Table of Contents
- What HayaiLearn Actually Is
- Build Your Foundation First
- Your First Steps: The Getting Started Checklist
- Finding Videos You'll Actually Watch
- Studying While You Watch
- Two Ways to Learn: Top Down and Bottom Up
- The Words Page
- Sentence Mining
- Albums
- The Dojo: Where You Drill
- How XP, Levels, and Streaks Work
- Importing Your Own Videos
- Your Profile and Settings
- A Recommended Learning Loop
- The Bottom Line
- Join Our Discord Community
What HayaiLearn Actually Is
HayaiLearn is a Japanese learning platform built on video immersion. You learn by watching real YouTube and Netflix content, the same stuff native speakers watch, with a layer of AI tools on top that turn "I have no idea what they said" into "oh, that's what that means."
The name "Hayai" (速い) means "fast" in Japanese. The whole point is to get you to fluency faster by keeping you in content you genuinely enjoy.
Here's the belief behind it: classroom study alone does not make you fluent. You have to acquire the language through tons of input. But comprehension is only half the job. Understanding Japanese is one skill. Producing it, actually speaking and writing it, is another. HayaiLearn covers both halves:
- Input (reading and listening) builds your comprehension from content you like.
- Output (speaking and writing) turns that understanding into the ability to actually use the language.
You can run HayaiLearn on the web app, the iOS/Android app, and through the Chrome extension for studying directly on YouTube. There's also limited Netflix support (clickable subtitles with the popup dictionary and AI explanations).
Estimated Time: 15 minutes to read, a lifetime to master
Build Your Foundation First
Do this before anything else. HayaiLearn is an immersion tool, not a "learn Japanese from zero" course. Before you dive in, you need the absolute basics: Hiragana, Katakana, a handful of basic Kanji, and basic verb conjugations.
Think of Hiragana and Katakana as your ABCs. You can't read anything without them. Kanji looks scary, but knowing even the basics opens up a huge chunk of the language.
Here are the videos we recommend to get the foundation down fast:
- Hiragana: Learn All Hiragana in 1 Hour by Japanesepod101
- Katakana: Learn ALL Katakana in 1 Hour by Japanesepod101
- Kanji: Learn Kanji in 45 minutes
- Basic verb conjugations: Game Gengo's Complete Japanese Verb Conjugation Video
Once you can read kana and you know roughly how verbs change shape, you're ready for the rest of this guide.
Your First Steps: The Getting Started Checklist
When you're new, head to the Onboarding page (left sidebar on desktop). It gives you a Get Started checklist that walks you through every core action once: add a video to an album, take a quiz, import a video, mine some sentences, mark words as known and learning, and so on.
Try it: knock out every item on this list in your first session. By the time it's all green, you've touched every part of the app and the rest of this guide will click instantly.
Finding Videos You'll Actually Watch
The Videos page is your home base. Instead of dumping every video into one giant list, it opens on a personalized feed built around what you like to watch.
The Video Feed (Desktop)
The feed is laid out as a vertical stack of "lanes," each with its own title and a See All button. It leads with a Continue to watch lane so you can pick up where you left off, and a Most comprehensible lane that ranks videos by the highest percentage of words you already know. That second lane is gold: it surfaces videos you're most likely to actually understand.
Across the top is a row of category tabs (All, Gaming, Music, Variety, VTuber, and more). Tapping a category swaps in that category's own lanes. The feed refreshes once per day at the same time for everyone, so the lineup stays steady while you study.
Notice the details on each card:
- A LVL badge (1 to 10) shows the difficulty. Lower is easier.
- A Comprehension % shows how much of the video you're likely to understand based on the words you already know.
Your top bar always shows your level and XP, your saved word count, and your streak (the little flame). More on those later.
The Video Feed (Mobile)
The mobile feed works the same way, just stacked for a phone screen. You get the same level and XP bar up top, the same category tabs, and the same Continue to watch and Most comprehensible lanes. Navigation lives in the bottom bar instead of a sidebar.
Filtering and Searching
The moment you apply a filter, the page switches from the lane layout to a simple list view. On desktop, use the filter icon near the top right. On mobile, tap the filter icon to open the All Filters sheet, pick your sub-categories, and tap Apply filters.
How videos get their difficulty score: we grade every video 1 to 10 based on how common its vocabulary and grammar are, how fast people speak, and how long the sentences run. A 1 is easy. A 10 will hurt.
How "Known %" Is Calculated
While watching a video, tap the Known % indicator at the top to see the breakdown. It splits your coverage into Vocabulary and Grammar, showing how many words and patterns you already know out of the total in that video.
Studying While You Watch
This is where the real learning happens. When you open a video, the subtitles aren't just text. They're interactive.
Smart, Interactive Captions
Each Japanese subtitle shows furigana above the words and is color-coded by what you know. Words are underlined based on their learning state, and you'll see a star icon (to mine the sentence) and a copy icon next to each line.
Unlike apps that use old parsing libraries, HayaiLearn uses AI to parse the subtitles. That means better tokenization for slang and casual speech, word meanings trimmed to fit the exact sentence, and translations that are flat-out more accurate.
Customizing Your Captions
You control how subtitles look and behave through the caption settings.
