Listen to a real podcast. Tap any word you don’t know.
Written by Darren Nah, who builds Toku Reader. Checked September 2026.
Listening is where most reading apps stop. You can follow a podcast at eighty per cent, one word goes past that you cannot catch, and there is nothing to do about it except rewind and fail again. This is the part of Toku Reader I would show you first.
How it works
- Find a Japanese or Chinese podcast in the app, or bring your own audio file — an MP3, an M4A, an audiobook chapter, with your own subtitle file if you have one.
- Play it. The transcript scrolls with the audio and the line being spoken lights up.
- Tap a word you don’t know. The reading and the meaning appear and the audio keeps playing — you are not thrown out of the episode to look something up.
- Tap again to save it. It goes into the review list with the sentence it came from.
The transcript is made on your phone
This is the part that matters and the part nobody expects. If an episode has no transcript, the app writes one on the device, from the audio, without sending the audio anywhere. Nothing about what you listen to leaves the phone. There is no account to make, and once an episode has been transcribed you can read it with no signal.
Shadowing, and slowing it down
Shadowing is the old technique of repeating a native speaker a beat behind them, out loud, until your mouth learns the shape of the sentence. The app loops one sentence, records you, and plays both back so you can hear the difference. You can also slow the audio down without the voice going strange — most of the time a word you “can’t hear” is a word you can hear at three-quarter speed.
Both languages, and video too
Japanese gets ふりがな over the kanji; Chinese gets pinyin with the tone changes applied, which is the difference between learning the sound and learning the spelling. The same tap works on a video with subtitles, so a YouTube video with captions behaves like a podcast with a transcript.
Which podcasts
Whichever ones you would listen to anyway. Learner podcasts are gentler and native shows are faster, and the honest advice is to have one of each: a show you can follow for the pleasure of following it, and a show that is slightly too hard, for the twenty minutes a day when you are willing to work. If a show you already follow is not in the list, you can add it by its feed address, and an audio file you own can be opened straight from the Files app.
Why the words stick
A word you met inside something you chose to listen to has a sentence, a voice and a moment attached to it. Every word you save keeps that sentence, and the review schedule brings it back at the point you are about to forget it. That is a very different thing from a list of words somebody else picked.