Niho: Read Real Japanese Books

Read whole Japanese books from Aozora Bunko, with furigana, an offline dictionary, and a word book that fills itself. Free, with no account.

What is Niho?

Niho is a reader for people who learn Japanese by reading a lot of it. Textbooks give you passages. At some point you want a whole book, and a Japanese book is hard to finish when every other line sends you off to a dictionary app and back.

So the books and the dictionary live in the same place. Aozora Bunko's catalogue of more than 17,000 public domain works ships inside the app. Download one and the whole book is on your device. From then on the text, the dictionary, your word book and the quizzes all work without a connection.

Long-press a word, tap Look up, and the meaning appears over the page. The word is saved with the sentence you found it in, and it comes back in a quiz a few days later, just before you would have forgotten it.

Screenshots

iPhone

iPad

What's Inside

Whole Books, Not Textbook Excerpts

Natsume Sōseki, Miyazawa Kenji, Dazai Osamu, Akutagawa, Japanese folk tales and thousands more, complete and free of copyright in Japan.

Start here: thirty short, plainly written classics, roughly in order of difficulty, so a first book is one you can actually finish
Shelves for children's stories, folk tales, fiction, mysteries, essays, poetry and translations
Search by title or author in kanji, kana or romaji, even offline
Editions in old kana spelling are marked before you download them

Furigana Where the Edition Prints It

Readings sit in small kana above the kanji, exactly where the source edition put them. Children's books mark most kanji. Adult fiction marks only the hard ones. When you are ready, switch them off.

Three Ways to Read

Pages that turn like a Kindle, one continuous scroll, or a chat view where the chapter arrives one sentence at a time. Your place is shared across all three, so you can switch mid-chapter and carry on from the same sentence.

Type size, line spacing, margins, Mincho or Gothic, and four page colors
Next chapter is one page turn away

A Dictionary That Is Already There

JMdict and KANJIDIC2 are bundled, so a lookup is instant and needs no signal.

Senses grouped by part of speech, with JLPT level and common-word badges
A kanji breakdown: meanings, on and kun readings, school grade and stroke count
Inflections undo themselves: 食べました finds 食べる, 勉強した finds 勉強
Japanese has no spaces, so a rough selection is fine. The longest word starting there comes first, shorter ones follow
Any word or passage can be read aloud by the system's Japanese voice

A Word Book That Fills Itself

Every word you look up is saved with its reading, its meaning and the sentence you met it in. The JLPT N5 to N1 vocabulary lists are included too.

Quizzes From Your Own Reading

Questions are built from the words you actually looked up, and a five-box Leitner schedule brings the ones you miss back sooner.

Fill in the blank, using the real sentence from the book
Word to meaning, and meaning to word
Reading: type the kana for a kanji word

Free, Offline, No Account

Niho is free. There are no ads, no in-app purchases, and no account to create.

Start with a Short Book

Pick one from the Start here shelf, download it, and read the first page. Most of them take an evening or two.

Download on the App Store

Book text from Aozora Bunko. Dictionary data from JMdict and KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0). JLPT word lists by Jonathan Waller (tanos.co.uk).