Month: March 2023

Tools for learning Japanese via immersion (inspired by TMW meta)

~ Aka ~ Leave a comment

Intro

A summary of tools that are very helpful when learning Japanese through immersion. This is heavily based on what I personally know and use from the “meta” in TheMoeWay discord, sorry if I missed out any favorite tool you have.
Also, I use Windows PC and Android, so I’m only listing tools for them here.

Updates:
13 March 2023 – added mpv websocket

Light novels/novels

  • Yomichan
  • Browser supporting Yomichan
    • PC: Chrome/Firefox/Edge/other Chromium-based browsers; personally I prefer chromium-based as they have better support for asbplayer for mining subtitles later)
    • Android: Kiwi browser (afaik the only modern mobile browser supporting addons)
  • Ttu reader (github page: https://github.com/ttu-ttu/ebook-reader)
  • Books in epub format

Manga

Pre-processed OCR

  • mokuro – read manga in a browser with easily Yomichan-able text

On-the-fly OCR

  • PC: ShareX + manga-ocr – very, very accurate for manga, also good for short bits of text from games and novel scans etc. Won’t work well with long text though.
  • Android: OCR manga reader, or Kaku

Anime

Streaming

  • Japanese subs from Kitsunekko or other sources
  • streaming sites, eg. YouTube, Netflix, zoro.to etc.
  • asbplayer to display soft-subs + mining with Yomichan
    • alternative: mpv + stream url

Local

  • either one of these:

3D (TV/movies etc.)

Same workflow as anime. Might be harder to get good streaming sources though. More niche stuff may require access to private tracker torrents.

Games (including visual novels and some emulated games)

  • Something to hook the text:
    • Textractor + TextractorSender or Textractor websocket plugin (older meta was to send to clipboard, this eliminates the need for that)
    • Agent, if the game doesn’t support Textractor
    • (if neither Textractor or Agent works for your game, then you’ll need to use OCR. Or find the script in txt form somewhere. Sorry.)
  • A texthook display webpage, either of these will track time and chars read, and reading speed:
  • If it’s a console game, either emulate it, or use a capture card and OCR.

Mining

Stats tracking

  • ExSTATic
  • Spreadsheet templates
  • TMW discord immersion bot

Extras/alternatives

  • jidoujisho – all-in-one video, reading + mining app on Android.
  • jpdb – good for checking relative difficulty of a series. Also can be used as an Anki alternative for studying and remembering vocab.
  • fsrs – custom scheduler for Anki
  • JL – overlay hooked text, eliminates the need for a separate browser page to display the text. Supports look-ups and mining, but Anki templates are less configurable than Yomichan (it doesn’t support fancy templates relying on handlebars).
  • Google Lens/Vision OCR. May be possible to do it with Chrome browser, or use the API key + an app like ocr-reader.
    • limitation for API: free for 1k images/month, then paid after
  • Arujisho – monolingual/bilingual dictionary app for Android
  • Marv’s vndb & Seiya Saiga user scripts – for better navigation of vn-related sites

Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to the various tool and guide authors, and the general TMW community; without them I wouldn’t have learnt as much, and be having so much fun immersing.
Here’s a list of some of them, check them out for more details and resources: