🇯🇵 Best Japanese websites for intermediate 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.

Daily news stories rewritten for children and non-native residents, with furigana on every kanji, definitions on hover, and a slow narrated recording of each article. Free, updated every weekday, and the single best bridge from textbook Japanese to real news. Note that NHK moved the site to news.web.nhk and renamed it NHKやさしいことばニュース; old www3.nhk.or.jp links redirect. Articles are short and the vocabulary skews toward politics and disasters.

Dozens of illustrated PDF booklets sorted into levels, from near-zero Japanese up to comfortable intermediate reading, published free by the tadoku (extensive reading) organisation. Perfect for the phase where textbook dialogues are boring but native material is still impossible. The catalogue is small compared to the paid printed sets, and the stories are simple by design.

Explains the language on its own terms — the copula, the real function of は versus が, plain form before polite form — instead of forcing it into English grammar categories. Completely free online, and available as a cheap ebook or app. It is dense and dry, uses casual forms early (which surprises people used to textbooks), and the last update was years ago, but as a grammar reference it has aged well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yuki speaks slowly in Japanese only, using drawings, gestures and props so you understand from day one without translation — the closest thing Japanese has to Dreaming Spanish. Rebranded from Comprehensible Japanese to Natural Japanese (NIJ) and moved to nijapanese.com; cijapanese.com now redirects there. Most videos are free on YouTube; the site adds a level-sorted library, transcripts and watch-time tracking behind a subscription.

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.

Over 1,600 episodes of original serialised stories and articles, each with human-recorded audio, per-word definitions in context, and editor notes explaining why a sentence works the way it does — that last part is what separates it from generic reading apps. You can dial furigana down as you improve, and it syncs with your WaniKani level so known kanji lose their furigana automatically. Some content is free; full access is $9/month or $89/year, and it is aimed squarely at the awkward post-Genki stage rather than absolute beginners.