Learn Japanese by reading real books

Japanese has about 125 million native speakers and one of the world's largest pop-culture exports — manga, anime, literature, games. It's famously hard for English speakers: three writing systems (hiragana, katakana, 2,000+ kanji), grammar that puts verbs at the end, and honorific registers that shift by context.

Reading is the single highest-leverage activity for Japanese. Most learners plateau at conversation because you can get by with basic phrases — but reading forces you to confront every kanji and every grammar pattern. With tap-to-translate, you can start reading before you've memorized all the kanji, because each tap shows reading + meaning instantly.

Start with manga (simpler sentences, visual context), move to light novels, then contemporary fiction (Murakami, Yoshimoto), and eventually the classics (Sōseki, Kawabata). Every saved word becomes a flashcard that remembers the kanji, reading, and meaning together.