🇯🇵 Japanese for advanced learners: the best resources

Free on desktop, Android and web; the iOS app is a one-off paid purchase that funds the project. The interface is dated and the options are overwhelming at first, but nothing beats it for retaining vocabulary over years. Most effective when you stop grinding premade decks and start mining sentences from things you actually read or watch.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

Hundreds of lessons that go far deeper than any commercial course, including Classical Japanese, dialects and rare constructions, all free. This is where you go when you hit a grammar point nothing else explains properly. Absolutely not a beginner's first course — the writing is academic and the sheer volume is discouraging if you start at lesson one.

Built on the free JMdict/KANJIDIC data, it handles wildcard searches, deconjugates verbs, draws kanji by radical or handwriting, and tags words by JLPT level and commonness. Free with no account required. The example sentences come from Tatoeba and vary in quality, and for nuance between near-synonyms a monolingual dictionary will serve you better once you can read one.

Its killer feature is per-media word lists: look up a specific show or novel, see how many words it uses and what percentage you already know, then pre-study that deck before you start. The built-in SRS is fast and keyboard-driven. It is free but rough around the edges — sparse documentation, an opinionated review algorithm, and a small one-person-project feel — and it assumes you have already got past the beginner stage.

Thousands of public-domain books recorded by volunteers, downloadable as MP3 or M4B with no account. Pairing a LibriVox recording with the matching free Project Gutenberg text gives you a full audiobook-plus-ebook study set for nothing. Two caveats: recordings are volunteer-quality and vary a lot reader to reader, and everything is out of copyright, so the language is often a century old — great for literature, poor for modern slang.

Runs OCR over manga pages and produces an HTML reader where the text is real selectable text overlaid on the artwork, which means Yomitan works on it. That turns manga from a hard-to-look-things-up format into one of the most accessible ways to read Japanese. Free and open source, but it is a command-line Python tool that you point at files you already own, so expect some setup and no content included.

Teppei talks about everyday nothing-in-particular in slow, simplified Japanese for three to five minutes an episode, with well over a thousand episodes across separate beginner, intermediate and Z (advanced) feeds. The short format makes daily listening genuinely sustainable. Free on all podcast apps. No transcripts on the free feeds and no structure — the value is volume and consistency, not instruction.

Ken interviews people on the street and explains slang and onomatopoeia, all in Japanese with dual Japanese/English subtitles, so you get unscripted native speech with a safety net. Excellent for the stage where structured lessons are too slow but raw TV is still too fast. Free. There is no curriculum here — it is listening practice, not a course.

The default place to ask 'is X app worth it' or 'what should I do at B1' and get answers from people who have actually done it, plus per-language subreddits (r/Spanish, r/LearnJapanese, r/French) with far better resource lists. The wiki and FAQ head off most beginner questions. Expect strong ideological camps — comprehensible-input purists versus textbook people — so read a few threads before taking any single answer as settled.

Covers kana plus 3,500 kanji including all jōyō and jinmeiyō characters, checking your stroke order as you draw. It can sync its order to WaniKani, RTK or JLPT levels so it slots into whatever you already use. Currently free on iOS and Android (the developer has said early users keep the full version free permanently). Handwriting is a real time cost, so it only makes sense if producing kanji by hand actually matters to you.

Works entirely offline, shows conjugation tables and example sentences, supports handwriting input, and can export selected words straight to Anki — which makes it the practical companion to a paper textbook or a book you are reading on the train. Completely free with no ads. Android and Windows only; iOS users should use Shirabe Jisho instead.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

Free blog and grammar reference from the team behind WaniKani, covering everything from particle nuance to honest reviews of other learning resources. Its resource-review database is genuinely useful when you are deciding what to buy. It is reference reading rather than a curriculum, so it works best alongside a structured course.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

The maintained successor to Yomichan, which was discontinued in 2023 — Yomitan is the version to install now, and it is actively developed, free and open source (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Android via Kiwi-style browsers). Hover any word to get readings, definitions, pitch accent and audio, then send the whole sentence to Anki as a mining card. Setup is fiddly: you must download and import dictionary files yourself, and the Anki integration needs the AnkiConnect add-on.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

A second strong comprehensible-input channel, running since 2021, covering complete beginner through advanced with a wider range of formats than most — folktales, vlogs, quizzes, let's-plays. The website is a free index that lets you filter by level, topic and style, read transcripts and download audio. Content is free; there is no structured curriculum, so you pick your own path through it.

Modern assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will roleplay a scenario at your level, correct your writing with explanations, generate graded reading, and hold voice conversations — endlessly patient and available at 2am, which no tutor is. Free tiers are enough for text practice; voice modes generally need a subscription. The caveats are real: models are noticeably weaker and more error-prone in lower-resource languages, they tend to produce bland textbook register rather than how people actually speak, and they will not correct you unless you explicitly ask them to.

Fills the gap Anki and WaniKani leave: it drills grammar in cloze sentences and, for every point, links to the relevant page in Tae Kim, Genki, Imabi and others so you can read a real explanation before reviewing. There is a permanent free tier plus a 30-day full trial; Premium is $5/month or $150 lifetime, which is cheap for what it covers. It assumes you already have kana and some vocabulary, and it is a review tool rather than a first-time teacher.

Built on Tatoeba sentences, it drills words in context by frequency band across 50+ languages and 170+ language pairings, with a genuinely generous free tier. It explicitly starts where beginner apps end, so it is the natural 'what now?' answer for someone who finished a Duolingo tree. Sentences are crowd-sourced and occasionally awkward or oddly specific, and it teaches nothing about grammar explicitly.

