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Kotoba no Sekai言葉の世界
Learn a few real Japanese words a day from today's news.
Source on GitHub ↗Runs daily at kotoba.billbaran.us, on my own data
The words and example sentences here are made up. The real site uses sentences from today's news, which belong to their publishers. Nothing in the demo contacts a market-data, news or brokerage service.
Kotoba no Sekai turns each day’s Japanese news into a short, personal vocabulary lesson. A scheduled container finds words you haven’t seen yet and publishes a study page. On that page you reveal the reading and then the meaning, with the original sentence for context. It also writes an Anki export and a Markdown digest each day.
What's interesting about it
- A daily job reads NHK, NHK Web Easy, Asahi and graded-reader feeds and splits the text into words with kuromoji. It keeps only words that are new to you and at your JLPT level.
- Each word comes with its reading, meaning, the real sentence it came from with furigana and a translation, a table of verb and adjective forms, and audio at three speeds.
- It keeps working when optional services are missing. Translation falls back from local Ollama to Google to none. Audio falls back from ElevenLabs to OpenAI to the browser's own speech.
- One global throttle covers every Jisho dictionary lookup, and the job stops cleanly if Jisho is down.
- The site is static HTML published to S3 + CloudFront. Each run uploads only files whose MD5 changed.