Jiten
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What is Jiten & how to use it

The core ideas behind Jiten, covering media decks, coverage, known words, and difficulty, and how they fit together.

Updated

Jiten analyses Japanese media, including visual novels, books, anime, dramas, and games, and turns each one into detailed vocabulary statistics and a ready-to-study Anki deck. If you learn Japanese through immersion, Jiten helps you answer two questions: "what should I read or watch next?" and "which words do I need to learn for it?"

This guide walks through the core concepts. Once they click, the rest of the site is easy to navigate.

Media decks

A deck is one piece of media that has been parsed into its vocabulary. Every deck page shows the words that appear in it, how often each one occurs, and a frequency-ordered list you can study from. Decks can have parent and child relationships, like a series and its individual volumes or episodes.

Browse everything from the Media page in the header. Filter by type, difficulty, or length to find something at your level.

Known words & coverage

As you learn, you mark words as known. Jiten tracks these per account, so every deck can be measured against what you already know.

Coverage is the headline number: the percentage of the words in a deck that you already know. A higher coverage means an easier, more comfortable read.

  • Around 80% coverage is challenging, and you will be looking up a lot.
  • Around 90% coverage is a good immersion sweet spot for most learners.
  • 98% and above is comfortable, mostly for review and enjoyment.

You do not have to mark words one by one. You can import a list of known words (for example, exported from another tool), and coverage across the whole site updates automatically.

Difficulty

Every deck gets a difficulty score from a model trained on Japanese text. It lets you compare media on a single scale instead of guessing from the summary. Combined with coverage, character count, and word count, it gives you a realistic picture of how hard something will be for you before you commit.

Studying with the SRS

Once you have found media at your level, you can study its vocabulary with Jiten's built-in SRS (spaced-repetition system), powered by FSRS. Reviews are scheduled so you see each word right before you would forget it. You can also generate an Anki deck and study in Anki instead, whichever fits your workflow.

Where to go next

Still stuck? Ask on Discord and we will be happy to help.