About Japaneseness

A free, printable, multilingual Japanese-learning library. Our goal is 1,000 languages. We're starting with three.

Why this exists

If your first language is English or Mandarin, learning Japanese is easy in one specific way: the materials exist. Textbooks, apps, manga with furigana, YouTube, free PDFs. You name it.

But if your first language is Yorùbá, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Swahili, Tamil, or Quechua, you're on your own. Most learners reach for English-language materials and pay the “translation tax” — doing two languages at once. Japaneseness removes that tax.

Phase 1: 2026

• 3 languages: English, Bahasa Indonesia, Yorùbá
• 200 worksheets per language: 50 hiragana + 50 katakana + 80 N5 kanji + 20 N5 grammar
• = 600 PDFs, all printable, all free

How it's built

Worksheets are stored as language-independent YAML in content/master/. Each language pack (content/languages/<lang>.yaml) only contains instruction translations — the practice content itself never changes.

The first draft of each translation is generated by Claude. Every key is published with a review_status: beta flag until a native speaker reviews it. Contribute a review →

Tech

• Site: Astro + Tailwind CSS
• PDFs: XeLaTeX with Noto fonts (handles every script)
• Search: Pagefind (static, no server)
• Hosting: Cloudflare Pages + R2
• Source: github.com/toriiyu/japaneseness

License

Everything on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International . You can print, modify, translate, and redistribute the worksheets — even commercially — as long as you credit Japaneseness and share derivatives under the same license.

Phase 2 ideas (not committed)

• 4–10 additional languages, picked by request volume
• Audio (TTS) for kana & kanji readings
• Print-on-demand workbooks (KDP)
• Interactive flashcards (probably not — print is the point)