Hey Product Hunt! 👋 I'm Maxime, the solo maker behind Yomimaru, and I'm a Japanese learner before I'm a developer. Quick backstory. I studied Japanese for about two to three years, partly on my own and partly at a language school in Tokyo. I had the streaks and the flashcard stats to show for it. Then a friend would send me a normal message, or I'd sit down in front of a restaurant menu, and I'd just freeze. The characters were technically "in my head." They only ever came out inside a flashcard, never out in the real world. What finally fixed it was reading. Real Japanese about stuff I actually cared about, a little every day. The problem was finding it. Real books were too hard and left me drowning in a dictionary. The beginner stuff was about topics I had zero interest in. And even on a good day, I still had to decide what to actually read, which is its own small wall. So as a broke student I started doing something a little silly. I got an AI to write me small Japanese stories about my own life, my dreams, the movies and books I loved, sometimes with my friends dropped into them. And for the first time, opening my Japanese practice was actually fun. It took me a while to get what was really happening. It wasn't the AI. The AI was just the trick that got me to the real thing: I was finally reading Japanese I cared about, every day, and it was sticking. So I built the whole app around that one idea. One thing up front, because someone always asks. This isn't a novel generator. ChatGPT can write you a Japanese story, it just can't teach you to read it. Everything in Yomimaru exists to make the reading itself work. Here's what that feels like in the app: - Type any topic you're into, your football team or a cozy Kyoto café mystery, and get a Japanese story written at roughly your level, in seconds. - It's not all AI. There's a library of 15,000+ real Japanese texts, classics and daily news from real outlets like NHK and Asahi, so the heart of it is genuine native writing, not filler. - The reading adapts to you. Words you already know show up clean, the ones you don't keep a small pronunciation hint above them, so you're never lost and never babied. Tap any word for its meaning, or ask Tomo-Sensei about a whole sentence and get a short explanation card at your level instead of a wall of text. - Bring your own stuff. Drop in a PDF or an article, or upload a manga page and Yomimaru reads the Japanese right off the artwork, so you tap any speech bubble to understand it without leaving the page. (This is the one I love to show, so watch the demo.) - Starting from zero is a real path. If you don't know a single character yet, you go from your first lesson to reading an actual, hand-written Japanese story in one sitting. The whole daily reading experience is free, no credit card. The full library, the daily news, the guided path that lines up what to read next, the tools that make hard text readable, all of it. Credits are only for the AI extras like generating brand-new stories, and if you run out you just pause on creating new ones. Everything you were already reading stays open. Being honest about where it's at: Yomimaru is web only for now. It works great in a mobile browser and you can add it to your home screen, but native iOS and Android apps don't exist yet. They're coming. The reason any of this matters to me isn't really about an app. Every hour I put into Japanese has paid me back. A night laughing with drunk locals at a bar in Wakayama, a grandmother teaching me an Obon festival dance in a tiny mountain town. And reading opened doors that speaking never could, from signing my own apartment contract to understanding why a temple I stayed at meant so much to the writers I love. Reading a little every day is what slowly got me there. If Yomimaru helps even a handful of you reach your own version of those moments, that genuinely means a lot to me. The one thing I'd love feedback on: when you first open it, does the level feel right? Too easy, too hard, about there? Getting that calibration right for everyone is the hardest part, and your gut reaction in the first five minutes is the signal I can't get on my own. A little thank-you for this community: use the code **PRODUCTHUNT** at signup for an extended trial of the AI features, so you can throw whatever weird topic you want at it and see if it holds up. Thanks so much for taking a look. I'll be here all day answering everything. 🙇

Yomimaru

Like Duolingo, but every lesson is a Japanese story you love

Like Duolingo, but every lesson is a Japanese story you love