# Toku Reader — Japanese & Chinese Tap-to-Read > Offline Japanese and Chinese text reader with integrated learning tools. (iPhone/iPad app by Darren Nah.) - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/toku-reader/id6761078304 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`) - Developer: [Darren Nah](https://appshunter.io/developer/1887667751) - Category: Education, Reference - Price: Free with in-app purchases - Rating: 5.00/5 from 3 App Store ratings · 1 written reviews indexed - Age rating: 17+ - Requires: iOS 17.6 · 702 MB - Languages: American English - Released: 2026-03-31 - Data updated: 2026-08-23 - Monetization: free with in-app purchases - User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/toku-reader/id6761078304/reviews.md ## What is Toku Reader? Listen to real Japanese and Chinese podcasts, and tap any word you don't know — without stopping the audio. Toku Reader takes the native material you actually want to understand — podcasts, websites, books, anything you paste — and makes every word in it tappable. Tap once and you get the reading and the meaning, from dictionaries stored on your device. LISTEN Find shows by search, from the trending charts in Japan, Taiwan, and China, or from a hand-picked list for learners. Every episode gets a transcript — either supplied by the show or generated privately on your device — and the whole transcript is tappable while the audio keeps playing, with the current line following along as you listen. Shadowing mode loops a sentence so you can repeat after the speaker, and you can record yourself to compare. READ ANYTHING Browse Japanese and Chinese websites with furigana or pinyin added in place. Paste a link and get the clean article without the clutter. Import your own EPUB, PDF, text, or subtitle files. Scan a printed page with the camera. Books are laid out like books, with proper Japanese and Chinese line-breaking and real chapters. TAP TO UNDERSTAND Two purpose-built engines — one Japanese, one Chinese — work out how each word is actually read in the sentence in front of you, not just what a dictionary lists. Japanese gets furigana, pitch accent, and conjugation breakdowns. Chinese gets pinyin with tone changes applied. Traditional characters are a first-class choice throughout, not an afterthought. LOOK ANYTHING UP Search from Japanese, Chinese, or English. Draw a character you can't type. See stroke-order animations, radical breakdowns, word frequency, and example sentences from real usage. REMEMBER IT Save a word and it keeps the sentence you first met it in, and where it came from, so you can jump straight back. Spaced repetition returns it just before you'd forget. A home-screen and lock-screen widget keeps a word in front of you, and an optional once-a-day reminder tells you when reviews are ready. Export to Anki at any time. ON IPHONE AND IPAD Toku Reader is built for both. On iPad the transcript, the reader, the dictionary and your word list use the full screen rather than a stretched phone layout. OFFLINE, AND NO ACCOUNT The dictionaries ship inside the app and all text analysis happens on your device. You never have to sign in, and nothing you read is uploaded. WHAT'S FREE Listening, reading, browsing, shadowing, and reviewing are free and unlimited. Word lookups are free up to 50 a day. Toku Premium removes that limit, monthly or yearly. Payment is charged to your Apple ID at confirmation of purchase. Subscriptions renew automatically unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period; manage or cancel any time in Settings → Subscriptions. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ ## Key features - Tap-to-read with furigana/pinyin - Offline dictionary and OCR - Import PDFs, EPUBs, and web content - WaniKani and Anki integration - Spaced-repetition review deck - Handwriting input and reverse search ## Pricing and in-app purchases Base price: Free. **Subscriptions** | Subscription | Price | Period | | --- | --- | --- | | Toku Reader Premium | $6.99 | per month | | Yearly Premium | $29.99 | per year | ## Recent user reviews (1 of 1) All indexed reviews: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/toku-reader/id6761078304/reviews.md ### 5/5 — Beautiful App *2026-07-09* This is a well thought out, beautiful app, which will definitely receive a lot of use by me. If I were to make a recommendation, I think it would be beneficial to be able to view pitch accent upon click of the individual words (Japanese). Other than that, great app. Thank you! <3 Edit: in the latest update, the author of this app added pitch accent! No complaints. Great work. **Developer response:** Thank you for the review! Your support helps make Toku Reader even better. I wanted to provide an update: you can now view pitch accents upon tap of Japanese words! This is available on the newest version of the app. I hope you enjoy this feature. Thank you once again for supporting Toku Reader! ## Frequently asked questions about Toku Reader ### What languages does Toku Reader support? Toku Reader primarily supports Japanese and Chinese. It provides furigana for Japanese and pinyin for Chinese, along with comprehensive dictionaries for both languages. ### Can I use Toku Reader offline? Yes, Toku Reader is designed to work entirely offline. This includes tokenization, dictionaries, OCR, and spaced-repetition reviews, ensuring your reading and study remain private and accessible without an internet connection. ### How does Toku Reader integrate with WaniKani and Anki? You can connect your WaniKani account to sync radicals, kanji, and vocabulary study progress. It also allows you to import your existing Anki decks, preserving your scheduling history for a seamless learning experience. ### What types of content can I read with Toku Reader? Toku