The free YouTube channel is mostly comedy skits about Japanese life, but Dogen's paid phonetics series is the most systematic treatment of pitch accent and pronunciation available in English, and pitch accent is the thing almost every self-taught learner ignores until it is a hard habit to fix. The full course lives on Patreon (roughly $10/month) rather than YouTube. Only worth it once your grammar and vocabulary are solid enough that accent is your bottleneck.

A franchise of local producers filming unscripted street interviews, each episode subtitled in the target language and English, which is the closest free thing to hearing how people genuinely speak. All YouTube episodes are free; membership adds transcripts, vocabulary lists and exercises. Real-speed unscripted speech is hard early on — start with the slower 'Super Easy' episodes if you are below B1.

Around 6 million words recorded by native speakers across 400+ languages, usually with several accents per word so you can hear regional variation. Free to search on the site; the paid tiers are aimed at API users and bulk audio downloads. Indispensable for names, place names and anything a TTS voice would mangle — many learners wire it directly into Anki for card audio.

Built-in correction tools let partners fix your messages inline, and the social 'moments' feed gets you corrections from strangers without arranging a call. Free for the core exchange; VIP adds more translations and simultaneous target languages. The persistent caveat is that a fair share of users treat it as a dating app, and exchange partners are unreliable — it works best once you already have some output to correct.

Noriko speaks clearly but at close to natural pace about substantive topics — working culture, living abroad, social change — which makes it a real step up from beginner slow-Japanese podcasts. The podcast itself is free; transcripts, vocabulary lists and a learner community sit behind a paid membership. Too fast for beginners; ideal for the B1 plateau.

Thousands of lessons built around a short native dialogue plus line-by-line breakdown, with PDF transcripts, vocabulary lists and cultural notes at the paid tiers. The sheer volume means you can always find something at your level. Caveats worth knowing: the pricing is aggressive with constant discount emails and multiple tiers, quality varies a lot between older and newer series, and the free account is heavily limited after a trial period.

Lets you build study sets by JLPT level, grade, frequency or your own list, with flashcards, multiple-choice quizzes, writing challenges and a built-in dictionary — all offline. The free version covers the first few JLPT levels; a single in-app purchase (around $12) unlocks everything permanently, with no subscription. Android only, and the sheer number of options takes a while to navigate.

A Chrome extension that shows target-language and native subtitles simultaneously, lets you click any word for a definition, replay a line, and save phrases for review. The free tier already covers dual subs, dictionary lookups and the CEFR-graded video catalogue; Pro (about $6/month) adds machine translation, speech recognition and better AI lookups. It transforms passive Netflix time into study time, but you need enough of a base — roughly B1 — for subtitle mining to beat just watching.

Import podcasts, articles or ebooks, tap unknown words for definitions, and LingQ tracks your known-word count over time. The free tier caps how many saved words you can keep, so serious use means paying (~$13/month or less annually). The interface is clunky and the built-in SRS is weaker than Anki, but the reading-plus-audio workflow with 50+ languages is hard to replicate elsewhere.

Aims to be WaniKani plus Bunpro plus graded reading in a single structured route from pre-N5 to N1, with human-written (explicitly not AI-generated) grammar lessons. $8.99/month, $83.88/year or $349.99 lifetime, with a 14-day trial and a free kana trainer, dictionary and grammar library. N2 content was still being completed as of 2026 and N1 has not started, so advanced learners will outrun it.

Focuses on what native speakers actually say versus what textbooks teach — nuance between similar expressions, casual contractions, and register. Most videos are largely in Japanese with subtitles, which makes them good listening practice in their own right. Free on YouTube; Miku sells separate courses and a podcast membership. Assumes solid beginner grammar already.

A browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.

One of the few sites where the free tier is a complete study system rather than a demo: kanji, vocabulary, grammar and listening schedules, quizzes in several formats, and preset lists matching Genki, Tobira and the JLPT levels. Pro adds extras but is not required. The interface is busy and old-fashioned, and the friendly-mascot presentation is not to everyone's taste, but for a free all-rounder it is hard to beat.

Same idea as HelloTalk but with vetted profiles and a cleaner focus on actual voice and video calls, which makes it noticeably less spammy in practice. Free to use; Pro adds unlimited partner search and extra languages, and the app also sells paid tutors. Both apps live or die on finding one or two committed partners, so expect to message a lot of people before anything sticks.

Hundreds of free lessons working through JLPT grammar points in Japanese only, which doubles as listening practice and is the standard recommendation for N2 and N1 preparation. Free on YouTube; the company also sells structured online courses. Because it is all in Japanese with no English scaffolding, it is unusable below roughly N4 level.

One-on-one video lessons from roughly $5–30/hr depending on the language and the teacher's credentials. It is the single fastest way to get real speaking practice, and the reason most self-study plans stall is that they skip this step. Community tutors are cheap conversation partners; professional teachers are worth it if you want structure, homework and error correction.

A streaming service where every show has clickable dual subtitles and saved words become flashcards, covering 15 languages with apps on phone, Roku and TV. It solves the 'what do I watch' problem for languages where Netflix's catalogue is thin. The library is much smaller than a mainstream streamer and it is subscription-only — if you already pay for Netflix, Language Reactor's free tier does most of the same job.

The heavyweight immersion toolkit: one-click sentence mining with audio, screenshot and definitions, plus its own SRS and known-word tracking, for 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and the major European ones. A 10-day free trial then a subscription (roughly $10/month). Overkill unless you are committed to a sentence-mining routine — if that describes you it saves hours a week, otherwise Language Reactor's free tier is enough.

100,000+ tutors across 120+ subjects, with a free replacement if your first tutor is a bad fit. The main structural difference from italki is that Preply pushes weekly lesson subscriptions and takes a large commission from tutors, which some learners consider a reason to prefer italki. Worth comparing side by side for your language — prices, availability and tutor quality differ per market rather than per platform.