A little daily practice

Five Japanese words a day

A fresh set of five common Japanese words, chosen automatically for today, each shown in kana/kanji with a romaji reading and a small picture cue. Tap the circle to hear each one pronounced — come back tomorrow for five new ones.

Voice

Sounds robotic? On Mac: Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Manage Voices, then download an Enhanced or Premium Japanese voice.

The five words, the two sentences and the review list are chosen in your browser, so with JavaScript turned off that part of the page stays empty. How this works, further down, is written into the page and explains what would have been there.

How this works ›

The five words are picked automatically from a list of 100 common Japanese words, grouped into 20 fixed sets of 5, based on today's date — no server, no schedule, it just recalculates whenever the page loads. The same 20 sets repeat in order every 20 days.

Each word is shown in kana/kanji with a romaji (romanized) reading underneath, since that's the most useful format if you're not fully comfortable reading kana yet.

Pronunciation uses whichever Japanese voice your browser offers (Web Speech API), so quality depends on your browser and OS. The page picks the best-sounding one it can find rather than the default, which is usually the oldest. In Chrome that is normally a Google voice, and those are synthesised on Google's servers — the words on this page are sent there to be read aloud. Everything else here stays on your machine, and if a Google voice fails the page falls back to one that is already installed. If more than one Japanese voice is installed, a picker appears above the words so you can choose whichever sounds best — your choice is remembered. On a Mac, System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices lets you download higher-quality "Premium" voices, which usually sound noticeably more natural than the default one.

Tap the small dot next to a word to mark it as practiced today — that's saved locally in your browser, not shared anywhere.

Below the words, two short sentences combine most of that day's words together, using common everyday phrasing, so you can hear them used in context rather than in isolation.

The Review section uses spaced repetition: every word you've ever marked with the dot goes into your personal review pool. New words come back the next day; after that, saying "Got it" pushes the next review further out (1 day, then 6, then longer each time), while "Still learning" brings it back tomorrow. Everything is stored locally in your browser, going all the way back to the first word you marked.