Paper Mahjong: Learn Words

New: 20 languages. Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Polish and Turkish just joined - each with the full word set, offline.

A mahjong solitaire that quietly teaches you a language.

You can start from nothing at all. No alphabet, no script, nothing to memorise first - one tile shows a picture, its partner shows the word, and matching the two is the whole lesson. Three to five new words arrive each round, tucked in among ones you have already met, so a first session feels like a game rather than the first day of a class.

Every word can be read aloud in your phone's own voice, so you hear it as well as see it. And it goes as far as you want to take it: from your very first word up to university-level vocabulary, or the whole JLPT ladder if you are here for Japanese.

No quiz. No typing. No streak to protect. Just tiles, the way you would play solitaire on a quiet afternoon - except the words stay with you.

HOW IT WORKS Boards are dealt from the words you are studying. Miss a word and it comes back sooner. Get it right three times running and it steps back to make room for something new. That is the whole system: spaced repetition, hidden inside a tile game. Nothing to schedule, nothing to configure.

WORDS THAT GROW UP A new word arrives with its reading printed above it and its picture beside it. Once you know it, the reading quietly disappears. Later the tile turns face-down for a beat before it shows itself, so you have to remember rather than read. Later still it may arrive scrambled for you to piece together. Recognise, recall, rebuild - the word gets harder as you get better, and easier again the moment you slip.

20 LANGUAGES, ONE GAME Japanese, English, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Polish, Turkish, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Chinese and Russian. Each one carries over 8,500 words of its own, bundled in the app. Switch whenever you like - every language keeps its own progress, so a month of Spanish is still waiting when you come back from Japanese.

BOARDS THAT GROW WITH YOU Your first board is 36 tiles. As your vocabulary grows the boards grow with it - 72, 108, 144, all the way to 432. Hints and shuffles are there for when a board gets tight.

CHOOSE WHAT YOU STUDY First Words for the very beginning. The school ladder, from elementary to university. JLPT N5 through N1 for Japanese. The 500, 1,000 and 2,000 most common words. Or pick a scene and learn the words you would actually need there - a restaurant, a hospital, an airport, an office, a phone call.

YOUR WORD COLLECTION Every word you have met is kept, sorted by topic, in your own collection. Words you have cleared nine times turn gold. You can see what is still new, what is in review, and what has gone solid - and read back the whole list any time, in any language you have studied.

READING HELP WHERE IT IS NEEDED Japanese prints furigana above the kanji. Chinese prints pinyin. Turn it on always, off entirely, or leave it on Auto and let it fade as each word settles.

1,000 CLASSIC LEVELS When you just want mahjong, Play mode has 1,000 hand-laid levels waiting, with no studying attached. All of them are free.

QUIET BY DESIGN No streaks. No daily guilt. No leaderboards. No account to make, no email to hand over, nothing to sign up for. No banner ads and no pop-ups - the only ads are short videos you choose to watch to refill a hint, and you can ignore them forever. Everything works offline: the words, the pictures, the boards, the whole 8,500. On a plane, on a train, in a waiting room with no signal.

FREE AND PRO Free gives you the tile game, 1,000 levels, the starter study tracks, five scene packs and the full word collection. Paper Mahjong Pro is one payment, once, for the advanced study tracks, all 42 scene packs, JLPT N4 through N1, the full statistics record, and skill refills without watching anything. No subscription, and it works on every device signed in to your account.

Play it the way you would play solitaire: a few minutes at a time, for as long as you like. The words come with you.