❓ Help

How to play, what the numbers mean, and what to do when something looks wrong. Short version: pick a level, play rounds of eight, and the game moves you up or down by itself.

Getting started

Create a player. A username and any password you will remember. There is no email and nothing to verify.
Pick a level. The JLPT levels run from N5 (beginner) to N1 (advanced). Guess; a wrong guess fixes itself after a round or two.
Play. The Games page lists the eight games with your personal best on each. Practice, Tales and Grammar are in the top bar.

Your level, scores and practice memory follow you between devices, so you can play on your phone on the train and on a laptop at home.

Never studied Japanese?

Then step 2 above is the wrong question — none of N5 to N1 is right yet, because every game here assumes you can already read kana. Start here instead. It is five steps, an evening's work in total, and nothing in it is scored or on a leaderboard:

How Japanese works. Ten short pieces — the three scripts, why the verb comes last, what particles do.
Hiragana. Nine short lessons, a few rows at a time. Each shows you the new kana (tap one to hear it, in your browser's Japanese voice if it has one), then plays with them: flashcards, hear a sound and tap its kana, pairs, and a Word Grid of words spelt only with kana you have met. Playing the grid finishes the lesson; the ninth finishes the step. The whole chart is a tap away from the lessons page.
Katakana. The same sounds in sharper shapes, six lessons the same way, with loanwords to spell from アイス to パーティー.
Your first twenty words. Twenty everyday words, all in kana you can now read, each tappable to hear. Then five sentences built from nothing but those words, glossed piece by piece, which is where は, を and the verb-at-the-end stop being rules. The cover the meanings box turns the list into a test.
Start N5. Sets your level and points you at the gentlest games.

Your place in the track is remembered, you can leave and come back, and "Reset this track" at the foot of the page clears it without touching anything else.

Rounds and levels

A round is eight questions at your current level. Kanji Snap, Kanji Pairs and Word Grid work differently, see below.
Score over 65% and your next round is one level harder. Score under 35% and it is one level easier. Anything in between and you stay put. Every right answer counts towards the level, hint or not; a right answer on a later try counts as half a point on the scoreboard. You can also change level by hand from the chip in the top bar.
A right answer flashes a green ✓ and moves straight on; the previous answer is shown in a strip under the next question in case you want to check it. A wrong answer shows a red ✕ with the correct answer and, where there is one, a short explanation. Tap anywhere, or press Enter, Space or →, to carry on.
When a level is short of material the round borrows questions from the neighbouring levels. The small chip on each question shows which level it came from.
Sound. The 🔊 button next to the game's name turns the right/wrong sounds on or off. The choice is remembered on that device.
Leaving a round half-way is fine: only finished rounds count.

Mastery: the games stop asking what you know

Every game remembers each item you answer — a sentence, a word, a compound, an onomatopoeia. Get one right three times in a row (across rounds) and that game stops dealing it. A small 🌱 mastered tag shows the moment it happens, and the result card lists what the round retired.
One wrong answer puts it straight back in rotation with the streak at zero. A hint neither counts for nor against.
Mastered is not forgotten: after 30 days the item comes back once, marked review. Right again and it goes away for 90 days, then a year. Wrong and it is back to the start.
When you have mastered everything at your level in a game, rounds borrow from the neighbouring levels; when there is nothing left anywhere, the game revisits mastered items rather than refusing to deal.
Progress (nav → Progress) shows what you have mastered per game and per level against everything there is, what is due for review, and the latest things to retire. "Start over" there forgets it all; scores and levels stay.

