Reading Manga on iPhone - Kanji lookups?

Japanese
#1

Please forgive me for owning an iPhone. Unfortunately I have never really used my phone much and my employer gives me an iPhone for free. I’m truly jealous looking at the availability of Japanese learning tools on Android. If I had to pay for my own phone, I’d switch.

Currently I have my own Komga server at home, with Tailscale installed to make it reachable when I’m not home, and KMReader instealled on my iPhone so I can read things on my Komga server in the train. Lately, I’ve been reading Manga on my morning commute. The issue is, that I’m not yet at a point where I can seriously read a Manga without Furigana without looking up kanji I don’t recognize, and depending on the manga, this happens fairly often. So I’ve effectively been limiting myself to Mangas that have a solid amount of Furigana…

My reading is massively behind my listening and my speaking unfortunately. So I want this to become my next focus, to align it with the rest of my Japanese.

For this, I would like a setup on my iPhone, with which I can somehow (OCR?) look up words I can’t read.

I have searched a lot online I couldn’t find a solid solution.

Does anyone have any sort of reader on their iPhones / iPads that somehow offers a useful way to look up words? The added difficulty is that Manga are typically images, rather than selectable text…

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#2

I’ve only used the bookwalker app on my iphone, but heres how I do it. Just take a regular screenshot and with the inbuilt OCR I can select (long press) whatever and either use the translate function of the context menu or just copy it to jisho or your dictionary of choice. This even works on pretty low resolution scans. The selection can be a bit difficult across multiple columns of text, but overall works well enough for me.
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#3

I used Kantan Manga on ios when I started out and wanted to read on my phone while riding the train, but compared to Mokuro the OCR is seriously lacking so I would find myself fighting to scan many kanji and just move on when I couldn’t. It was better than nothing, and it’s completely usable just for reading even without the scanner.

I haven’t tried Mokuro in the browser on any phone, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it works. Files need to be prepared in advance through a computer though, but if you have a day and stock up on lots it’s not really a problem.

If only the OCR on Kantan wasn’t so bad and adding manga wasn’t so tedious, I would recommend it.

Try Mokuro Reader, files must be prescanned via PC first.

If you’re past the look up words in every sentence stage I would just draw it by hand if all else fails, works well enough when you don’t need to do it often.

#4

You could try Manatan, which will work with your Komga server, if you do no want to run your files through Mokuro.

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#5

Manatan is great at doing it, but the app is filled with bugs and inconsistent behavior. You can easily tell how much slop it’s in there. My biggest problem with it though is that the creator closed the source code, and now it’s a mash up of other open source projects with original features being cut out and monetized. Even themes, that are taken directly from Mangatan, are a paid feature in Manatan.

The biggest competitor right now, with a few less features but overall way better UX and stability is Fushi. It can be installed on iPhone/iPad through Testflight. For Mac users that want an Apple-like UI, there’s also Niratan, which now syncs with Fushi. That’s the beauty of open source, it opens up collaboration among amazing tools :slightly_smiling_face:

#6

It sounded great in theory, until I saw that the subscriptions are about AI credits. Tokenization and OCR is a problem that can be solved mostly to fully deterministic. I’m not an AI hater, but solving this with AI simply reeks of having no idea what they’re doing. And even if they wanted to go an AI route, those are workloads that at the very least the past 8-9 years worth of iPhone releases could do with a local model rather than using a massive and expensive LLM via internet. Their whole website and everything is fully AI generated, too. Including the FAQs, texts, blogpost, everything. For a free product I wouldn’t mind, for a paid product that’s a no.

I had no idea I could get Mokuro to run on a phone. I thought it was strictly desktop. Nice!!

I hadn’t thought of this one, this is amazing, too! I actually like that it’s less convenient, probably animates me to think about the word and the kanji for a sec rather than looking up instantly.

Additionally I found GitHub - classicsc/MaruReader: Manga, web, and book reader for Japanese language study · GitHub which seems vibecoded too, but at least runs locally. I used it a little yesterday, the UI is horrible, scrolling is inconsistent, some epubs skip pages due to how the epub parser works, but it seems like it has potential for the future. The OCR and the Yomitan-like integration work 10/10 flawless though. My biggest point of criticism is the UI really not working well.

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#7

Yeah, both Manatan and Fushi offer AI related features, and both are heavily vibe coded. But you don’t really have to make use of anything AI related (I certainly don’t). And even if you were to, I think both of them (at least Fushi for sure) allow you to use different inference backends, including local ones. Also Fushi doesn’t sell anything, everything is completely free, and if you want the AI features, you have to bring your own API key.

On top of the vibe coding, these apps exist thanks to bringing all together the most popular open source tools for each kind of media. For instance, Fushi integrates Jidoujisho, which uses Mokuro. At the end you’re essentially using the same stuff, in a more or less convenient way. So yeah, I wouldn’t either pay for such a thing, but I appreciate non lucrative projects alike.

#8

I like that this method doesn’t require anything special.