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Lingo7 lets you read books with a translation under every sentence in 49 languages. Japanese is not one of them yet. Ask for it below, and see what adding it takes and what reading Japanese involves.
Lingo7 does not read Japanese yet: the app has no Japanese dictionary, audio or books, and Japanese text needs word splitting before the reader can translate a tapped word. Readers ask for Japanese, Korean and Chinese most often. Leave your email to vote; we add the most requested languages first and write to you once, when Japanese is ready.
We add the most requested languages first. Leave your email and we'll write to you once, when Japanese is ready.
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We use your email only to tell you when Japanese launches, and delete it whenever you ask. Privacy policy
The demo below is the live reader with a German book. Japanese would work the same way once it is added.
Spoken in: Japan; large communities in Brazil and the United States, especially Hawaii
Written Japanese mixes three scripts in one sentence. Kanji, the characters borrowed from Chinese, carry most nouns and verb stems; hiragana writes grammar endings and particles; katakana writes loanwords and foreign names. Hiragana and katakana have 46 basic signs each and take a few weeks. Kanji are the long part: Japanese schools teach the 2,136 joyo kanji, and a newspaper or a novel assumes you know them.
There are no spaces between words. A reader finds the boundaries from the switch between kanji and kana, which is why any app that translates a tapped word has to split the text first. Beginners usually start with texts printed with furigana, small kana above each kanji that give its reading: children's books, graded readers and NHK News Web Easy, a news site written in simple Japanese with furigana on every kanji.
Printed fiction is still mostly set vertically, in columns read from right to left. Websites, e-books and apps run horizontally, left to right, and that is the layout a learner meets first.
There is no date yet. We add the most requested languages first, and Japanese needs the work described on this page. Leave your email in the form and we will write to you once, when Japanese is ready.
Not yet. Lingo7 has no Japanese dictionary, audio or shelf of books, so a Japanese book would not get the sentence-by-sentence translation and word lookups the app is built on. The 49 languages it does read are listed on the home page.
One vote per email address per language. The count on this page shows a number once at least 10 people have asked, and refreshes within a minute of a new vote. Your email is stored only to tell you when Japanese launches, and deleted whenever you ask at support@lingoseven.com.
Yes. Hiragana and katakana are the entry ticket: with them you can read furigana, particles and loanwords, and every learner text assumes them. Most people learn both in two to four weeks of daily practice.
About 2,000. The 2,136 joyo kanji cover ordinary books and newspapers. The first 1,000 or so get you through manga, children's literature and simplified news, especially with furigana.
Different rather than harder. A Japanese text needs fewer characters than a Chinese one, because kana carry the grammar, but most kanji have several readings that depend on the word, so the same character is read differently in different places. Chinese characters mostly have one reading each.