About
A cozy corner for learning Japanese.
Nihongo Circle is a small, free place to learn Japanese — every feature, no paywall, no exceptions — built for the long, lovely road from your first あ to the JLPT N5, and beyond. No grind for grind’s sake. Just good tools, a bit of warmth, and the quiet thrill of a language slowly clicking into place.
Why this exists
Years ago, the best way to fall in love with Japanese wasn’t a polished app — it was scrappy, generous, personal stuff. A free grammar guide written by someone who clearly cared. A textbook with two friendly cartoon characters. A blog by someone living the dream in Tokyo, sharing the everyday magic of it. None of it nagged you. It just made you want to keep going.
That’s the feeling we’re chasing. Nihongo Circle is the modern version of that corner of the internet — the spaced repetition, the dictionary, the games, the mock exam, all in one place — but kept friendly, calm, and yours.
Free, and no paywall
Every feature is free — the lessons, the review, the games, the mock exam, all of it — and nothing is ever locked behind a subscription. You can use almost everything without even making an account; sign up only when you want to save your progress. Ads are what pay for it. If you’d rather not see them, Pro turns them off — that’s the only thing it does. Learning a language is hard enough; the tools shouldn’t get in the way.
Why “Circle”?
縁 (en) is that quiet thread that connects people — a bond, a bit of fate, the reason you ended up here at all. Learning is better together: add a friend, compare streaks, challenge each other to a duel, and keep one another going. A circle, not a leaderboard to climb alone.
Go at your own pace
Streaks are here to gently keep you company, not to guilt you. Miss a day and we’ll just say welcome back. Five quiet minutes counts. Tea encouraged. 🍵 And you won’t be doing it alone — that little purple flame is Tomo (友, “friend”), who pops by to cheer you on and keep your fire lit.
Where we use AI
In exactly one place: when you get a review wrong, you can ask why, and an AI writes the explanation. It’s labelled every single time, and there’s a button on it to tell us when it’s wrong — which deletes it for everyone, not just you.
Nothing else here is written by a machine. Every word, reading, meaning, example sentence and grammar note comes from open dictionaries and human editing. No AI has ever written a Japanese sentence that ended up in the dictionary, a lesson, or your review queue, and the code enforces that rather than trusting us to remember: an explanation that invents a Japanese sentence is thrown away before you ever see it.
That line matters more than it might sound. A beginner can’t tell a made-up example from a real one — so the honest thing is to keep generated text clearly marked, keep it out of everything you study, and tell you where the boundary is.
はじめましょう
Pull up a chair. Start with the kana, poke around the dictionary, or play a quick game — no account needed.
— made with care, for anyone who ever wanted to read a manga without the furigana. 🌸