📚 What?

This is a list of tools for language immersion, vocabulary and sentence mining. That is, getting language-learning material from native, organic media such as books, websites, TV series, etc. to be included into your study routine supported by spaced repetition software.

Although many of the tools in this list were created by and for the learners of the Japanese language, the underlying principle is the same for any language.

There is no goal to list the sources of media for immersion.

ℹ️ Guides and how-tos

• Zach Highley - Anki Settings: A Complete Guide and Recommended Settings For Medical School
• Tatsumoto Ren - Anki, Yomichan and Mining
• Animecards - Anki, Yomichan and Mining
• TheMoeWay - "You can learn how to learn Japanese properly here"
• Xelieu - Lazy Guide "for people who don't want to bother customizing their settings or knowing stuff technically"

🔰 Essential tools

Desktop

• Anki: powerful, intelligent flashcards — the first choice software for spaced repetition.
• Anki-Connect — Anki Desktop add-on to interact with other software.
• GoldenDict NG — actively maintained fork of GoldenDict, supporting multiple dictionary formats (StarDict, Babylon, Lingvo, Dictd) and online dictionaries and export to Anki.

📱 Mobile

• AnkiMobile Flashcards - App Store — the official version of Anki for iOS
• AnkiDroid Flashcards - Google Play — Anki for Android.
• Jjidoujisho — a full-featured immersion language learning suite for mobile.

Mining

Browser-based

• Yomichan — browser extension with a pop-up dictionary and export to Anki; not maintained anymore.
  • Rikaitain - fork of Yomichan by Ajatt-Tools.
  • Yomitan - fork of Yomichan by TheMoeWay.
  • Yezichak - fork for languages besides Japanese.
• 10ten - hover-over dictionary.

System-wide

• VocabSieve — desktop Yomichan-like tool for many languages.
• Kamite — a desktop language immersion companion for learners of Japanese.
• YomiNinja - application for extracting text from any type of visual content.

🎮 Games

• Textractor - application to extract text from video games and visual novels.
• Game2Text — complete toolbox for gamifying language learning.

📺 Video and audio players

Stand-alone

• Memento — an mpv-based video player for studying Japanese with Yomichan support.
• mpv — powerful multi-platform video player extensible via scripts.

mpv scripts

• immersive — mpv script for improving language immersion, with a special focus on sentence mining.
• mpvacious — adds mpv keybindings to create Anki cards from movies and TV shows.

Browser-based

• Animebook — browser-based video player, which allows for using Yomichan.
• ASBPlayer — browser-based video player, which allows for using Yomichan.

Paid and proprietary

• Language Reactor — toolbox.
• AppForLanguage — toolbox.
• Migaku — toolbox.
• LingQ — toolbox.

📖 Books, manga, comics, and OCR

• ttsu - e-book reader that supports Yomichan forks.
• Flow — browser-based ePub reader that supports Yomichan fork.
• Manga-OCR
  • Cloe - reader.
  • Poricom - reader.
  • Mokuro — read Japanese manga inside browser with selectable text.
• LeIm — browser extension with pop-up translation and word statistics.

📓 Dictionaries

Pop-up and Yomichan forks

• Default Yomichan Dictionaries for Japanese
• Yomichan Dictionary Collection - Shoui

Dictionary tools

• pyglossary — A tool for converting between dictionary formats including Yomichan.

📈 Finding input for your level

Japanese

• JPDB — media by difficulty with extensive vocabulary statistics.
• Natively — book-reading community for Japanese language learners, by difficulty level.

Example banks

Many languages

• YouGlish — search words in YouTube videos.
• Google Ngram Viewer — search words in Google Books.
• Centro virtual Cervantes. Refranero Multilingüe — proverbs in many languages and their translation to Spanish.

Japanese

• 用例.jp 日本語 例文検索帳 — search Japanese sentences.
• Massif — search Japanese sentences.

Russian

• Национальный корпус русского языка — national corpora of the Russian language.