Alternatives
Products that do what Shirukan does
Retro kanji lookup with furigana, strokes & X-Ray
- 1

- 2CA
May 2026 · ezfurigana.com
- 3

- 4

- 5

- 6IM
The idea is actually quite simple. As a Japanese learner and a coder, I've always wanted there to be an open-source, 100% free for learning Japanese, similar to Monkeytype in the typing community. Unfortunately, pretty much all language learning apps are closed-sourced and paid these days, and the ones that are free have unfortunately been abandoned. But of course, just creating yet another language learning app was not enough - there has to be a unique selling point. And then I thought to myself: why not make it crazy and do what no other language learning app ever did by adding a gazillion…
2025 · kanadojo.com
- 7

- 8
- 9

- 10

- 11QQWANJI▲174
Hey HN! I've built this bit of cuteware (software not solving a problem but just for fun) inspired from the patterns made by swipe typing on mobile devices. To me it seemed like the closest thing to an English version of Kanji and it would be cool to consistently recreate those patterns. The implementation is vanilla js to keep things simple (and from a bit of framework fatigue) I'm keen to see how people use qwanji. Any and all feedback welcome!
2024 · byronicalpatrick.github.io
- 12LJ
Hi HN, Just wanted to share a tool i've been working on to help with my own study routine. It’s a browser extension called Lingoku. The idea is simple: we spend hours browsing the web in English every day. This tool replaces some of the english words with Japanese vocabulary based on your japanese level (Similar to Toucan, but with a better user experience). It’s basically an attempt to make the "i+1" method actually passive, you understand the sentence because it's mostly english, but you pick up Japanese words naturally from the context. It uses an LLM in the backend to make sure the…
Dec 2025 · lingoku.ai
- 13

- 14

- 15

- 16

- 17

- 18AF
I'm a long time lurker that recently quit my job to work on my own projects, a lot due to the inspiration from Hacker News. Now I have published my first serious project, an app for learning how to write Japanese characters. It's the app I always wanted but couldn't find when I was studying. It tries to be simple to use, you just start the quiz and go with the flow. There's no need to plan and manage your studies, and it uses spaced repetition for better retention. There's a promo page with more details up at http://www.kanjibyhand.com. It's only for Android so far. The free version includes…
2012
- 19

- 20

- 21

- 22DB
Hi HN I built this app while learning Japanese kanji after struggling to find a tool that showed how kanji are structurally connected through their graphical components. The core feature is a recursive DAG-style component graph (“Kanji Atlas”) that breaks kanji down layer by layer into radicals and graphemes, so you can visually explore how characters are constructed and related to one another. Demo at https://mykanji.app/components/kanji/鬱 I also built in a lot of my own opinions about how a learning tool should feel and work. Some features: 1. A kanji memory…
May 2026 · mykanji.app
- 23

- 24JJ
I was talking with a friend (@finnvoid) about how we could make it easier to practice their hiragana and katakana reading while they are living in Japan. After some quick basic idea-crafting with Gemini, they took it and ran with to, building "Jordle" a Wordle-esque tool to help them (and you) learn your furigana. Playing is easy, your goal is to transliterate the shown characters into the romaji (romanization). Pick between the two character sets (hiragana and katakana) or both to practice. Data is local to the device, so it's pretty snappy and technically works offline. We'll probably be…
Dec 2025 · jordle.io
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →