Yonda: Read Real Japanese

Photograph a page of the manga on your shelf. Yonda finds the words you don't know, teaches them, and won't translate until you can read it yourself.

You didn't start learning Japanese to clear flashcards. You started because there's something you want to read.

Yonda's Scan & Read turns that something — the manga volume on your shelf, a novel, a menu, a street sign, a newspaper — into your curriculum. Photograph up to five pages. Yonda reads them (vertical text, furigana, real reading order), checks every word against what you already know, and builds a lesson out of only the kanji and vocabulary YOU are missing. You study it with serious spaced repetition, pass a 100% comprehension exam, and then read your own pages — furigana you can toggle, a tap-gloss on every word colored by your mastery, and translations that unlock only after you've proven you don't need them.

That last part matters. Translation apps read Japanese FOR you, which is why you can point a camera at manga for years and never learn to read. Yonda refuses to do the reading until you can.

HOW IT WORKS

1. Photograph real Japanese — up to 5 pages per scan.
2. Fix any misreads in a 30-second review. The OCR is good; you make it perfect.
3. Yonda diagnoses the gap: exactly which kanji and words you don't know yet, based on your own study history.
4. Study a lesson built from just that gap. Wrong answers get an explanation on the spot, not a red X.
5. Pass a clean-sweep exam. 100%, no partial credit.
6. Read your pages. They join your My Scans shelf — a growing library of real Japanese you've conquered.

Words from your scans keep coming back in long-term reviews, so what you read stays read.

THE ENGINE UNDERNEATH Yonda is a full Japanese course, not just a scanner. • Kana, kanji, vocabulary, and grammar on a path from zero to N1. N5 is polished today; higher levels are in active development. • FSRS spaced repetition — reviews arrive when you're about to forget, not on a corporate schedule. • Wrong-answer options drawn from real confusability data, never random, so tests actually test. • AI conversation practice for when you want to use what you've learned.

WHAT YOU WON'T FIND • No streak guilt. No hearts, no lives, no mascot crying at you. • No ads, anywhere. • No selling or sharing your data. Scan photos live in a private bucket, visible only to you, and are deleted when you delete the scan.

Honest limits: scanning needs an internet connection, and you should know kana before your first scan (the free N5 course starts there). Japanese is hard. Yonda doesn't pretend otherwise — it just makes every hour count.

Free: the full N5 course plus one trial scan, forever. Pro is coming soon.

Questions and bug reports are read by a human — support@irons.la.