Reading a single word in Japanese is easy with a dictionary. But what about a whole sentence? Today we’re excited to introduce Sentence analysis, a new tool that breaks down any Japanese sentence word by word, so you can finally understand not just what it means, but how it’s put together.

🔍 What is Sentence analysis?

Paste or type any Japanese sentence — kanji, hiragana, katakana, or a mix of all three — and JapanDict splits it into its individual words automatically. Each word is tagged with:

• Its part of speech (noun, verb, particle, adjective…), color-coded so you can see the sentence’s grammar at a glance
• Its reading in hiragana and romaji
• A direct link to its full dictionary entry, when one exists

It’s perfect for that line from a book, a game, a song, or a message from a friend that you can almost read, but not quite.

🎯 Try it yourself

Head over to japandict.com/sentence and paste in any sentence you like. Not sure where to start? Click one of the example sentences right below the search box to see it in action immediately.

🧪 It’s in beta

Sentence analysis is brand new, so you’ll see a βeta tag next to the title for now. Japanese grammar has plenty of edge cases, and we’re still smoothing things out — if you spot a sentence that doesn’t break down quite right, we’d love to know.

Have feedback, suggestions, or just want to chat about it? Head over to our community at forum.japandict.com. We’d love to hear from you.

ありがとうございます！ 🔍📚

We’re always looking for new ways to help you learn Japanese vocabulary every day, and today we’re excited to announce that JapanDict is now on Bluesky! 🎉

You can find us at @japandict.bsky.social.

🦋 Why Bluesky?

Bluesky has been growing fast, and we know many of you have already made the move there. We didn’t want you to miss your daily dose of Japanese vocabulary just because you switched platforms! Whether you’re a long-time follower or just discovering JapanDict, Bluesky is one more place where we can learn Japanese together.

📅 What to expect

Just like on our other social channels, we’ll be posting a new Japanese word every day, kanji, hiragana or katakana, romaji, and the English translation. Short, simple, and effective. A tiny habit that adds up over time.

🌐 Follow us everywhere

Can’t get enough Japanese vocabulary? We’re also active on:

• 🐦 Twitter/X: @learnkanji
• 📘 Facebook: facebook.com/japandict
• ✈️ Telegram: t.me/Learn_Japanese

Pick your favourite platform or follow us on all of them!

💬 Join the conversation

Have feedback, suggestions, or just want to chat about Japanese? Head over to our community at forum.japandict.com. We’d love to hear from you.

ありがとうございます！ 🦋📚

We’re excited to announce that the “Search Kanji by Drawing” feature has officially graduated from beta!

Since we first launched this feature back in April 2022, we’ve been continuously improving the recognition accuracy and expanding the range of kanji that can be detected. Today, we’re happy to share that the drawing search now recognizes
2,206 different kanji characters – making it even more useful for your Japanese learning journey.

🆕 Newly supported kanji

In this latest update, we’ve added support for 85 additional kanji characters that weren’t previously recognized. These include common names, place names, and characters you might encounter in everyday Japanese:

吾 朋 昌 旭 亘 只 頁 肌 勺 汐 砂 填 圭 鯉 林 桂 柏 梢 杏 桐 沫 荻 王 銑 辻 敬 幌 嬌 匕 蝶 独 進 曰 描 掲 乃 允 裳 敢 徳 街 数 笠 笹 篭 匁 勿 伊 漕 散 廿 之 智 弘 猪 渚 阿 窪 苑 酉 梓 摯 菱 亥 椿 錘 栗 楠 枢 彦 亜 蒲 航 瓜 函 脹 烏 蔦 鳩 薦 寅 辰 丑 卯 巳

This expansion means you can now draw kanji from Japanese names like 桂 (Katsura), 梓 (Azusa), and 楠 (Kusunoki), or look up characters you encounter in place names and classical texts.

🖌️ Try it out!

The kanji drawing search is available right from the https://www.japandict.com/. Just click on the brush icon next to the search box and start drawing!

We hope this improvement makes JapanDict even more helpful for your Japanese studies. If you have any feedback or encounter any issues, please let us know in the https://forum.japandict.com/.

ありがとうございます！ 📚

Image by freepik

It’s been a while since our last update, but instead of doing summer vacations, we’ve been very busy working on some new features and improvements in japandict.com! We hope you like them.

🖌️ Kanji user lists

Since we added the user lists feature, many people requested the possibility to add kanji. Although this feature was planned since the beginning, it was not ready when we launched it.

We’ve been working hard to deliver this feature as soon as possible, and we’re very happy to present it now! When you create a new user list, it’s now possible to add both words and kanji in the same list.

🗣️ Collocations and expressions

Collocations are words that are normally used together and sound natural to a native speaker. For example, if you want to say “to have a bath”, the natural expression would be お風呂に入る.

Selected words now have a new section called “Collocations and expressions” which contain a list of collocations and expressions using that word. We believe that this could be a very useful tool to learn how to sound more natural to native speakers.

Some examples:

• お風呂
• 耳
• 友達
• だ

🔖 New categories and tags

JMDict, the parent project where JapanDict takes most of it’s content, has added some new categories to classify words. As usual, we’ve also implemented these changes and are now ready to be used.

Some of the new categories:

• Cards – Terms used in card games such as poker, etc.
• Kabuki – Terms used in kabuki, a classical form of Japanese drama.
• Greek mythology – Words used in the ancient Greek mythology.
• and more…

Also, some categories have been renamed:

• The “obscure” category (#obs tag) has been renamed to #rare and all the words have been migrated there.
• Language tags have new names to avoid clashes with other tags from different categories. From now on, they will have the suffix “_lang” added to them. For example: #eng will be #eng_lang.

🧑‍🎓 New JLPT word lists

Some inaccuracies in the JLPT vocabulary lists were reported in the forum, and after some investigation we realized that the algorithm that is inserting this data into the system, was not able to detect the proper words correctly. After some manual tuning, we’ve finally fixed these flaws and now the lists are better than ever! Check them out:

• Japanese JLPT Level N5 vocabulary
• Japanese JLPT Level N4 vocabulary
• Japanese JLPT Level N3 vocabulary
• Japanese JLPT Level N2 vocabulary
• Japanese JLPT Level N1 vocabulary

🐛 Other small improvements and bugfixes

As usual, we also have a big list of small changes and improvements that were done since our last update:

• Improvement: Dark mode doesn’t show a “white flash” any more when switching pages.
• Improvement: Lists of user lists are now paginated.
• Improvement: Database optimizations to make the site faster and more responsive.
• Improvement: Implemented search only forms in kanji and readings.
• Improvement: Added some antispam measures in the JapanDict forum.
• Improvement: Added “gloss type” from JMDict in some glosses. Example: のぞみ
• Cosmetic: Small improvements in dark mode theme.
• Bugfix: auto-redirect in kanji can now be disabled.
• Bugfix: user registration was crashing when username had kanji or kana characters. It’s now showing a warning that these characters cannot be used.
• Bugfix: Usernames that contained a dot or that were shorter than 3 characters were failing in the forum.
• Bugfix: “order by” in lists of user created lists was not working properly.
• Bugfix: Showing the “not found” page instead of an error when a user list doesn’t exist.

Discuss in the forum

Image by JapanDict, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.