YoMoo puts furigana on every kanji and the dictionary one tap away. This is what that looks like on a real Japanese news article. Free on Android and in your browser — no sign-up needed.
The video covers this in 80 seconds. Here it is in plain terms.
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Furigana appears automatically. JLPT color-coding on each word shows you at a glance whether it's N5 vocabulary you should already know, or an N1 term you have never seen before and can safely skip.
The dictionary popup shows the reading, definition, part of speech, and JLPT level without leaving the article. Save the word, then keep reading. You don't lose the sentence.
Saved words go into a personal vocabulary list you can filter by JLPT level. Run a quiz on your N3 words, flip through flashcards, or export the whole list to AnkiDroid or CSV.
The problem most intermediate learners run into is not reading speed. It is the interruption cost. You hit 経済産業 (keizai sangyō) in the middle of a sentence, you don't know if the reading is けいざいさんぎょう or something irregular, and you leave the article to check. By the time you come back, the sentence is cold. That is the loop YoMoo is designed to break.
This demo was recorded on an Android device running YoMoo v1.2.9. It walks through the core reading session: opening a live Japanese news article, reading with furigana, looking up a word without leaving the page, turning on text-to-speech, and switching to the pre-simplified version of the same article.
A lot of Japanese reading apps annotate their own curated content beforehand. YoMoo does its own morphological analysis each time you open an article. This matters because Japanese is context-sensitive. The character 上 reads as じょう (jō) in 上司 (jōshi, "supervisor") and as うえ (ue) when it stands alone. Pre-annotated apps get this right when their editors caught it. YoMoo's analysis runs on the actual sentence structure.
The same engine runs on anything you bring in: text you paste, a URL you point at, a PDF you upload, a DOCX file, or text you scan with the camera. OCR runs on-device. No internet needed for that part.
In the demo, you see a word tapped mid-sentence. The popup shows the kanji spelling, the hiragana reading, the English definition, the part of speech, and a JLPT level badge. That last piece is more useful than it sounds. Knowing that a word is N1 vocabulary tells you it's worth noting but maybe not worth stopping for. Knowing it's N3 tells you it belongs in your review queue.
The dictionary has 170,000+ entries and is cached locally after the first download. Lookups are instant. They work offline. You do not need to be on the train platform with service.
The TTS section of the demo shows sentence-by-sentence highlighting as the audio plays. On Android, YoMoo uses the device's native Japanese TTS voice. This is worth specifying because the quality gap between Android's native Japanese engine and browser-based alternatives is real. If you have tried listening to Japanese TTS through a web app and found it mechanical or hard to follow, the Android version reads differently.
You can use this for passive listening on a commute, or you can treat it as a dictation exercise: listen to a sentence, pause, try to write it, then check. Neither use requires you to leave the article.
Not every article is accessible at every level. A Politics article written for native readers might have grammar patterns you have not encountered and vocabulary well above N3. YoMoo pre-processes every news article into a simplified version rewritten at approximately N4-N5 difficulty. Shorter sentences, more common vocabulary, same news content.
One tap switches between original and simplified. Both versions get furigana, dictionary lookups, and TTS. A reasonable approach is to read the simplified version first for comprehension, then read the original to see where the difficulty was. Or skip the simplified entirely once your level gets there. The button does not go away.
The demo focuses on the news reading loop. YoMoo also includes JLPT practice passages from N5 through N1, Aozora Bunko classic Japanese literature, a spaced-repetition vocabulary system with quiz and flashcard modes, and direct Anki and CSV export. All of that is free. No account required.
If you are on iOS or prefer not to install an app, the YoMoo web analyzer runs the same furigana engine and dictionary in your browser. Paste any Japanese text, a URL, or drop in a PDF. It works on any device.
Download YoMoo on Google Play, or open the web analyzer right now and paste any Japanese text. Furigana in seconds either way.