Reader can process various text formats, including pasted text, PDFs, EPUBs, and content from websites. It also features OCR to read text from photographs of printed materials. ### Does Toku Reader have ads? No, Toku Reader does not contain advertisements. The app is free to use with optional in-app purchases for enhanced features or content. ### What is the age rating for Toku Reader? Toku Reader has an age rating of 4+, making it suitable for a wide range of users, including younger learners and adults. ### How often is Toku Reader updated? The latest version of Toku Reader is 4.5.6, last updated on June 1, 2026. While specific update frequency isn't detailed, this indicates active development and maintenance. ### What devices are supported by Toku Reader? Toku Reader is currently supported on iPhones. Future platform compatibility may be expanded based on user demand and development. ## Version history (last 5 releases) ### 5.2.2 — 2026-08-20 Podcasts and Chinese reading, tightened up. • Now Playing takes you straight back to the line being spoken, instead of jumping to the top of the transcript first. • Transcript lines stay easy to read as they dim — the whole line fades together, and the readings above the words keep their full strength. • Chinese words written with a letter — A股, IP地址, PC机, D盘, C语言 and dozens more — now show a real meaning instead of coming up empty. • Toku is steadier when you switch away mid-episode: your saved words, review grades and highlights are safely written down before the app goes to sleep. ### 5.2.0 — 2026-08-17 Reading shouldn't make you squint. • English search now finds the everyday Chinese words it used to miss — search "school" and 学校 comes up first, with its HSK level. • The small labels throughout the app — word type, level, how common a word is — are darker and easier to read in daylight. • Japanese sets more evenly: a long reading no longer pushes its word apart from the sentence, and furigana stays legible on transcript lines you haven't reached yet. • Transcripts wait longer before returning to the spoken line, so you can re-read a sentence without being pulled away. • While you read a web page, the browser bar shrinks to just the site name and the player tucks out of the way — more of the screen for the page. • Getting started is clearer: the button that builds your first library is always in view, and following a show now leads the show page. • Review cards hold still when you flip them, and the study heatmap is readable at a glance. ### 5.1.6 — 2026-08-12 This update is about honesty: when you tap a word, you should get a real meaning — not a confident guess. MEANINGS YOU CAN TRUST • Formal written adjectives like 確固たる, 堂々たる and 断固たる showed a perfect reading and then "No entry found". Around 550 words of this kind now define properly. • Words with several genuinely different meanings no longer state the first one as fact. 下げている now reads "is hanging / lowering" instead of only "is hanging". • Newspaper spellings written half in kanji and half in kana — ちょう報, ゆう合 — now find their real entry. • ぴょこっと now has a definition, and is labelled an adverb rather than a noun. SEARCHING IN ENGLISH • Everyday loanwords are findable in English again. "coffee", "salad", "beer" and "restaurant" now reach コーヒー, サラダ, ビール and レストラン — over 5,000 entries restored to English search. GRAMMAR THAT SHOWS ITS WORKING • Negative conditionals used to hide the negative. 来なければ was labelled simply "Conditional" and glossed "if (one) comes" — the opposite of what it means. It now shows the full path, 来る → 来ない → 来なければ, "if (one) doesn't come". JAPANESE NAMES AND EVERYDAY KANA • 丁薛祥, who appears throughout China news coverage, no longer splits into a wrong surname plus a blank. • はい, ここ and バイト no longer come back as "lung", "individual" and "secondary capital city". CHINESE • Chinese words no longer all label themselves "verb", and a Chinese name reads as a name. • Around 7,300 Chinese compounds that showed an empty card now answer. PODCASTS • Long NHK episodes that refused to download — and blamed your connection — now download reliably. Thank you to everyone who reported a wrong meaning. Nearly every fix in this release came from a real report. ### 5.1.3 — 2026-08-03 Bigger screens, and better Chinese. iPad and Mac • Home and Read now use the width of the screen instead of a narrow strip down the middle. Podcast shelves show more of what they've already downloaded. • Podcast and video transcripts hold a comfortable line length instead of stretching the full window. • Tapping a word in one of your own video files with the device turned sideways no longer cuts the meaning off the bottom of the screen. Traditional Chinese • Sentence patterns like 雖然…但是 and 因為…所以 now explain themselves. They never appeared for Traditional readers before — silently, for as long as the feature has existed. • Tapping a word no longer opens a page spelling it in Simplified. If you have chosen a script in Settings, that still wins. Everywhere • Japanese pronunciation guides stay legible at the smallest text sizes. • Settings is now honest that the data export is a copy to keep elsewhere, not a restore point. On iPhone, everything else is deliberately unchanged. ### 5.1.2 — 2026-07-26 Toku now works properly on iPad. Podcasts and videos put the player beside the transcript in landscape instead of squeezing it into a few lines — about four times more text on screen. Word cards no longer get cut off at the bottom of the screen. The browser's address bar no longer hides underneath the podcast player. Reading columns, search fields and cards stay a comfortable width instead of stretching across a 13-inch screen. Your place in every book is exactly where you left it. --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-08-23.*