When I started learning Japanese almost three years ago, I started by reading some blog articles and watching some videos on how to get started. I learned about Anki, Koohii, Genki, Marugoto, Tofugu, and many other sites, books and learning methods. I watched videos about how important flashcards are, how you absolutely have to learn over 2000 kanji by heart to read a simple news article, and about a surprisingly vast amount of counter words for anything and everything.
And I hadn't even started learning anything myself yet.
So I started doing the recommended stuff (except flashcards, I don't like them too much), and slowly started progressing. First with simple news articles, Duolingo, the usual. I also tried immersion, surrounding yourself with as much Japanese content as possible — preferably content that's just a bit too difficult to understand yet. (I even spent half of my savings on a "Harry Potter" book in Japanese, which ended up way too difficult for my level.)
So I did this stuff, and with time, it did work! You can learn Japanese this way. It means using multiple resources, researching the most effective learning methods for you, spending half of your time on Shirabe Jisho or Takoboto looking up words you don't know (or don't remember). Last year, I passed JLPT N4 in Berlin with what I had learned this way.
But doesn't this mean — if you can learn Japanese just fine with the classic resources, then you don't need Nekonbini? That's right. You don't. The same way you don't need the internet to find the hotel, since you can just use a good old paper map to do it. It's just more of a struggle than it needs to be.
While learning Japanese the "old way" in the past years, I discovered multiple things that annoyed me, and sometimes actively stopped me from continuing. They break down into these categories:
Reading
Honestly, starting to read Japanese is a pain. More precisely, kanji is. How are you supposed to read a text, when it expects you to know about 2000 kun- and on-readings off the top of your head? The solution is as simple as tedious: look them up in the dictionary by drawing them. Which is quite the struggle on a laptop, so you'll be using your phone. Well, now you're always carrying your phone in one hand while trying to read basically any Japanese text.
And while there are furigana (the little kana above the kanji telling you how they're pronounced), they're rare enough and get only rarer as your level increases. Also, furigana are a bit like subtitles — when they're there, you're reading them. You can't really avoid it. They're helpful, but can slow down your learning rate, since you don't have to actually read the kanji all the time.
Speaking of which:
Kanji
I like kanji! So much that I learned all 2045 from the 5th edition of RTK ("Remembering the Kanji" by James Heisig). I learned them by coming up with a simple "story" involving their components, so-called mnemonics. I added my stories on the (very good) site kanji.koohii.com, and (according to the stats) practiced them over 20,000 times in daily reviews. Yeah.
Unfortunately, Koohii had no way to actually draw the kanji on the website, so I built the habit of hand-drawing them on paper every time that I reviewed them — resulting in a college block with enough pages filled with kanji to redecorate my walls, probably. But it also meant sitting down at home every day drawing 40, 50, 60 kanji on paper, after work. And I didn't even notice when I was starting to draw some of them wrong, since nobody was there to tell me.
AI
When I started learning Japanese, AI was not yet very usable for learning the language. While you could ask it about grammar concepts or unknown words, it wasn't always very clear whether the answer it gave you was actually right or not.
And while opinions about AI still strongly diverge depending on who you talk to, the fact is that AI is now a very useful tool for learning Japanese. It can help you understand not only complex sentences or unknown grammar structures, but also idioms or dialects that you would simply not find in a dictionary at all. But learning with AI chatbots is still limited by the AI not remembering what you already know and what you don't ("please don't use romaji!"), its missing context on who you are ("explain for N3 level learner") and what you're looking at ("explain this sentence I found in a video about..."). That friction alone sometimes stops me from actually looking stuff up in practice.
And there we are. You might have experienced these problems in your learning routines too. And since this is an article on Nekonbini you might be guessing what comes next.
One Nekonbini to rule them all!
Take all of the points above, combine them into one unified learning app, and there you have it — Nekonbini! Initially created as an "add furigana to text" web app for me and my girlfriend, it quickly developed further and further as a private project.
"It'd be awesome if you could just select a bunch of text and an AI would explain it, but like actually in context" — it was awesome.
"Imagine if you could draw the kanji on the page with live feedback!" — I imagined, and liked it.
And I imagined something else, too. That after months of using Nekonbini in private, why not publish it? After all, you might like it, too.
The core idea of Nekonbini is to have it all in one place. But not only as a simple record — your learning progress is crucial to figure out how to present new material, and how to stop you from forgetting what you already learned. Nekonbini uses your learned stories, kanji, vocabulary, JLPT level, ... across the app's components to tailor the site to you. And it always has an in-context AI teacher ready to ask, no need to switch apps and write long prompts. It's just there. It's easy, for once.
Nekonbini launched in May 2026 at nekonbini.com. Here's what's actually in it:
- Adaptive furigana that show up only for kanji you don't already know — driven by a custom 2-step machine learning pipeline that adds accurate readings to any Japanese text.
- Live kanji handwriting practice with stroke-by-stroke feedback, powered by a 100% custom-built recognition engine — no more wondering whether you drew it right.
- An in-context AI teacher that knows your level, what you've learned, and what you're currently looking at — no more rewriting the same context prompt every time you ask a question.
- Fully translated to over 10 languages, so non-English-speaking learners aren't stuck reading their lessons in a language that isn't their own.
- Free-forever core: the integrated learning experience doesn't require a subscription. AI features and handwriting training are on a paid tier if you want them — but you certainly don't have to.
Japanese is definitely one of the hardest, if not the hardest language to learn as a foreign language. And having to use a mountain of different sites, books and methods that don't really interoperate makes it even more of a mess. That's what Nekonbini is for. Learning will not magically get easy, it will still be hard. But at least, it'll be the language that's hard, not the process.