The project
About Wakarii
Wakarii is a free application that helps you start your journey into the Japanese language — find resources, practice, and track your progress, all in one place.
The story
Wakarii was born when I (the creator) was studying Japanese in Tokyo.
Learning a language means juggling a pile of resources — books, apps, websites, asking AI for help — and it becomes a mess fast. I realized I was spending more time cycling through tools and searching for material than actually studying.
So I started building an app that let me write, practice, search, research, and ask AI, all inside the same framework, with no distractions, on my phone or my PC.
A few years of work, iterations, and a few lazy weeks in between later — here we are.
How it works
I won't lie to you: when I decided to release Wakarii as a product, I started thinking about business models, subscriptions, and everything needed to turn it into a "real business" that scales. And I started resenting what the project was becoming.
We're at a point where everything is a subscription, everyone's building an app with AI hoping to get rich, and every landing page promises "fluent in 3 weeks, just 5 minutes a day."
That's not how it works.
I built Wakarii to help myself study Japanese efficiently. That has to stay the point — and everyone should be able to use it.
Finding good Japanese resources (especially from outside Japan, and as a beginner) is genuinely hard, and there's a lot of noise out there. Building your own study plan from scattered internet content is complex. That's why I built courses that — far from perfect — give people structure, tools, and a place to actually sit down and study. For free.
There's a paid tier too, because keeping this running costs money. I try to keep it cheap so it stays accessible — and if not, the free tier is fully usable on its own.
The goal
Wakarii isn't trying to be a money grinder. It's not trying to gamify your progress just to throw particles and progress bars at you, or optimize for retention.
The goal is to give you the best possible experience to sit down and access everything you need to improve your Japanese — beginner, intermediate, or advanced.
We'll try to stick to that as much as possible.