The games

Missing Particle: A sentence with one particle blanked out (は, が, を, に, で, と…). Tap the right one. You get two tries: a wrong particle is greyed out and you choose again, and a right answer on the second go still counts for your level (half a point on the scoreboard). The 💡 Hint button shows the whole sentence in kana, and it costs nothing. A miss says what the particle you picked does, so you can see why it doesn't fit.
Sentence Reorder: The words of a sentence, shuffled. Tap them to build the line — each word goes into the gap you have chosen, so tap a mark between two placed words to put the next one there rather than at the end. Tap a placed word to take it back to the pile; Undo takes back the last one you placed; Check when the line is full. You get three tries: a wrong build tells you how many tiles are in the wrong place (not which) and leaves the line live to rearrange. Solve it on a later try and it still counts for your level, at half a point on the scoreboard. After the third miss the words out of sequence are marked and the correct sentence is shown.
Pick the Definition: A word, four English meanings, one of them right. Two tries: a wrong meaning is greyed out and you choose again; right on the second go still counts for your level, at half a point on the scoreboard.
Kanji Snap: A kanji word on the left, a meaning on the right, a red ✗ and a green ✓ below. Decide whether the meaning is right before the clock runs out; the clock sometimes runs fast. The run goes on until your tenth mistake or the end of the board, and is scored on the questions you reached. On a keyboard ← is wrong and → is right.
Kanji Pairs: Thirty tiles: fifteen kanji words and their fifteen hiragana readings, shuffled. Tap a kanji and a reading; a match turns the pair over. Three wrong pairs close the board. It is scored as pairs matched out of fifteen, and the hearts at the top are your lives.
Word Grid: Sixteen tiles of single characters, kanji and kana. A meaning comes up with a row of empty slots: tap the characters of its word in order and they turn over, and the next word is spelt from what is left. A wrong word costs one of three lives and the characters go back. The board is exactly the characters of its words, so it always clears. Scored on the words spelt out of all of them.
Kana Chain (かなチェーン): A word ladder in kana, and the gentler chain. You start from a word you are given with its meaning; each rung changes one kana and a new word appears — かみ → かめ → あめ — with the changed kana marked. Pick what the new word means from four choices; the word you land on starts the next rung, for eight rungs. A miss shows the meaning and the ladder carries on, so it scores like any other round; the result card says how many rungs you climbed before your first miss. Only words with one clear meaning are used, and the words come from your level when they can.
Kanji Chain (熟語チェーン): Kanji shiritori. An anchor kanji with an empty slot before or after it, and four kanji of which only one makes a real two-kanji word. The kanji you place becomes the next anchor, for eight links, and the chain so far stacks up on the screen. A miss shows the right kanji and the chain carries on, so it scores like any other round; the result card also shows how far you got before your first miss. The words come from the JLPT vocabulary lists, so a real compound the lists lack still counts as wrong.
Guess the Onomatopoeia: The sound words and manner words: ワクワク, ザーザー, こっそり. Half the questions show a sentence with the word blanked out and its English, and ask which word fits; the other half show the word and ask for its meaning. A small hint says whether it is a sound, a manner or a feeling. After each answer the full example sentence is shown, so a miss still teaches you the word.

Practice

Flashcards, separate from the games: nothing you do here touches the scoreboards.

Choose a deck: all vocabulary, verbs, adjectives, kanji words, kana words, two-kanji words, grammar points, onomatopoeia, the 200 most used words, or the hiragana and katakana charts. Then a level, how many cards (10, 20 or 40), and which side is up: Japanese → English or English → Japanese.
Easy mode puts the hiragana under the kanji on the front, for when you are learning the meanings before the readings.
Tap a card (or press Space) to flip it, then ✓ or ✗ (or → and ←) to say whether you had it. A miss comes back three cards later in the same deck — and if you miss it again, six cards later, then twelve. Each return is further away, so you are recalling the card rather than copying it off the last screen.
Learn the whole deck is the other way to practise: one pass over every card in the deck rather than a sized session. A card is done when you have had it three times in a row — right once and it comes back about five cards later, right twice and it goes much deeper into the deck, right a third time and it moves to the done pile. A miss sends it back to the start. A bar across the top counts how many cards sit at each stage, so you can see at a glance what you know and what you only half know, and your place is saved between sittings.
Cards that keep beating you are collected as you go: miss the same card more than three times in one sitting and it joins the problem pile. At the end you can save the pile as a revision deck — it appears on the practice menu and holds exactly those cards, whatever deck or level they came from, so you can drill just the hard ones. Delete it when it has done its job.
Between sessions the deck remembers. Every card sits in a box: a miss drops it to box 0 (due now); a hit moves it up, and the box decides when you see it next (1, 3, 7, 14 then 30 days). A new deal takes what is due first, then new cards. The menu shows cards, due and mastered for every deck.
"Forget my practice history…" on the menu resets every deck to the start. It does not touch your scores.

Tales

Under Reading in the menu, with the news. Japanese folk tales and classics from the Japanese Reader Collection (Clay & Yumi Boutwell, Kotoba Books), for reading and listening. Pick a volume, then a story.

Words. Words with a dotted underline have the book's gloss: hover, or tap on a phone, for the word, its romaji and the meaning.
Sentences. Hover a sentence for its English, or tap it to keep the English open. Tick show English to see every sentence's English at once.
Listening. Choose Normal or Slow and press play. With follow along ticked, the sentence being read is highlighted and kept in view. Double-tap a sentence to play from there.
Notes and summary. The book's grammar notes and an English summary are below the story.

Syncing a recording

The recordings carry no timings, so at first the highlight follows an estimate from sentence length and may drift. Anyone can fix a recording for everyone, once:

Choose the speed you want to sync (Normal and Slow are synced separately) and click Sync it under the player.
Press play. The next sentence to mark is outlined. Tap Mark (or press Space) the moment the reader starts that sentence.
Keep going to the end. Undo takes back the last mark if you were early or late; Cancel throws the attempt away.
After the last sentence the timings are saved and the story says who synced it. Re-sync at any time if it is not quite right.

