Hi everyone, I’m Mersad.
My Japanese-learning story started with someone else’s motorcycle trip.
I saw a couple travelling through Japan on their bikes and went down one of my usual rabbit holes. It inspired me enough that I got my motorcycle licence, bought a bike, and started thinking that one day I wanted to ride through Japan myself. I had already been interested in the culture for a long time, so learning Japanese somehow became part of that dream.
I researched everything I could find about learning Japanese and eventually landed on WaniKani. For quite a while, WaniKani was basically all I did.
At the time I didn’t know that I had ADHD. Once I was diagnosed, learning Japanese became important to me for another reason too. I wanted to prove to myself that I could stick with something genuinely difficult, and that this wouldn’t become another rabbit hole that fizzled out after a few months.
So I kept going. Later I added Bunpro, learned more grammar, and got to the point where I technically knew quite a lot of kanji and vocabulary. I also kept hearing the same advice: if you want to learn Japanese, you need to immerse. You need to actually use the language.
Watching anime was easy enough, but reading was the part I kept avoiding.
That became painfully obvious when I failed the N3. I could look at a text and recognize a surprising amount of it, but reading it took me forever. I knew the kanji, the vocabulary, even the grammar, and I still couldn’t get through a Japanese text at any useful speed.
People had told me to read more, and they were right. I tried graded readers and other learner material, but most of it just didn’t hold my attention. I read a lot in English and German, and I read a frankly ridiculous amount of manga, so the desire to read was never the problem. I wanted to read things I actually cared about. The learner material often felt like something I had to get through before I was allowed to read the interesting stuff.
Then I started buying Japanese ebooks and ran into the next problem. A sentence could turn into several minutes of looking things up, switching context, checking a translation, and still not really understanding why it was phrased the way it was. A normal translation told me what the sentence meant, but it often hid the Japanese structure that I was trying to learn. Even when I understood the result, it didn’t feel like much of the Japanese was sticking.
I kept wishing I had one place where I could just read the book and get help without leaving it.
That idea slowly became Yomumichi.
I’ve been working on it in my spare time for about two years now: thinking through how it should work, making prototypes, throwing things away, and trying again. I was building it mainly for myself. Failing the JLPT a second time was frustrating, but weirdly also validating. It confirmed that reading was the real problem, and it made me take the project much more seriously.
The basic idea is that you bring an ebook you actually want to read and Yomumichi prepares it for the reader. The Japanese stays in front of you with full furigana and instant lookup for words, kanji, and grammar. When a sentence still doesn’t click, there are different levels of help: a close look at how the Japanese pieces fit together, a more faithful translation, or a natural one.
I don’t want the Japanese to disappear behind the translation. I want to stay inside the book long enough to follow how Japanese actually puts the thought together, instead of constantly jumping out of the text or only reading the English result.
I also want things discovered while reading to remain useful afterwards. If a word or sentence is worth remembering, it should be easy to review it later in the context where it first mattered.
Most of what you see here is still a prototype. The design, structure, and probably quite a few details will change while I turn it into a working Beta. These screenshots show what I’m building towards, not a finished app. Some parts are blurred on purpose because they’re either early ideas I’m not ready to show properly yet or book covers I’ve hidden for this post.
At some point I realized that this might be useful to people besides me. I’d really like to find out if that’s true rather than quietly building the whole thing around my own habits.
I’m planning a small private Beta where people can try it for free and tell me what helps, what’s confusing, and what still makes them want to close the book. You’ll be able to try your own compatible EPUB, but I’ll also include a few books that I can legally make available for the Beta, so not having an ebook ready doesn’t stop you from testing it.
If this sounds like something you’d actually use, you’re welcome to join the early-access list:
Join the Yomumichi early-access list
There’s no Beta date I can honestly promise yet. I’d rather invite people when there’s something worth testing and improve it with them from there. If people really like it, I might make a real product out of it. And if it turns out that nobody else needs this, that’s useful to know too. I’ll still have built the reader I need for myself.
I’d also love to hear about your own experience with reading Japanese, whether you’re reading books already, tried one years ago and stopped, or are still trying to make the jump. If you’d be comfortable having a short chat with me about how you read now, feel free to say so. No pressure either way; I’m happy to just talk here in the thread too.
That’s Shiori, Yomumichi’s mascot. You’ll probably see her peeking over words in the reader too.
P.S. I made an @yomumichi account where I’ll share updates as the project changes. I’m @mersad if you want to follow along as I build it or ask me something directly.
