YABAI
Real Japanese slang, one giant word at a time
67 followers
Real Japanese slang, one giant word at a time
67 followers
Textbooks teach Japanese that stops at the classroom door. YABAI is the other half: 308 real slang, internet and fandom words, each on a card built around giant Japanese typography. Every word has a meaning, a real example, a vibe check (safe to use? friends only? careful?) and a story — and when the origin is uncertain, it says so instead of inventing one. Built end to end with AI agents in Claude Code. 13 languages, works offline. No streaks, no tests, no XP.
YABAI
@yuichisatoapp I like that it focuses on real everyday Japanese instead of textbook phrases.
YABAI
@grayson_bass Thank you! If you try it, I'd love to know which word surprised you most.
@yuichisatoapp Definitely! I’ll give it a try and let you know which one catches me off guard
YABAI
@grayson_bass Looking forward to it — thank you!
hi, it's an interesting project, really nice idea.
before installing it, i'd like to understand: is it free or is it a paid app?
YABAI
@luca_ardito Thanks! It's a paid app — $0.99, one time. No ads, no tracking, no subscription — I didn't want to build the kind of app that monetises your attention.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
Are you planning iOS version too? :)
YABAI
@busmark_w_nika Not yet — Android only for now. The iOS side is set up in the codebase but I haven't shipped it. If there's interest here I'll prioritise it.
Dial
308 words is a pretty specific number, curious how you picked the cutoff there. is that meant to be a complete "you can follow along with native content now" set, or is it deliberately a starter pack with more packs planned later
YABAI
@galdayan Honest answer: 308 isn't a cutoff I chose — it's what survived the rule. Every candidate had to be either in current use or evergreen: no dead slang, no words that only exist inside one show. Plenty got rejected on the way (KY, スパチャ, 最高かよ…). The number is just where the list stood when I shipped.
It's definitely not a "you can follow native content now" set — no list of 308 words could be, and YABAI isn't a course. It's the layer textbooks skip: the words that carry a group chat. And it's not a pack model either. New words go into the app itself with updates, under the same rule — two of the current 308 (ミリしら, ドパガキ) came from tester suggestions, so the list already grows that way.
Dial
@yuichisatoapp that tester-suggestion pipeline for new entries is the part that'll keep this from going stale, most slang apps ship once and rot within a year. makes more sense now why you framed it as the layer textbooks skip rather than a course, that's a much narrower and more honest promise
YABAI
@galdayan Thank you — that narrower promise is the one I wanted to make. If you try it, I'd love to know which word surprised you most.
YABAI
@galdayan Small correction first: ドパガキ wasn't coined by a tester — it's a word already in use; a tester just pointed out it was missing.
The testers are Japanese friends I showed the app to, with one ask: tell me anything that's wrong or missing. So the suggestions already come from native speakers. Anything they flag then goes through the same rule as every other entry — is it actually in current use (or evergreen), and can it be written and sourced in Japanese first — and the final call is mine (I'm a native speaker too).