The stories, glosses, notes and recordings are the publisher's and are here for the people who share this copy. Please do not pass them on.

The daily paper

Reading → News is a headline Japan story in the Japanese a newspaper really uses — not simplified, because learning to read a paper is mostly learning its register. One or two stories a day; older days are at the foot under Back numbers. If the newest paper is not today's, the page says so.

Old papers are never taken down. Use ← and → under a story to walk back a morning at a time, or Every paper, by month for the whole run — an old story is as good for practice as today's, and the newspaper words in it are the same words.

Words. A dotted underline means there is a gloss: hover, or tap on a phone, for the word, its reading and what it means.
Sentences. Hover or tap a sentence for its English, or tick show English for all of them at once.
Listening. Read it aloud uses your own device's Japanese voice, so there is nothing to download. The sentence being read is highlighted; change the speed mid-story and it carries on from where it is; double-tap any sentence to hear just that one. A device with no Japanese voice says so — reading still works.
The headline. Open the line under it: headlines drop their particles and their verb, and the note says what the one you are looking at is doing.
Too hard? やさしい日本語 at the foot of each story is the same news in plain Japanese.
Notes. How the newspaper says it collects the grammar that turns up in print and almost never in speech.

Getting it by email

The 📬 box at the foot of the News page mails you the link each morning a new paper lands. Put in your address and click the link in the confirmation email — nothing is ever sent to an address that has not confirmed. Every email has a stop link at the foot, and Stop the emails on the page does the same thing.

The daily challenge

Three games a day. Every day at midnight (Japan time) three of the eight games are drawn, the same three for everyone. They are at the top of the Games page with a number on each; finish a round of each and the day is done. Any round counts, whatever the score.
Streaks. Finish the three on consecutive days and your streak grows. Today's set is open until midnight, so a streak from yesterday is safe until then. Miss a day and the count starts again from the next day you finish; your best streak and the total of days done are kept on the Progress page, with the last four weeks as a row of dots.
Everyone's streaks are listed under the overall ranking on the scoreboards page. The result card at the end of a round tells you where you are in today's challenge and which game to play next.

Scores and the monthly competition

Overall ranking is your average across the games you have played, with how many of the eight you have tried. Each game also has its own board.
Months. The boards run by calendar month, Japan time. Only rounds finished in the month count, and whoever is top of the overall ranking when the month closes is that month's winner. Past winners are listed on the scoreboards page; use the period selector to look at earlier months or all time.
Print, email, copy. "Print / email this board" opens a clean copy of the ranking you can print, save as a PDF, send through your mail app, or copy as text to paste anywhere.
Your account. The same page carries "Change my password…" (current password, then the new one twice) — the place to make a password Joel reset for you your own again.
Keeping your scores private. Under "Your account", tick "Keep my scores private" and you disappear from every scoreboard, the monthly ranking, past-winner lists and the streak table — for everyone. Your own rounds, bests, progress and daily streak stay on your pages, and nothing is deleted; untick it and you are back on the boards at once.
Deleting your scores. At the bottom of the scoreboards page, under "Delete all my scores…", type your username to confirm and every round you have played is removed. Your login, level and practice memory stay.

Grammar

The Grammar page lists the patterns the games at each level draw on, one line each with an explanation and an example. Use the level tabs at the top to look ahead or behind.

Questions

I forgot my password.: Ask Joel. There is no email on the account, so there is no reset link — he resets it and sends you a new one. Change it to something you will remember under "Your account" on the Scores page.
How do I change my password?: Scores page, "Your account", "Change my password…". You need the current one; if you do not have it, ask Joel for a reset first.
The level is too hard or too easy.: Play a round; over 65% moves you up and under 35% moves you down. Or tap the level chip in the top bar and pick one.
Why is a question from a different level?: That level does not have enough material yet, so the round borrowed from the neighbours. The chip on the question says where it came from.
The Kanji Chain said my compound was wrong, but it is a real word.: The game only knows the words on the JLPT vocabulary lists. If the list lacks the compound, it counts as wrong. Tell Joel and it can be added.
The tale's audio will not play.: The recordings stream from Google Drive. Try again in a moment; if it still fails, "open on Drive" plays it in a new tab, and the page still works for reading.
The highlighted sentence is behind or ahead of the reader.: Nobody has synced that recording yet, or the sync is off. Follow Syncing a recording above.
The news page will not read aloud.: It uses your device's own Japanese voice. iPhones and Android phones have one; on a desktop it can be a system download (Windows: Settings → Time & language → Speech; macOS has 日本語 voices under Spoken Content). Without one the page says so and everything else still works.
Does Practice change my level or scores?: No. Practice is entirely separate; only finished game rounds move your level or appear on the boards.
Something is broken.: Tell Joel what you did, on which page, and on what device. The About page says where the content comes from.