Why I Made a Free No-Signup Japanese Reading Resource for Learners and Classrooms
The crumpled worksheet was still on the folding table at the end of my after-school Japanese class last October, a half-chewed gummy stick stuck to the bottom corner. Third-grader Milo had scrawled in pencil in the margin: My mom can’t help me with this. The night before, Milo’s mom had emailed me: We speak Spanish at home, and the only translation here is English. I want to listen to him practice, but I can’t tell if he’s reading it right.
I’d heard this same line a dozen times in the seven years I’ve taught beginner Japanese to kids here. Most of my students are learning to connect with family overseas, or just picked it up because they love anime and want to watch without subtitles. Their families aren’t usually fluent, and half speak a first language other than English at home. Every existing beginner reading resource I could find had the same problems: either it was a textbook full of stilted stories about visiting Tokyo train stations that my students have never been to, or it was a subscription app that cost $10 a month and required a signup and login that half the parents couldn’t be bothered with, or it only had English translations.
I remember sitting at my kitchen table that night, scrolling through Google for 45 minutes, getting more and more frustrated. A parent in my class the year before had pulled her kid out because she couldn’t afford the subscription resource the program was using, and that had stuck with me. My cousin does basic web design for small local nonprofits, so I texted him: Can we build something really simple? No ads, no login, no paywall. All I need is space to put short reading passages for different beginner levels, with translations in as many languages as we can get. He said he’d do it for free if I bought him a large pepperoni pizza, so that was the deal.
I started writing the passages first. I kept all of them between 50 and 200 words, matched to how many basic kanji new learners know at each stage. I didn’t write about anything fancy. The first level passages are things like “I have a cat. My cat is black. She likes to sleep on my pillow.” Second level has stories about trading a granola bar for a lollipop at recess, or forgetting your bike lock after school, or staying up late to finish a drawing for your mom’s birthday. Things my students actually do every day, not generic textbook stuff that feels distant.
Then I asked parents of current and former students if they’d help translate the passages into their first languages. Within two weeks, we had 12 languages total: Spanish, French, Vietnamese, Bengali, Hindi, Chinese, Korean, German, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, and English. All the translators did it for free, just because they’d all been stuck at some point trying to help their own kid. I added a simple option to click and see the translation side by side with the Japanese text, no clicking through a bunch of ads to get it.
The first time I used it with my class a month later, I saw what a difference it made. Lila, a new fourth-grader who’d moved here from Ho Chi Minh City the year before, pulled it up on her mom’s phone after class. She’s learning Japanese to talk to her grandma who lives in Osaka, and her whole family speaks Vietnamese at home. She tapped the translation button, switched it to Vietnamese, and held the phone up to show me. “Now my grandma can read it too when we FaceTime,” she said. She didn’t have to fumble with an English translation that she could barely read just to practice 10 lines of text.
The biggest thing that’s come out of this, for me, is how many parents think they can’t help their kid learn a language if they don’t speak it themselves. That’s a myth that a lot of expensive learning resources push, to get you to pay for their tutors or their premium plans. But the truth is, even if you don’t know a single word of Japanese, you can still help your kid practice. Just pull up a story, have them read each line out loud, then check it against the translation in your own language. That’s it. You don’t need fancy training or a fluent background. For teachers, especially in underfunded programs or small community classes, you can project any story on your whiteboard for group reading, or print copies for your students to take home, no permission needed, no fees, no login to share with parents.
I’m still adding new passages every month. Right now I’m working on a handful of longer pieces for high school beginner classes, after a teacher in Oregon emailed me asking for content that fits older beginners better. I don’t track how many people use it, and I don’t have any plans to add ads or paywalls down the line. There are still gaps: we don’t have translations for every language people ask for, and I haven’t added native speaker audio yet, which is on my to-do list for next year. But for now, it works. Every week I get one or two short emails from a parent or a teacher saying it solved a problem they’d been stuck with for months. That’s more than enough.
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