Great! With a couple small gripes
I much prefer this to the bloat and confusion of Manabi reader. It would be absolutely perfect to me if there was iCloud sync for the books you’re reading and where you are in them. There is that one issue where when you swipe out without pressing the bookmark button it doesn’t save your spot, but it doesn’t bother me too much. Haven’t tried the premium browser within, so I can’t speak on that, but I may try it in the near future. Thank you for developing this! So so useful to have these tools on iOS.Izz3ee
Saving broken
Book position no longer saved and developer is not responding to bug reports via email. Additionally the app overheats easily and saps battery life.唐雷克
Promising but needs some work
This app does what it advertises — it’s a great tool for Japanese learners to read books and makes learning vocabulary much easier. Crucially, it imported the epub I tested correctly, with vertical text and right-to-left reading. (Surprisingly, some other similar apps failed to do so.)
However, there are a few issues that are quite big to me. When looking up a compound word like 無邪気 the dictionary doesn’t treat the whole word as a single tappable “link”. Meaning, if I tap 無, I get the whole compound word. However, if I tap 邪, I get 邪気. And similarly, 気 gets the single character. The expected behavior, from many other apps, is that tapping on any character of a compound word will give the definition of the whole compound word.
Also annoying: swiping the book does close it, but doesn’t save the page you were on. To do that, you have to tap the exit button. I also couldn’t find a way to go to a specific page (though there is a table of contents).
For more minor issues, the e-reader is just not very refined at this point. It’s not exactly fair to compare this to the pre-installed Apple Books app, but it would be nice to have features like auto day-night mode, tap to flip pages, and page flipping animations.
That all said, I’m very glad this app exists and I’m hoping to see future updates resolve these issues. At it’s core, I think this is a great app.Keith C Ng
Doesn’t work on ipad mini
It used to work on my phone, but now whenever I try to upload epubs on my ipad mini, the screen just goes blank. It’s disappointing because this was my favorite JP reading app.nubbs88
10/10 recommend
Super useful. That being said, I don't think the font change works.Sammdilly
Almost perfect…
But having to guess/look for the last place I left off at can be quite annoying. It would be nice if the bookmark worked! Doesn’t work on updated iPad or iPhone.
Because of this, I don’t use the app as much as I would like to, even though I would love to. So I hope it’s something that can be fixed in an update soon. An automatic spot-saving feature would be nice and convenient, if that can be done!
Another issue I notice is in the “smoothness” of using the app like having to tap multiple times for the top bar to show up… then after adjusting settings there, it restarts the book and I have to find where I left off at again.
Besides those two things, I think it’s an amazing and super helpful resource for studying/reading Japanese. I love how easy it is to export saved words to the flashcard app I use.
Not only that, but the fact that if you tap on a word in your saved words, you can see the sentence that you first found it in— this is extremely convenient, as well.The Waffle Speaks
Dictionaries Issue
I've downloaded some dictionaries and even though the uploading worked the dictionaries do nothing and won't work.
The standard ones work though.kleiln
