Getting Started with Niho: Your First Japanese Book

It is tempting, the first time you open a Japanese reader, to search for Natsume Sōseki and download Kokoro. Kokoro is a wonderful book. It is not a good first book. This post walks through the first evening with Niho in the order I would do it myself: pick something short, download it, find a reading view you like, look up a word, and let the quiz bring it back.

What Is Niho?

Niho is a free Japanese reader for iPhone and iPad. The catalogue of Aozora Bunko, more than 17,000 works that are out of copyright in Japan, ships inside the app. You download the books you want, and from then on the text, the dictionary, your word book and the quizzes all work without a connection. There are no ads, no in-app purchases and no account.

Step 1: Open Discover and Start at the Top

The Discover tab has shelves for children’s stories, folk tales, fiction, mysteries, science fiction, essays, poetry and translations. Above them are two shelves of our own. Most read comes from Aozora Bunko’s own access ranking. Start here is thirty short, plainly written classics, placed roughly in order of difficulty.

Take the first book on Start here, or one of the first few. They are short enough to finish in an evening or two, and finishing matters more than anything else in the first week. A finished short story teaches you that you can do this. An abandoned novel teaches you the opposite.

Search works too, by title or author in kanji, kana or romaji, and it needs no signal because the whole catalogue is on the device.

Step 2: Download the Book

Tap a book and you get its detail screen: the author, the length, how often it is read on Aozora Bunko, and whether the edition uses modern spelling. Some editions are in old kana spelling. Those are marked Old kana, and the genre shelves leave them out, because historical spelling defeats a learner’s dictionary lookups. If you see that label, pick a different book for now.

Tap Download to my library. The app fetches the book straight from Aozora Bunko, finds the chapters, and puts it on your shelf. This is the only step that needs a connection.

Step 3: Choose How to Read

Niho has three reading views, and you can switch between them at any time.

Pages turns like a Kindle. Swipe, or tap the margins, to turn the page. When a chapter ends, the next page is simply the first page of the next chapter.

Scroll is one continuous column, with a Next chapter button at the bottom.

Chat sends the chapter one sentence at a time, like a conversation, with quoted dialogue on the right. It sounds like a gimmick. For a learner it is often the most useful view, because one sentence at a time is exactly the size of reading that does not feel like a wall.

All three share your place, down to the sentence. Read a few pages in Pages, switch to Chat when it gets hard, and you carry on from the same line.

The Aa button opens the reading settings: type size, line spacing, margins, Mincho or Gothic, and four page colours. The default line spacing is generous on purpose, because the furigana sits in the space above each line.

Step 4: Look Up Your First Word

Long-press a word. The system’s own selection appears, and the toolbar above it offers Look up, Speak, Copy, Jisho and Translate. Tap Look up.

Japanese has no spaces, so your selection will rarely be exactly one word, and that is fine. Niho tries every run of characters starting from the beginning of your selection and shows the longest word the dictionary knows first, with the shorter ones behind it. Select 先生一人 and you get 先生, with 先 as a second option.

Inflected forms are undone for you, and the app shows how it got there: 食べました becomes 食べる, with the steps named. The entry shows the senses by part of speech, the JLPT level, whether it is a common word, and a breakdown of each kanji with its meanings, readings, school grade and stroke count. The definitions are in English, from JMdict. If you want them in your own language, the Translate button sends the word to Google Translate in an in-app sheet, and that part does need a connection.

Step 5: Let the Furigana Do Its Job

Furigana appears exactly where the source edition printed it. Children’s books mark most kanji. Adult fiction marks only the hard ones. This is one more reason to start on the Start here shelf rather than with a novel: the books there tend to carry more readings.

When you no longer need them, turn Show furigana off in the reading settings.

Step 6: Check the Word Book

Every word you look up is saved to the Words tab automatically, with its reading, its meaning and the sentence you met it in. That last part is the important one. A word attached to a sentence you actually read is far easier to remember than a word on a list.

The JLPT N5 to N1 vocabulary lists are in the same tab, if you want to see where your words sit.

Step 7: Take the First Quiz Tomorrow

The Quiz tab builds questions from your own words: fill in the blank using the real sentence from the book, word to meaning, meaning to word, and reading, where you type the kana for a kanji word. Words move through a five-box Leitner schedule. Get one right and it waits longer before coming back. Miss it and it comes back sooner.

There is not much to quiz on the first evening. Read, look things up, and open the Quiz tab tomorrow. The default daily goal is twenty answers, which is a few minutes.

What to Expect in the First Week

Honestly, the first book will be slow. Many lookups per page is normal at the start, and the number goes down faster than you expect, because the same words keep coming back in the same author’s prose.

One limit worth knowing now: Niho lays text out horizontally, left to right. Aozora Bunko’s books were printed vertically, and Flutter, which the app is built with, cannot set vertical text yet. I would rather tell you that here than have you discover it on page one.

Where to Go Next

Once the first book is open, see how Niho compares with other ways to read, pick up practical tips for daily reading, or see who the app is for. All related posts are collected under the Niho tag.

Pick the first book on the Start here shelf and read the first page tonight.