Jiten
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What Jiten does differently

How Jiten approaches immersion learning, with a real media library, coverage tracking, free decks and open data.

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There are a lot of good tools for learning Japanese, and Jiten is built to work with them rather than replace your setup. This is a short look at what it focuses on, so you can find out how it'll fit your workflow.

Built around real media

Jiten starts from the things you actually want to read and watch. Anime, novels, manga, visual novels, video games, and more, each analysed and turned into a vocabulary list along with stats. New titles are added constantly. You can see the latest additions on the media updates page.

Instead of working through an abstract "core6k" deck, you study the words of this show or this novel, and learn the words you'll actually meet.

Coverage you can trust

The most useful number on the site is coverage: the share of a title's words you already know. It is worked out against your own knowledge, so you can open any media in the library and see how comfortable it will be for you before committing several hours to it. Knowing when you're ready for it is one of the hardest part of immersion learning, and coverage makes this question easier to solve. Choosing media at your level covers strategies to find appropriate media for you.

Difficulty you can compare

Every title gets a difficulty score from a model trained on Japanese text, adjusted by votes from readers who have actually finished it. That gives you a consistent scale to compare titles on instead of guessing from a synopsis.

It is a comparison within a kind of media rather than across all of them. Comparing two novels, or two anime, is what the score is good at, as asking whether a novel is harder than an anime is often a question that's impossible to answer.

Free, open, and yours

The core is free and stays free: the library, coverage, deck downloads, the SRS and the Jiten Reader extension. Jiten+ exists for people who want to chip in, and adds extras on top: images and audio on cards, custom frequency lists, immersion plans, your coverage over time, monthly boosts for media requests, and higher limits.

The project is open source, and the data it derives, decks, frequency lists and statistics, is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. See deck licensing for what that covers and what it does not.

Your data is yours in a practical sense. You can export decks as Anki, CSV or plain text, download frequency dictionaries, and take a Complete Backup of your entire vocabulary with its review history, stability, difficulty and due dates. Leaving is always one export away, which is how it should be.

It plays well with others

You do not have to abandon your setup to use Jiten.

Anki works in both directions: export a deck as .apkg, or import your studied cards through AnkiConnect and bring their review history with them. Yomitan works three ways: download Jiten's frequency dictionaries, export a per-title occurrence dictionary, or load your own Yomitan dictionaries into Jiten so your preferred definitions show up across the site in that browser.

For texthookers, manga readers and video players, the Jiten Reader extension parses the page and syncs everything back to your account.

Coming from somewhere else, your can import your known words in a few clicks.

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