Photograph any page of real Japanese — manga, a novel, a menu, a street sign. Yonda finds exactly which words you don’t know, teaches them until you prove 100% comprehension, and hands you back your own pages. Readable.
Full N5 course free forever. No credit card. No streak guilt.
Five stages, one promise: the page you photograph is the page you end up reading. No detours through someone else’s curriculum.
Up to five pages per scan: the tankōbon you bought in Nakano and never opened, chapter one of the novel that defeated you, tonight’s izakaya menu. Yonda’s vision engine handles vertical text, correct reading order, and furigana — the things that break ordinary OCR on real Japanese pages. Then you get a 30-second review pass to fix any misreads, because on stylized manga lettering no machine is perfect and we won’t pretend ours is. You approve the text. Nothing gets taught from a misread.
Yonda checks every word and kanji on your pages against your personal knowledge graph — everything you’ve ever studied, reviewed, missed, and mastered in the app. What comes back is a precise diagnosis: these 14 words and 6 kanji are the only things standing between you and this page. Not a generic “N4 vocabulary list.” Your list. Someone else scanning the same page gets a different lesson, because they know different things.
The lesson is serious spaced repetition, not a matching mini-game. FSRS scheduling brings each item back right before you’d forget it. Wrong-answer options come from real confusability data — the kanji people genuinely mix up with 読, not three random strangers — so every question actually tests something. And when you miss, you don’t get a red X and a sad noise. You get re-taught, inline, on the spot. Missing is how learning works; we built for it.
Before Yonda unlocks your pages, you pass a clean-sweep exam on everything the scan taught you. Not 80%. Not “good enough.” Every word, every kanji, one clean pass. That sounds strict because it is: partial comprehension of a page is just decorated guessing. When you walk into the read-back, you walk in knowing you’ve earned it — and that feeling is the entire product.
Now you read. Your actual photographs, with a furigana toggle when you want training wheels and a tap on any word for a gloss colored by your mastery. Translations exist — but they unlock only after you’ve passed, as a check on your understanding rather than a substitute for it. This is the moment translation apps sell you and never deliver: not “here’s what it says,” but you, reading Japanese.
Every scan you finish joins your shelf — a growing library of real pages you can now read, re-read, and show someone. And the words you learned don’t retire when the scan ends: they enter your long-term review queue and keep coming back on the FSRS schedule, woven in with the full zero-to-N1 curriculum underneath. Six months from now you won’t remember studying that word. You’ll just read it.
You can. You have been. How’s your Japanese?
That’s the honest difference. Lens — and every camera-translate app — answers the question “what does this say?” Yonda answers “why can’t I read this yet, and how do I fix that?” They’re opposite products:
Every time it translates a bubble, it takes the rep you needed. That’s why you can use it for years and still be illiterate in Japanese — the tool absorbs the practice.
It diagnoses what you’re missing, teaches exactly that, verifies comprehension at 100%, and only then lets you at the translation — as an answer key, not a bypass.
Yonda remembers every word you’ve ever learned and schedules it back into your life for as long as it takes.
Use Lens for train-station signs when you’re lost. Use Yonda when you’d rather stop needing it.
Cancel anytime in two taps. No win-back tricks. If Yonda isn’t making you a better reader, we haven’t earned the $12.
Yes. Your photos go to a private storage bucket only your account can access. They are never shared, never used to train anything, never seen by other users, and they’re deleted when you delete the scan. Your bookshelf is your business.
Good, with honest edges. The vision engine reads vertical text, correct panel/bubble order, and furigana reliably on printed pages. Heavily stylized lettering, handwriting, and low-light photos can still produce misreads — which is exactly why every scan includes a 30-second review where you confirm or fix the text before anything is taught. You are the final gate. Nothing enters your lessons that you haven’t approved.
Yes. Scan & Read assumes you can read hiragana and katakana — that’s the honest floor, and we won’t pretend a camera removes it. If you’re not there yet, the free N5 course starts at literally the first kana and gets you to the floor properly. Then scan.
Yes, via the front door: the free N5 course takes you from zero. Your first scan will be more satisfying after a few weeks of foundations — a page where you know 80% and learn the rest beats a page that’s 95% unknown.
Photographing pages you own for your personal study is exactly the kind of private use copyright law contemplates. Your scans are private to you; Yonda never republishes, shares, or redistributes them.
Up to 5 pages photographed in one go = one scan. Pro includes about 20 scans a month — call it a chapter a week with room to spare for menus.
Studying, reviews, and reading your unlocked scans: yes. The scanning step itself needs a connection — the heavy OCR and diagnosis run server-side. Photograph the menu now, study on the flight home.
Same respect for spaced repetition, different source of truth. Their content is a deck someone else built. Yonda’s flagship content is whatever you photographed, diagnosed against what you already know — plus a full structured zero-to-N1 curriculum underneath, so you’re never choosing between rigor and relevance.
iOS first — it’s where we can make the camera-to-lesson loop excellent. Android and web share the codebase and are planned, but we won’t ship them half-good. No date promises we can’t keep.
They stay yours. Every word you learn from a scan enters your long-term review queue on the FSRS schedule, alongside your curriculum items. The scan ends; the knowledge doesn’t.