How it works
Enable the extension on a site you read. It highlights useful words in the article, not a separate lesson window. Hover a highlight to see the meaning. Chrome itself stays in English.
The loop is short on purpose:
- Words that are worth noticing get a highlight — after Japanese is split into words.
- Hover (or tap the highlight) for the translation.
- Keep reading. The page does not become a worksheet.
Coverage is a slider, not a promise that every token will change.
The page does not come with spaces or furigana
Textbook Japanese is spaced in your head. A real page is a ribbon of kanji, kana, and the occasional English loanword in katakana. The first skill is seeing where a word ends. The extension segments that ribbon so a highlight can land on 駅 or 予約 instead of a random run of characters.
Particles are the other thing class rushes and reading punishes: は vs. が, を, に, で. They are tiny and they decide the sentence. A hover will not write you a particle essay; it will keep the gloss attached to the word that was actually there.
Kanji you do not know yet are why people bounce off news. NHK Web Easy, a shop blog, or a Japanese product page is readable sooner if the hard word can explain itself without you leaving the tab. This is still not a substitute for a kanji course — it is how those kanji stop being wallpaper.
English ↔ Japanese is live
English → Japanese and Japanese → English are both in the language picker. All 12 languages work with English. Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Arabic are bidirectional (EN↔). Hebrew is English → Hebrew.
What this is not
It is not a course, a streak, or a classroom. It does not teach stroke order, and it does not claim to be a full IME or dictionary app. It is a reading overlay for people who already spend time in the browser.
Questions
Japanese has no spaces. Can it still highlight words?
Yes. The extension segments Japanese before it paints. It will not be perfect on every proper name or slang mash-up, and it will not claim to be a full morphological analyzer. It is good enough to mark useful words on a normal article.
Kanji, hiragana, katakana — which does it handle?
It works on ordinary mixed Japanese text. Hover a highlight for the meaning. It is not a kanji dictionary with stroke order, and it does not replace a reader built only for graded stories.
Can I read a Japanese page and see English?
Yes. English → Japanese and Japanese → English are both in the picker. An English page can show Japanese; a Japanese page can show English.
Price
There is a free week, then $5 a month. Cancel anytime. No user counts or review scores on this page — those belong on the Chrome Web Store listing if they exist.