The toolbox

You’re watching something, a word goes by that you don’t know, and by the time you’ve typed it into a dictionary the scene is over. Sound familiar? That’s the whole problem these tools solve. They let you grab a word without breaking your flow. You set them up once, one evening, and then mostly forget they exist. There are two routes: the free setup (Anki, Yomitan and a couple of add-ons), which I used for years, or Migaku, a paid all-in-one that I use now. Both work. Pick one. Here’s the free setup as a checklist:

Anki

Anki is an SRS, a spaced repetition system. Think Quizlet on steroids. It shows you each card right before you’d forget it, like watering a plant at the right time instead of dumping a bucket on it once. It looks bare-bones when you first open it. That’s fine. You’ll only be in there ten or twenty minutes a day.

My cards have the Japanese sentence on the front with the word I’m learning highlighted, and the word, its reading, the definition and sometimes a screenshot and audio on the back. Reading the whole sentence on the front is the important part. The question on every card is “do I understand this Japanese?” and not “do I remember the English?” If you don’t want to design your own card, the free Lapis note type looks great, and it’s what I use for my game setup.

▢ Screenshot neededA mined sentence card in Anki: front (sentence) and back (word, reading, definition, screenshot)images/guide/anki-card-front.png

Yomitan

Yomitan is a browser extension. You hold Shift and hover over any Japanese word on any website, and it shows you the reading, the definition, the pitch accent and how common the word is, plus a button that turns the sentence into an Anki card. If I could only keep one tool from this whole guide, it’d be this one. Setup goes like this:

1. Install it from the Yomitan site and allow the recommended permissions (it needs to read pages and talk to Anki).
2. When it asks about dictionaries, grab the recommended ones. Make sure you get JMdict (the main dictionary), a frequency list (so you know if a word is worth learning), and a pitch accent dictionary.
3. In settings, I like to turn on nested popups, so you can hover a word inside a definition and get a popup in your popup.
4. Install AnkiConnect in Anki (Tools → Add-ons → Get add-ons → paste the code), restart Anki, then in Yomitan go to Anki → Enable integration. It should say “Connected.”
5. Under Configure Anki card format, pick your sentence mining deck and match the fields: {sentence} → Sentence, {expression} → Word, {glossary} → Definition. Use {reading} if you want the word in hiragana.

▢ Screenshot neededYomitan popup on a Japanese web page, with the green “add card” button and frequency numbers visibleimages/guide/yomitan-popup.png

Now you hover a word, hit the green +, and the card is in Anki. If you’ve already mined that word, the button turns purple so you don’t add it twice.

Later on, once you know around 3,000 words, you can add a Japanese–Japanese dictionary to Yomitan and put it first. Reading definitions in Japanese is immersion too, and chapter 10 talks about making that jump.

Japanese subtitles on anything

I pay for Crunchyroll, and it drives me nuts that there’s no way to turn on Japanese subtitles. Plenty of other sites don’t have them either. Here’s the free workaround:

1. Find the episode’s Japanese subtitles on Jimaku. It has pretty much every anime and a lot of TV.
2. Install asbplayer (browser extension).
3. Drag the subtitle file onto the video, on any site.
4. If it’s out of sync, pause on a line and use Ctrl + ← / → to snap the subtitles to the audio.

Since the subtitles are now just text on the page, Yomitan works on them too, so you can shift-hover and mine straight out of Hunter × Hunter on Crunchyroll.

▢ Screenshot neededasbplayer showing Japanese subtitles over an anime, with a Yomitan popup open on a wordimages/guide/asbplayer-crunchyroll.png

Japan-only Netflix

Netflix Japan has tons of shows with proper Japanese subtitles, plus some you can’t get anywhere else. 孤独のグルメ, my comfort show, is one of them. You need a VPN set to Japan to see that library. Heads up: using a VPN for this is against Netflix’s terms, so do it at your own risk.

The free VPN Gate works, and the phone setup is built into both iPhone and Android:

1. On the VPN Gate site, untick every protocol filter except L2TP/IPsec and refresh the list. Stick to servers with the Japanese flag.
2. Skip any server marked “academic use only.” Copy the bold hostname of one that looks good.
3. On your phone, go to Settings → VPN → add a VPN. Set the type to L2TP, paste the hostname as the server, and type vpn for the account, the password and the secret. Yes, all three are just “vpn.”
4. Turn it on and open Netflix. The Japanese shows appear, and your home feed gets more Japanese the more you watch.

As for safety, your connection is encrypted, and your Netflix login is still protected by HTTPS, but the volunteer running the server can see your IP and which sites you visit. VPN Gate is a research project from the University of Tsukuba, so it’s fine for immersion; I just wouldn’t do my banking through it. The bigger issue is that Netflix blocks a lot of these servers, so if one stops working, add another. For a computer, my friend SevenStop has a video.

Books, visual novels and games

For novels I use the ッツ Ebook Reader. It opens EPUB files right in your browser, so Yomitan works on them, and it tracks your reading speed. I read most of my light novels there, sometimes with the audiobook synced up so the text highlights as it’s read aloud. For games, Game Sentence Miner with OBS grabs the text off your screen, whether it’s a visual novel, Persona or Cyberpunk, and lets you mine it with a screenshot and the voice line attached (the full setup is in chapter 7). And for physical manga and books, Migaku’s phone app can take a photo of a page and make the text hoverable.

Migaku, the all-in-one

Everything above is free and works great, but it’s a handful of separate tools that took me some work to get running smoothly. Migaku puts it all in one place, with lookups on Netflix, YouTube and websites, one-click cards, its own SRS, and an estimate of how much of a video you’ll understand. I switched to it a while back to spend less time on setup. It’s paid (and they’ve sponsored my videos, so weigh that how you like), and if money’s tight the free setup gets you basically all the way there.

A few more I use all the time

jpdb.io shows you how hard an anime, manga, novel or game is, how many unique words it has, and how well it’s rated. I check it before I start almost anything. Immersion Kit lets you search a word or grammar point and watch clips of it from anime and dramas, which is perfect for “wait, how is this used?” And Toggl is just a timer, but I track my immersion hours with it, and watching that number climb is weirdly motivating. Okay. Tonight, install Anki and Yomitan. Tomorrow, mine your first card from something you like.