Practical Tips for Reading Japanese with Niho

Niho does one thing: it lets you read a whole Japanese book without leaving it for a dictionary. Whether that turns into a habit depends less on the app than on how you use it in the gaps of an ordinary day. These are the things I would tell a friend who had just installed it. Take the ones that fit and ignore the rest.

Finish Short Books Before Long Ones

The Start here shelf exists for a reason. Thirty short, plainly written classics, roughly in order of difficulty. Read three of them before you open a novel.

Finishing is a skill of its own, and it is built on short books. Each one you complete makes the next one feel possible. A long novel abandoned at chapter three does the opposite, and it is a very common way for a reading habit to end.

Use Chat View When a Chapter Gets Hard

The Chat view sends the chapter one sentence at a time, with dialogue on the right, each new line typing itself out. When a page in the Pages view looks like a wall of kanji, switch to Chat. Your place carries over, so you continue from the same sentence.

One sentence at a time is a very different experience from a full page. You read it, look up what you need, and only then ask for the next one. Reading hard chapters in Chat and easy ones in Pages is exactly what the switch is for.

Do Not Aim Your Selection Too Carefully

Japanese has no spaces, and Niho knows it. Long-press roughly where the word starts, and Look up will try every run of characters from the start of your selection, putting the longest dictionary word first and shorter ones behind it.

So spend your attention on the book, not on dragging handles to the exact character. If the first answer is not the word you meant, the shorter candidates are right there.

Read the Deinflection Line

When you look up a conjugated verb or adjective, the entry shows how the app got to the dictionary form: 食べました to 食べる, with the steps named. It is easy to skip past this line. Try not to.

After a few weeks of reading those lines, you start doing the same unpicking in your head before you tap. That is grammar learned from real sentences, and it sticks better than a table.

Turn Off Saving When You Are Only Checking

By default every lookup is saved to the word book. That is right most of the time. But sometimes you look up a word you already know, just to confirm a reading, and then it sits in your quiz pile.

In Settings you can turn off Save every lookup. You might turn it off while rereading a book you know well, and back on for a new one. You can also save a single word by hand from the dictionary sheet, and remove words from the word book at any time.

Use the Reading Quiz

Of the four quiz types, reading is the easiest to skip, and the one I would keep. You see a kanji word and type its reading in kana. The hint shows the first kana or two, and either the whole reading or just the missing part counts as right.

Meaning questions tell you whether you understand a word. Reading questions tell you whether you could say it, and whether you would recognise it spoken. It is the fastest way I know to make furigana unnecessary.

Keep the Daily Goal Small

The default goal is twenty quiz answers a day, which takes a few minutes. You can change it in Settings. I would resist raising it early.

A small goal that you meet every day does more than a large one you meet twice a week. The Leitner schedule is built on regular return visits, and the words you miss come back sooner only if you come back too.

Let the Phone Read Aloud, at a Slower Speed

Select a word or a whole passage and tap Speak, and the system’s Japanese voice reads it. The speaking speed is adjustable in Settings. Try it slower than normal at first.

Listening to a sentence you have just read, at a pace you can follow, connects the text to the sound. It is also useful for names and place names, whose readings are often not what you would guess.

Download a Few Books Before You Travel

Everything works offline once a book is on your device, but the download itself needs a connection. Before a long flight or a trip into the mountains, download two or three books, not just the one you are reading. Nothing is more annoying than finishing a book at thirty thousand feet with nothing queued.

Turn Furigana Off Gradually

Furigana appears where the source edition put it, and you can switch it off under the Aa button. Do not rush this. A good point to try is when you find you are reading past the furigana rather than with it. If a chapter goes badly without it, switch it back on. There is no score for bravery.

Where to Go Next

If you are still setting up, start with the getting started guide. To see how Niho compares with other ways to read Japanese, read Niho vs other apps, or see who the app is for. All related posts are under the Niho tag.

Pick one of these to try this week. Chat view on a hard chapter is a good place to start.