Launching today
Toku Reader
Read & listen to native Japanese and Chinese, tap any word
50 followers
Read & listen to native Japanese and Chinese, tap any word
50 followers
Toku turns native Japanese and Chinese — articles, novels, podcasts, and YouTube videos — into something you can actually read. Tap any word for its reading, meaning, and dictionary, without leaving the page. On audio and video you get a synced, word-tappable transcript: tap to learn, slow it down, replay a line, or pause after each sentence to shadow it back. It runs its own JP/CN engine on-device with offline dictionaries — fast, private, no accounts, no streaks. Just reading.
The on-device offline dictionary part is what stands out to me, most language tools want you online for lookups. On the Chinese side specifically, word segmentation is the hard part since there are no spaces to tell you where one word ends and the next begins, and it's easy to tap-split a compound wrong. Also curious whether it handles both simplified and traditional, since a lot of Chinese content someone might paste in (Taiwan sites, older text) is traditional even if the learner studied simplified.
@galdayan Hello Gal, thank you for the comment. To answer your question, yes, the app supports both simplified and traditional Chinese. The segmentation of languages like Chinese is indeed very difficult given the lack of spaces, polyphones and multiple readings of same characters. While no deterministic, fully offline parser can get it 100% accurate, my app has built in redundancies, e.g., offering alternative ways to parse characters to allow the reader to get at the meaning faster through context clues (see screenshot). Hope this helps!
how does it handle the furigana lookup for kanji compounds that have multiple readings depending on context, like 当て字 or rare names?
@cafer441121 Hello Cafer! Thanks for the comment! While my app has an offline engine that parses the context for kanji with multiple meanings and offers the most likely reading in a context, I admit that a fully offline engine will not be 100% accurate. To account for this, in the pop-up, I also allows the reader to see variants of the reading (see screenshot), and they can see if other readings make more sense given the context.
the synced word-tappable transcript for podcasts and youtube is the part i'd want to stress test before trusting it. japanese in particular has a ton of homophones and casual speech drops particles constantly, so an on-device engine transcribing real conversational audio (not clean narration) seems like the hard part. does it show any confidence signal when it's guessing on a mumbled or fast line, or does it just silently give you its best guess as if it were certain
the "tap any word on a youtube video or podcast" part is the bit that matters. most immersion apps make you leave the content to look something up, which kills the flow and the motivation right when you had it. keeping the lookup in place on real native material (novels, podcasts, video) is how people actually stick with a language instead of grinding flashcards. congrats on the launch.
@alex_watson2110 Thank you Alex! Yes, that's the motivation, and I want to create something that truly helps people understand "in flow". I will keep working on this app, and truly try to make this something that helps Japanese and Chinese learners!