Best Japanese Language Learning Software: Why Migaku Stands Out

Japanese language learners find themselves in a unique situation: there are almost too many app and software options available to choose from. In another blog post, we looked at about ten resources ... and those were just to learn kanji.

If you go to Reddit and ask for the best Japanese language learning software, you'll get a bunch of different opinions. Use this for kanji, use that for grammar, go watch Dōgen to learn about this thing called pitch accent. It's overwhelming, frankly, and quickly gets expensive.

Enter Migaku.

A Chrome browser extension, Migaku turns your favorite online content into interactive, Japanese-learning gold. You watch or read things in Japanese, and you learn Japanese. It's fun. It's also effective. If you're still a beginner, we also offer structured courses that cover everything from vocabulary and grammar to kanji to listening comprehension and pronunciation.

Here’s why Migaku stands out among Japanese language learning tools and how it can be a game-changer on your journey to fluency.

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What is Migaku?

At Migaku, we believe that languages are learned by being interacted with. If you consume content you enjoy and largely understand, and you continuously learn new things from that content, you will make progress.

The thing is, it's difficult to interact with the language you're a beginner.

To solve this problem, we built a language learning platform that helps you do four things:

To do that, we use three main tools:

How languages are really learned

Different people have used different tools and taken different approaches to learn languages. What all successful language learners have in common, however, is that they got a massive amount of exposure to their target language (the language they were learning). We think this is super important.

Language, like any other skill, is something you learn by doing:

Unfortunately, most apps don't push you to spend time doing these things—the things that actually lead to progress.

At Migaku, we give you tools that enable you to consume the Japanese content you're personally interested in and also to take advantage of the learning opportunities presented by that content—even if you're not very good at Japanese yet.

As you consume content you love in Japanese, and understand the messages within that content, you will learn Japanese.

It's that simple.

Migaku's 4-step approach to learning Japanese

Condensing the above, we think that learning Japanese boils down to four key steps:

To reach step two, you need a foundation of about 1,500 vocabulary words and a few hundred grammar points. Once you've done that, all you need to do to learn Japanese (or any other language) is repeat steps two through four.

Building a foundation of Japanese vocabulary and Japanese grammar

We go into this in detail in our post the best way to learn Japanese vocabulary.

The key point—and what most language learning courses get wrong—is that words are not equally valuable. Whereas there are 124,000 unique words in Netflix's Japanese subtitles, some words appear much more frequently than others.

With this in mind, if you're a beginner in Japanese, you shouldn't set out to learn just any words in Japanese. You'll get much more value if you focus on the words that make the content you're interested in accessible.

So we did just that.

These courses are condensed into a deck of flashcards. You can work through them anytime, anywhere. To make sure you remember everything, we schedule each flashcard for review in the future, based on your performance. The learning curve is also super smooth: each "next" flashcard contains only one new piece of information.

The result is that, even if you know literally nothing about Japanese, by giving Migaku 20–30 minutes of daily effort for 6 months or so, you'll have learned what you need to learn to make Japanese Netflix accessible.

And that leads to our core functionality.

Consume (and learn from) content you enjoy

Migaku doesn't have a secret method or a gimmick to sell you. All we want you to do is spend a lot of time doing things you enjoy in Japanese. We believe that people learn languages by consuming (and understanding) content they're interested in—and that's why improving comprehension is such a big focus of our product.

Let's say that you finished our Migaku Academy course, so you now know ~1,500 vocabulary words and a few hundred grammar points, and now you're ready to live the dream: watching Gundamn, in Japanese.

You install the Migaku Chrome extension, and then boot up Gundam on Netflix.

It's surprisingly accessible! You don't understand everything, but you know enough words that you can make sense of most sentences.

... And then you stumble into , a new word that's got you completely confused.

So you click on it, and now you see this:

And before the line of dialogue has even finished, you now know that means "mysteriousness" or "profound secrets". The main hole in your knowledge is filled, and you continue on watching Gundam (in Japanese).

This functionality is minimally invasive, but incredibly powerful. It lets you consume content—videos with subtitles, Tweets, ebooks, web pages, anything with text—almost as if you knew all the words in your target language.

And it gets better.

Turn that content into personalized Japanese learning materials

So, that word up there?

Let's say you found this word to be cool. ("Profound secrets" are, indeed, pretty cool). Or maybe this is the fourth time you've seen the word in Gundam, and you're getting sick of looking it up.

Just click that orange button in the top-right corner of the pop-up definition.

Doing so will automatically create a flashcard that looks like this:

It contains the word you've selected, the sentence that word appeared in, and an audio recording of the sentence being read.

If you flip it over, you'll see this:

Yeah.

It's beautiful, and it took about three clicks. You can make a flashcard without leaving your content, or you can take a breather to customize them to your liking.

