Learn Japanese by reading

Share any article, or name a book. Soya rewrites it in Japanese at the JLPT level you choose, with hiragana furigana over the kanji and a tap for any meaning.

App StoreComing soonGoogle PlayComing soon

Soya is finished and in review. Soya will be free on both stores — no account, no subscription.

The Soya reader, showing an article with a reading above every word and a player bar to hear it aloud.

At your level, not somebody else’s

The level is a real constraint on the text rather than a label on it. The same article at two rungs is genuinely two different pieces of writing — and you can change your mind halfway and have it done again.

JLPT N5~800 words · beginner
JLPT N4~1,500 words
JLPT N3~3,700 words
JLPT N2~6,000 words
JLPT N110,000+ words · advanced

Every word carries its reading

Hiragana furigana over the kanji.

The level caps how much kanji appears as well as the vocabulary — roughly 100 kanji at N5, 300 at N4, 650 at N3, 1,000 at N2 — so a beginner article really does come back mostly in kana.
Every one of the five JLPT levels ships with three further example sentences per word, already in the app: 22,188 sentences in total, all of them tappable.
Two script drills come with it — 104 hiragana and 124 katakana, including the small combined sounds — for when the script itself is the thing in the way.

Tap a word to open its word sheet

今日きょう今日きょうnountodayIn this sentenceWith の after it, this is “today’s” — it modifies ニュース rather than standing alone.ののparticleof; ’sIn this sentenceJoins 今日 to ニュース. The order is the opposite of English: the owner comes first.ニュースニュースnounnewsIn this sentenceA loanword, so it is written in katakana — which is how you can tell at a glance that it came from English.ををparticlemarks the objectIn this sentenceMarks ニュース as the thing being read. Written を but said “o”.読みますよみます読みますよみますverbto readIn this sentencePolite present of 読む. Note the reading is よみ, not どく — a reading belongs to the word, not to the character.。

I read today’s news.

Tap any of the 5 wordsClose the word sheet

What comes in the box

All of this ships inside the app. It works offline, signed out, and before you have added a key — because none of it is fetched from anywhere.

103

Lessons

Short explainers, from the script up to a real news sentence, with 441 example sentences — every word tappable, every sentence speakable.

7,419

Words to practise

A graded catalogue covering every rung, so there is something to practise from the first minute on a fresh install.

22,188

Example sentences

Three further examples for each word, revealed free on the first press — no model call, no signal needed.

The Fill the gap practice game, with a sentence missing one word and four options to choose from.

And then practise it, for nothing

Five games built from the words you have looked up and the sentences already on your phone. Not one of them calls a model.

Get a word wrong and it is due again immediately; right, and it goes away for longer each time.
Your device’s own voice reads every word and sentence, so audio costs nothing either.
Two script drills come with it — 104 hiragana and 124 katakana, including the small combined sounds.

About Japanese in Soya

Does every kanji get furigana?

Yes — the reading sits above the word, and tapping it gives the meaning, the original-language word and spoken pronunciation. The reading is per word rather than per character, so 今日 reads きょう and not いまひ.

Will a beginner article be full of kanji I cannot read?

No. The JLPT level caps the kanji as well as the vocabulary — about 100 kanji at N5 — so an N5 article comes back mostly in kana. It is a real constraint on the text, not a hint.

Can I practise the kana themselves?

Yes, there are two drills — hiragana and katakana, 104 and 124 characters, including yōon and long vowels. Like everything else in Practice they make no network requests at all.

Start with something you wanted to read anyway.

App StoreComing soonGoogle PlayComing soon

Soya is finished and in review. Soya will be free on both stores — no account, no subscription.