to learn the kana first: by writing or by recognition, depending on your preference
• Kaishi (Core 1.5k) - “a modern, modular Japanese Anki deck made for beginners who want to learn basic vocabulary.” - a modern attempt by TheMoeWay to build a high-quality vocabulary deck for beginners, replacing Core 2.3k. This deck is strongly recommended. This is a basic vocabulary deck with the most common words you’ll see in JP media (with katakana loanwords and other redundant stuff stripped out). This is a good way to begin studying vocabulary as the goal is to focus on loading up on a large quantity of relevant vocab that way your immersion can be as comprehensible as possible.
  • Read more and download: https://github.com/donkuri/Kaishi
• Core 2.3K VN Order deck - “High Quality Cards for the Most Common ~1,970 Words from Visual Novels, Light Novels, Newspapers, Magazines, Blogs, Internet Forums and more.” This was the recommendation prior to Kaishi.
  • https://anacreondjt.gitlab.io/docs/coredeck/
• The Tango decks (also known as the ankidrone starter pack) - essential vocab and grammar, roughly grouped by JLPT level. This is not recommended except for specifically studying for the JLPT tests. It has a large amount of highly unnatural, textbook-ish sentences, obvious katakana loanwords, and rare vocabulary only relevant for textbook-style self introductions or travel. That said, it is included for posterity due to being formelry popular, and you may still find this useful as it focuses on entire sentences rather than targeted words. Focus on sentence mining or grab the Core 6k.
  • Read more and download: https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/basic-vocabulary#anki-deck
  • Alternate download from TMW (it’s probably the same thing): https://learnjapanese.moe/resources/#vocabulary

Anki card templates

You will need these to do sentence mining or create your own anki cards

• Explanation of the types of notes - read this to have an understanding of the terminology which will be used and the advantages and disadvantages of each type so you can make a decision: https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/discussing-various-card-templates

Both of the following can be configured to use any of the note types described in the article above.

• jp-mining-note - This is a relatively recent one and has quickly become a favorite of TheMoeWay community. It has a lot of features and is extremely well documented. As the name implies, it is a highly versatile template for sentence mined cards
  • Setup tutorial, very easy to follow: https://aquafina-water-bottle.github.io/jp-mining-note/
  • NOTE: for the time being, follow this link instead (aquafina hasn’t been online to merge some critical bugfixes): https://arbyste.github.io/jp-mining-note/
• Tatsumoto’s note types - A bit simpler template. You may wish to convert other premade decks (like the Core 2.3k) to one of these note types. https://github.com/Ajatt-Tools/AnkiNoteTypes

Anki addons

• Just read Tatsumoto’s explanation and list, it’s great: https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/useful-anki-add-ons-for-japanese. In particular you’ll want the AJT Japanese addon.

Yomichan setup

When you first install Yomichan, you’ll need some dictionaries. Ignore the ones on the Yomichan website, they’re outdated. Instead, get the JMDict from here and the rest of them from Shoui’s collection or Marv’s collection. Download the desired files and import in the Yomichan settings (don’t extract the zip)

Recommended dictionaries

At a minimum, you’ll want the following:

• JMDict, JMnedict, and KANJIDIC - The standard Japanese-English dictionary. This is updated very frequently, so be sure to get a new version from https://github.com/themoeway/jmdict-yomitan every few months. Get JMdict_english.zip
  • Alternatively, Jitendex - This is also based on the JMdict. It has prettier formatting, but I find it much more cluttery and don’t prefer it. It’s a matter of personal preference. https://jitendex.org/
• デジタル大辞泉 - One of the largest monolingual dictionaries (with image data stripped out). Get it from Shoui’s collection
• PixivLight - A community created encyclopedia/dictionary combo. It has entries for internet slang that aren’t found in normal dictionaries, as well as names of media, vtubers, doujin circles, etc. Compiled by Marv from TMW. Get it from Marv’s repo.
• JPDB Frequency and CC100 Frequency - Importing at least one frequency dictionary is strongly recommended as it helps Yomichan sort terms and helps you determine how common a word is. JPDB is based on anime, VNs, light novels, etc, and CC100 is based on a large corpus of websites. Get them from Marv’s repo
• Kanjidic - Click on kanji to get info about it. Download it from the same repo as the JMDict
• JPDB Kanji - Click on a kanji to get a list of common words using it and a list of radicals to help you memorize it. Get it from Marv’s Repo.

More monolingual dicts to try out:

• 大辞林　第四版
• 新明解国語辞典　第八版
• 三省堂国語辞典　第七版
• 旺文社国語辞典 第十一版 画像無し

Word audio

The default audio sources for Yomichan are not very good. Some seem incorrect or may not even be by native speakers. You can download a large collection of word audio and use local-audio-yomichan anki addon to serve it to yomichan.

JP subtitles for anime

• kitsunekko - download jp subtitles for anime. website goes down a lot unfortunately. https://kitsunekko.net/dirlist.php?dir=subtitles%2Fjapanese%2F

Text extraction

This is how you get text from your anime, visual novel, manga, etc into something you can Yomichan and interact with (including possibly adding to anki)

• A larger list of methods/resources, along with instructions on setting up each program with jp-mining-note: https://aquafina-water-bottle.github.io/jp-mining-note/setupeverythingelse/

Simple videos (anime, etc)

• mpvacious A plugin for the video player mpv. Automatically copy subtitle text to the clipboard, which can be automatically pasted into yomichan’s search page. Use keyboard shortcuts to send image and audio from the video into the most recently created anki card.
  • Installation and usage
  • Setup with tatsumoto’s cards
  • Setup with jp-mining-note
• asbplayer - A browser-based application. Simpler to use but less flexible and limited to video formats supported by browser.
  • setup

Visual Novels

For visual novels, you use Textractor which extracts text lines from the running program and sends it to the browser for use with Yomichan.

• Textractor with exSTATic
  • Setup Textractor
    • Ignore the information about texthookers here; it’s outdated, but the info about Textractor is good: https://learnjapanese.moe/vn/
  • Setup exstatic

Manga

• mokuro
  • A bit of a pain to setup, but great program. It’s like asbplayer but for manga: https://github.com/kha-white/mokuro
  • Details: https://mokuro.moe/
  • A collection of pre-processed manga: https://mokuro.moe/manga/