These flashcards can be sent to Migaku Memory, our proprietary flashcard application, or to Anki, an open-source flashcard application, meaning that you can continue studying these flashcards even if you stop using Migaku.

Follow Migaku's personalized learning plan

If you're like most students, myself included, school probably went like this for you:

The thing is, learning doesn't have to be that way.

Whenever you learn something in Migaku, the algorithm will look at your performance (whether you got a flashcard right or wrong, and if you've gotten it right or wrong several times) in order to schedule it for review in the future. You'll initially review new words quite often, but as time goes on and you get the card right a few times, you'll be asked to review that word less often. In this way, you slowly but surely transfer words you learn into your long-term memory. (This process is called spaced repetition.)

You don't need to plan or organize any of this. Simply watch the content you enjoy, make flashcards that seem useful, and then open Migaku Memory each day and work through the lesson plan our algorithm has prepared for you.

Figure out what you're going to watch next

There's more to Japanese than Gundam.

Eventually, you're going to be ready to move on.

Migaku keeps track of words as you learn them so that, when the time to find the next piece of content comes, you're ready.

Check this out:

So far, I've told Migaku that I know about 1,600 words. The anime Ano Natsu de Matteru looked interesting to me, so I booted it up. Migaku tells me:

Here, I've stumbled into the word (danger). It's a super common word that I don't know yet, and it's the only word in the sentence I don't know, so Migaku has highlighted it for me.

I have an "excellent" comprehension score of 84%, and this is at the top of my to-watch list, so I'm in luck! I'm watching it. (Actually, I'm on episode 11/12 as of the time of writing this post.) But if I had a lower comprehension score, I would have chosen to try something else on my to-watch list.

In the future, Migaku will use your "word's known" count and your interests to recommend you content that's appropriate for your current level.

(P.S. — I have Migaku configured to only show English subtitles when I hit the "pause" button, but you could also choose to have them always visible, visible if a sentence contains a new word, or blurred until you hover your mouse over them.)

An overview of Migaku’s core features

In the above section we talked about Migaku's core learning loop, showing how you can make an interactive learning experience out of pretty much any content on the web.

Here's a slightly more in-depth look at some of the features we glossed over.

Instant definitions of unknown words

After parsing a piece of content, you can hover over any word to see:

You'll know that your content is parsed because, as shown in the images above, the text within it will become interactable and, depending on your settings, may turn different colors.

Japanese-specific support features

Migaku doesn't just support people who want to learn Japanese: the above features are available for several languages.

Here are two features that specifically support people learning Japanese:

One-click flashcard creation

We already showed what the default flashcards you create on Migaku look like above.

The thing is, your flashcards don't have to look like that.

You can add all of the information shown above on your flashcards in order to customize them to your liking. For example, I prefer to not have any English in my flashcards. Instead, I include a Japanese definition of the flashcard's target word (the word you're creating this flashcard to learn.) I also usually include a few audio recordings of the word being pronounced, so I can hear how it sounds when different people say it.

Support for popular streaming platforms

We made Migaku to help you (and us) immerse in Japanese media, so we've gone out of our way to make sure our software is compatible with several streaming platforms. That means you can:

More generally speaking, we support any website that has some sort of text available. We even offer an OCR tool so you can read manga with Migaku.

Why Choose Migaku for Japanese Language Learning?

We'll be honest: there are a lot of Japanese learning apps and resources on the market. A quick Google search will probably reveal thirty seven apps, and we've even reviewed several Japanese textbooks ourselves.

The thing is, virtually all of those resources stop at being a Japanese course. They promote some "special" way to learn Japanese, and they don't really want you to make any meaningful progress, because then you'd stop needing their app and cancel your subscription.

Migaku is different: we're just a toolbox that helps you consume Japanese content much sooner than would normally be possible. Eventually you'll grow enough that you no longer need Migaku to enjoy Japanese content... but many of our users stay subscribed (or buy our lifetime plan) because our tools enable you to spend less time looking stuff up and more time enjoying your favorite content in Japanese.

You'll learn Japanese faster and you'll have fun while doing so. The worst case scenario is that you'll end up reading a bunch of books, watching a lot of anime, or doing whatever it is that you're excited about doing in Japanese.

Putting all that together

Migaku lets you turn your favorite Japanese content into a learning resource. This ensures that you don't waste your time or effort: you'll learn the things you need to do the things that you find interesting or meaningful. It's a very natural way of learning.

So, if you’re ready to move beyond textbooks and start learning through actual Japanese media, then this is for you. Migaku is the best Japanese language learning software for those serious about achieving fluency.

After all—learning a language should be fun.

(If you're pretty far along with your studies, that's OK. You can transfer a list of words you already know into Migaku to teach our parser the words you already know, thus picking up right where you left off with your previous approach.)