Niho vs LoopListen

Niho is a reader for people learning Japanese by reading a lot of it. Download a classic from Aozora Bunko — Natsume Sōseki, Miyazawa Kenji, Dazai Osamu, Akutagawa, Japanese folk tales, and seventeen thousand more — and the whole book is on your phone. From then on nothing needs a connection: not the text, not the dictionary, not your word book, not the quizzes. Read on the train, on a plane, or anywhere the signal gives up. READ A WHOLE BOOK, NOT A TEXTBOOK PASSAGE These are the real works, complete and free of copyright in Japan. A "Start here" shelf gathers thirty short, plainly written classics, roughly in order of difficulty, so your first Japanese book is one you can actually finish. Children's stories, folk tales, mysteries, essays and poetry each have a shelf of their own. FURIGANA WHERE THE EDITION GIVES IT Readings appear in small kana above the kanji, exactly as printed in the source edition. Switch them off when you are ready to read without them. THREE WAYS TO READ Paged, like a Kindle. One continuous scroll. Or chat, where the chapter arrives a sentence at a time and types itself out. Your place is kept in all three, so you can switch mid-chapter and carry on from the same sentence. Type size, line spacing, margins, typeface (Mincho or Gothic) and page colour are all yours to set. A DICTIONARY THAT IS ALREADY THERE Select a word the way you would anywhere else — long-press, drag the handles — and look it up. JMdict senses grouped by part of speech, JLPT level and common-word badges, and a kanji breakdown from KANJIDIC2: every kanji in the word with its meanings, on and kun readings, school grade and stroke count. Inflections resolve on their own: 食べました finds 食べる, 勉強した finds 勉強. Japanese has no spaces, so a rough selection is fine — the longest word starting there is shown first, with the shorter ones behind it. READ ALOUD Any word, sentence or passage you select can be spoken by the system's Japanese voice, at a speed you choose. A WORD BOOK THAT FILLS ITSELF Every word you look up is saved — with its reading, its definition and the sentence you met it in, which is what makes it stick. Browse your own words, or work through the JLPT N5, N4, N3, N2 and N1 vocabulary lists that ship with the app. QUIZZES FROM YOUR OWN READING Fill-in-the-blank, word → meaning, meaning → word and reading questions — type the kana for a kanji word — built from the words you actually looked up, scheduled so you meet them again just before you would forget them. Free, offline, and without an account. Book text from Aozora Bunko. Dictionary data from JMdict and KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0). JLPT lists by Jonathan Waller (tanos.co.uk).

LoopListen helps you listen again, shadow speech and practise a phrase. Import listening material, record your own voice, or turn a document into speech, then repeat the part you want to learn. TAP A, TAP B Tap A at the start and B at the end of a phrase to loop it. Drag the waveform handles or nudge them by 0.1 second. An optional A-point lead-in helps keep the first sound. BUILT FOR PRACTICE • Speed from 0.5x to 2.0x without changing pitch • Shadowing pauses of 1–10 seconds, or as long as the loop • Repeat forever or stop after a set number of passes • Save multiple A-B loops and switch with a tap • Remember position, loop settings and speed for each file • Background audio with Lock Screen and Control Center controls IMPORT AUDIO AND VIDEO • Use Open in Other App → LoopListen from chat apps, Mail or Files • Save to LoopListen in the share sheet accepts audio, video, TXT and DOCX. After saving, it attempts to open LoopListen; text documents enter the speech preview. If the system declines, use Open LoopListen or open the app manually • Play MP3, M4A/AAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, CAF, FLAC, Opus, MP2 and M4B; some containers are converted during import • MP4 and MOV video follows the audio through loops, speed changes and shadowing pauses RECORD MP3 Choose + → Start Recording. Finish to save an MP3 in your library, ready for playback, loops, renaming or sharing. Microphone permission is requested on first use. An unfinished recording can be saved when you next enter recording. TURN TEXT INTO SPEECH Copy text in another app, then choose + → Import from Clipboard and allow pasting if iOS asks. The app does not read the clipboard at launch. For files, Text to Speech is the last item in the + menu. Select TXT or DOCX, or open a document from another app. Scroll through the full text and choose Slow, Normal or Fast. A natural female voice is selected automatically: Aria for English, Xiaoxiao for Chinese and mixed text. Tap Generate Audio to create an MP3 for your library, then use the same playback and loop controls. TXT supports UTF-8, BOM-tagged UTF-16 and GB18030. DOCX extracts document text. Files are limited to 10 MB and 10,000 text characters; encrypted documents and image-only text are not supported. An internet connection is required for generation. Only after you tap Generate Audio is the text sent to an online voice service; the source file stays on your iPhone. If the service fails or times out, the app asks you to resubmit the file and try again later. SIMPLE AND CLEAR No account, advertising, in-app purchases or subscriptions. Media, microphone recordings and loop settings stay local. See the privacy policy for online text-to-speech data handling.