Japanese reading practice for beginners

Meet Japanese where you are

Stories tuned to your textbook, your chapter, and the words you actually know — for learners at the N5 and N4 levels.

Get started
Sign in or create an account.
How it works

Three steps to Japanese reading practice at your level.

Tell us where you are. Tell us what you'd like to practice. Read.

yomimono
You
Where are you in Beginning Japanese — Book I ?
Everything up to this chapter is marked as known.
Chapter 11
59 vocab
Chapter 12
48 vocab
Chapter 13
31 vocab
01 Mark where you are

Pick your textbook and the chapter you've reached. Yomimono uses that to know which words and grammar are fair game.

yomimono
You
What should we read today?
Create a story
I want to practice comparing things and counting.
Also… some yummy food please :)
Create story
02 Ask for a story

Tell us a grammar point you want to drill, a topic, a mood. Or don't — we'll surprise you with something at your level.

yomimono
You
A tale of three towns
つのまちのはなし
All furigana
Unknown only
Hidden

わたしのくにまちつあります。まち のなまえは「あおやま」と「きたがわ」と「みなみの」です。

今年ことしのなつ、ともだちのリンさんとつのまちきました。

はじめに、あおやまへ電車でんしゃきました。えきから三十分 さんじゅっぷんぐらい...

03 Read at your level

Stories arrive with adjustable furigana, tap-to-define vocabulary, and a difficulty that meets you exactly where you are.

Reading happens at the edge of almost-understanding.

Forty years of second-language research point to one stubborn finding: people learn to read a language by reading things they can almost understand. Krashen called it comprehensible input. Hu and Nation gave it a number — learners need to know around 95% of the words in a text for comprehension to hold, and closer to 98% to read without help. Below that, every unknown word becomes a wall, and reading stops being reading.

The Japanese tradition built on this idea is called tadoku, — read a lot, read what you can almost understand, don't translate. It works. The catch is that producing a steady supply of texts at exactly the right level for an individual learner — whether they're a few chapters into their first textbook or working toward N4 — has never been economically possible. Yomimono is what happens when it finally is. We create stories tuned to your textbook, your chapter, and the vocabulary you've actually picked up — so the friction goes down and learning begins.