Show HN: Native Japanese immersion reader app + Anki integration (Manabi Reader)
reader.manabi.io
reader.manabi.io
What's special about it?
Manabi Reader became popular as a Japanese-focused alternative to services like LingQ in that it locally tracks and analyzes all the words and kanji you read and study. It shows you which words are new and which you're currently learning via flashcards, so you can easily find content that suits your level and see what flashcards to prioritize adding. It also passively accumulates an on-device (and in your personal iCloud) corpus of example sentences from your reading. It’s also one of few ways to mine sentences including pitch accent directly into Anki on iPhone.
I had built this part-time while working over many years (starting with flashcards and then the reader app) but going full-time gave me the time to do a full rewrite: SwiftUI, native iOS + macOS, and an offline-first architecture that syncs with iCloud and my server in the background. Although it has a companion SRS algorithm (SM-2 with FSRS coming soon) flashcard app, it's also excellent for mining Anki cards. This works with AnkiMobile on iOS and AnkiConnect on desktop.
You can use it like a web browser for the web, or subscribe to RSS feeds. It comes with a bunch of curated content by level. Recently I added EPUB support, pitch accents, and note-taking with todos.
I'm now almost done adding a manga mode via Mokuro, and Netflix/streaming video support via realtime captioning of audio streams.
Next I plan on adding more media types (video, YouTube, PDFs), AI functionality (grammar explanations, document Q&A, etc), Yomitan/Yomichan dictionaries for bilingual/monolingual EPWING and Wiktionary support, and more service integrations such as 2-way sync for WaniKani, JPDB, and existing Anki decks. I've begun work on these items and hope to share more soon.
I'd also like to make this app much more beginner-friendly so that people with zero Japanese knowledge can start learning. Currently it assumes you can read kana at least.
The tech stack is quite nice for my needs so I'm happy to answer questions about that, too. I made my career on Continuous Deployment-style DevOps management, enough to learn to avoid servers in the first place as much as I can. So I made this app to be offline-first and reliant on static CDN files as needed. I have the app syncing in realtime with both iCloud and my servers, so if I have an outage, users will barely notice and I can finish my night's rest. Customers appreciate the privacy benefits of keeping their reading data local to their own iCloud account instead of on my servers as most of my competitors do.