Read a Japanese sentence with furigana, even as a beginner
You know roughly thirty hiragana, maybe a few katakana, and you stumble onto a full sentence. The kanji wall, everyone hits it. Furigana is the ladder over.
The kanji wall
私は日本語を勉強しています。
わたし は にほんご を べんきょう しています。
I am studying Japanese.
Six unreadable characters surrounded by signs you can read. Kanji make up 30 to 40% of a typical Japanese sentence.
A beginner who only learned the kana is blocked on most useful words from day one. That's exactly the frustration that pushes 80% of learners to quit between month 1 and month 3.
What furigana does
Furigana (振り仮名), literally "sprinkled kana", is a small hiragana reading printed above each kanji. Instead of replacing 勉強 with 「べんきょう」 and stripping the kanji from you, both stay: the word keeps its native Japanese form, and you know how to pronounce it.
Why not Google Translate
Paste 私は日本語を勉強しています。 into Google Translate and you get "I study Japanese". That's it. You learn nothing. Not the kanji readings, not the word boundaries, not the grammar underneath.
On Darumoji, the same sentence returns: the translation, inline clickable furigana above each kanji, and every kanji is a link to its detail page with readings, meanings and animated stroke order. You read AND learn from the same sentence in one click.
Under the hood
- Kuromoji
- Open-source Japanese morphological analyzer. Splits the sentence into words and identifies each kanji's canonical reading. This is what produces the furigana.
- Gemini Flash
- Handles only the translation and the contextual sense pick for ambiguous kanji (
生can readsei,shō,namaorkidepending on context).
Four day-to-day uses
- Decode a sign or menu photographed on a trip: retype the text, read the furigana, get the meaning.
- Study song lyrics: paste a verse, click each unknown kanji to open its card.
- Crack a manga or VN line: read a bubble, paste it, decode it.
- Build your own sentence: type in English or French, Darumoji returns the Japanese version with furigana.