Release Information

Learn kanji through visual equations, hear every day of the month in Lesson 7, see your own progress on the roadmap card, find worksheet verbs by their English meaning, and read the N5 exam practice more easily. NihongoTech Premium is now available.

What's new

• New: Kanji Mathematics - a page of kanji equations such as 木 + 木 = 林 and 木 + 木 + 木 = 森, with readings, romaji, meanings and a short explanation of each, and a note on whether it shows real structure or is only a memory aid. It has a card on the home page and on the Learn page.
• New: Lesson 7 has audio for every day of the month, at normal and slow speed, reading the hiragana.
• New: the roadmap card on the Learn page now shows your own progress, with a progress bar and a line such as "1 of 6 stages complete".
• New: NihongoTech Premium is available on the pricing page. It unlocks writing worksheets for JLPT N3, N2 and N1 kanji, kanji with no JLPT level, mixing levels and typing in your own kanji, for €3.99 a month. All kana worksheets and the N5 and N4 kanji worksheets stay free. If you subscribed less than 14 days ago, your profile page has a withdrawal request.
• New: on the reading practice page, a "Read aloud slowly" button plays the story at a slower speed and highlights each line as it is read.
• New: a "Show furigana" button on the reading practice stories writes the readings above the kanji, chosen for those exact sentences.
• New: each reading practice story now shows its JLPT level, how hard it is within that level, and the sentence form it uses, such as polite present with a 〜ています sentence.
• New: three more reading practice stories, in the past tense - 山のいい日, 母とりんご and 休みの日の本. Like the first three they are JLPT N5 and easy, with furigana, read-aloud and their sentence form shown.
• New: three more reading practice stories in the ～ています continuous form - 家の人と犬, 学校の先生 and みんなの今 - and every story now lists the grammar it uses, such as ～は, ～を and ～ています. The difficulty is colour-coded.
• New: six more reading practice stories - ～ません and ～ませんでした negatives, the ～て form linking two actions, and two built on adjective contrast (「not quiet, lively」, 「not hot, cold」) with both い- and な-adjectives. Stories are now labelled Easy or Medium.
• New: six more reading practice stories covering grammar the page was missing - ～あります/～います (what is where), ～たいです (want to), questions with か and their answers, ～ましょうか (shall we), ～ですから (because) and ～のがすきです (like doing).
• New lesson: Lesson 37.5 on ずつ - "each" and "at a time" with amounts, including why 一人で (alone) and 一人ずつ (one by one) are not the same thing.
• New lesson: Lesson 39.5 on wearing clothes - Japanese picks the verb by where on the body the item goes: 着る, はく, かぶる, かける, する and しめる, plus putting on versus wearing.
• New lesson: Lesson 59.5 on になる and ようになる - becoming something, a time or season arriving, and coming to do something.
• New: install NihongoTech as an app from your profile page - on a phone or a computer it opens in its own window with its own icon, and works offline with downloaded packs. On an iPhone or iPad the profile page shows the Add to Home Screen steps instead.
• Improved: on the conjugation page, a search that finds nothing now looks beyond your filters and tells you where the verb is, so you no longer need to know a verb's JLPT level to find it.
• Improved: the Blog card on the home page and the JLPT N5 exam practice card on the Practice page are marked as New.
• Improved: search no longer runs on a single letter, and waits 3 seconds after you stop typing (Enter searches at once).
• Improved: the practice question and answer choices on the N5 exam preparation guide are larger and easier to read.
• Improved: on the worksheets page, the verb picker finds verbs by their English meaning, and a new level on the kanji usage worksheet starts at page 1.
• Fixed: selecting a single JLPT level on the kanji worksheets no longer adds the N5 starter kanji to it.
• Improved: the question navigation on the N5 practice quiz no longer covers the question, Kanji Roulette shows romaji next to the readings, and the quiz difficulty cards have a Start button.
• Fixed: a kanji with no recorded meaning is now titled by the kanji itself instead of "X (undefined)".
• Fixed: on the N5 exam guide, a flashcard that appears in two modules now reveals on its own.
• Improved: pages load faster, especially blog articles.
• Improved: on the profile page, the subscription area now says what to do next when you have no subscription.