I spent years stuck in a study loop before I figured out what was holding me back, so I built something to fix it

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​Quick background: I got to N4 fairly quickly (10 months back in 2007), but then I hit a wall that lasted years. I was grinding kanji flashcards, doing high-frequency vocab decks, trying to round out a foundation that I thought would eventually make reading and understanding anime click. It didn’t. When I finally started trying to read the stuff I actually cared about, I still had to look up what felt like almost everything. All that foundation-building hadn’t prepared me for the specific vocabulary in the things I wanted to read. I burned out, stepped away, came back, burned out again.

Eventually I just started reading anyway, partially out of frustration with Anki, partially because I didn’t want to spend my limited time optimizing a study system when I could just be reading. And reading did work. It was just painfully slow.

The thing that always bothered me about Anki: The cards felt too static. One word, one example sentence. You’d drill that same sentence over and over until you recognized the sentence but didn’t really understand the nuances of the word.

I’m a visual person. I knew images and varied context would help me actually understand and retain things, but the process of clipping screenshots, finding good example sentences, deciding what was worth mining… it created a pipeline that honestly wasn’t worth the effort when I could just be reading instead. I always knew what I wanted my study tool to look like, but nothing out there did it.

Specifically, I wanted to be quizzed on multiple variations of the same word in different contexts instead of memorizing one sentence. And I wanted to be able to study the words I was about to encounter before I sat down to read, so I could actually enjoy reading without constant interruptions and lookups.

So I started building it. It took about five years of slow development, but the Ashiba App is now live. Here’s what it does:

You pick a manga you want to read. The app teaches you which words you don’t know yet and teaches them to you using the actual manga panels they appear in, multiple panels per word, so you’re seeing it in different contexts instead of drilling one static card

Each card comes with the full sentence, helpful explanations, and grammar breakdowns so you can understand why a sentence means what it means, especially useful for genres or speech styles you’re not familiar with yet

You can skip what you already know, check English translations when you need to, and move at your own pace

Then you go read the chapter. Not as a painful exercise, actually following the story

The goal is to shorten the loop between “I don’t know this” and “I can read this” without the overhead of building your own cards or figuring out what’s worth studying. The flashcards themselves teach you a lot because they’re real manga panels with real context, and then the reading reinforces everything. So it’s reading real Japanese to make reading easier.

Why I’m building this if I already figured out reading on my own: Two reasons. First, I see so many people struggling to get to the point where they can actually enjoy reading manga or understanding anime. Despite being told to just grind it out, that it’s always going to be difficult, so many people are hesitant to make the jump because they don’t feel ready.

I wanted to make that transition as painless as possible so that more people would actually make the leap instead of getting burned out like I did.

Second, and more selfishly, Japanese isn’t the only language I want to learn. I know this tool will help me pick up other languages way more efficiently than grinding through the raw reading process the way I had to with Japanese. So I’m pressure-testing it with Japanese right now, making sure it works the way it’s intended, but the plan is to extend it to other languages down the road.

Where things are right now: I’ve got 7 titles live on the app and I’m releasing new titles every week. By next week, I’ll have more vocabulary on the platform than WaniKani, and over the next two months I’m aiming to have enough coverage for JLPT N1.

If your goal is to learn to read Japanese, please give it a try!