On desktop: click the gear icon in the player controls (bottom left).
From there you get toggles for things like Pause each sentence, Enable Loop, Hide furigana on known words, Pause video on word hover, and karaoke style highlighting. You can set Subtitles to JP, EN, JP+EN, or OFF, and pick your Annotation style: Romaji for beginners, Hiragana for advanced, or None.
On mobile: tap the three-dot menu (top right of the video), then tap Settings.
You get the same options as desktop, just in a mobile sheet.
The Popup Dictionary
Hover over a word on a computer, or tap it on a phone, to open the popup dictionary. This is your single most-used tool.
Here's what's in it:
- The word with its furigana or romaji, plus the contextual meaning. We show the most likely meaning for this exact sentence instead of dumping every definition on you.
- Supplemental info tags (highlighted in purple): part of speech, JLPT level if it has one, and Freq Rank, which is how often the word shows up across our video library. Lower number means more common.
- A Conjugation breakdown for verbs and adjectives, showing how the form was built (for example, Potential and Negative).
- A See dictionary link to the word's full page.
- Learning state buttons to mark the word as you go.
Word Learning States
Every word lives in one of three states, and the subtitle styling and popup banner change to match:
- New (orange "NEW" banner, orange underline). You haven't learned this yet. Buttons: Learn and Known.
- Learning (green "LEARNING" banner, green underline). You're actively studying it. These show up in Review with a short max SRS interval of 7 days, so you see them often. Buttons: Known and Forget.
- Known (blue "KNOWN" banner, no underline). You've got it. These can still appear in Review but with a longer 90-day max interval. Buttons: Learn and Forget.
Grammar Support While Watching
Words are only half the battle. HayaiLearn detects grammar patterns in each sentence and shows them in a side panel (on the right on desktop, below on mobile). Open the Grammar tab to see the patterns, each tagged with its JLPT level.
Click any grammar pattern to open a full Grammar Lesson right there, without leaving the video. No more pausing to go google what は actually does.
The same panel groups the sentence's words by state (New, Learning, Known) and houses the AI Explanation, a paragraph or two breaking down the nuance of the sentence on demand.
Two Ways to Learn: Top Down and Bottom Up
There's no single "right" way to use HayaiLearn. Most people mix these two approaches.
Top Down (let the video lead)
You pick a video and learn whatever words show up in it.
- Choose a video at your level. Optionally, scan it first and mark words as learning or known.
- Watch it. Go active (pause to look up words, mark them in the popup) or passive (just keep watching, even if you miss things).
- Mine interesting or useful sentences as you go.
- Review your learning and known words in the Dojo.
- Check your progress on your Profile.
Bottom Up (you lead)
You decide exactly which words to learn, then find them in videos.
- Go to the Words page and pick words to study, sorted by frequency. Mark them learning or known.
- Open each word's dictionary page and find good example sentences.
- Play an example sentence to see the word used in a real video, then mine it.
- Review in the Dojo.
- Track progress on your Profile.
The Words Page
The Words page lists the Japanese words and grammar we want you to learn, split into Vocabulary and Grammar tabs.
A few things worth knowing:
- Vocabulary comes from JMDict, with JLPT tags sourced from COTO Academy. Each word has a Freq Rank (lower = more frequent), and the list is sorted by frequency by default so you study the most useful words first.
- Grammar is a collection of 800+ patterns categorized by JLPT level.
- Filter by Album, JLPT level, Part of Speech, and Type (All, New, Learning, Known).
- The Coverage analysis bar at the top shows how many words you've marked learning vs known against the full library.
Heads up: a JLPT tag doesn't always reflect a word's true difficulty. A word can have several meanings where only the hard ones got tagged.
The Word Dictionary Page
Click any word to open its dictionary page. The header shows every definition plus the word's per-skill XP across all four skills (Listening, Speaking, Writing, Reading).
Below that are example sentences pulled from real videos.
Playing Example Sentences
Click the play button on any example sentence to open the video at the exact moment the sentence is spoken. It plays the sentence, then stops. Use Previous and Next to jump between examples, save the video, or mine the line right from this view.
Sentence Mining
Mining means saving a sentence so you can study or revisit it later. While watching, click the star icon next to any subtitle to mine it.
You can add a note while you mine, which is handy for sentences you don't fully understand and want to ask about later.
Your saved notes show up right under the sentence in the player.
The Mined Sentences Page
Click Mined in the navigation to see everything you've saved. Each entry has a play button (jumps to the exact video segment), an Explanation button, your notes, and a delete button.
Pro tip: mined sentences are the best fuel for Review. To make sure every learning word has a mined sentence, go to the Words page, filter by Learning, and mine a good example for any word that's missing one.
Albums
Albums are collections of videos. They're more than folders: they act as filters across the whole platform. You can restrict example sentences, Review sessions, and word contexts to a single album, which lets you learn from the kind of content you actually care about.
Each album shows its overall Progress, video count, average Difficulty, and your Vocabulary and Grammar coverage.
To add a video to an album, click the bookmark icon on a video card or in the player, then check the albums you want and hit Save video. You can spin up a new album right from the same dialog with Add album.
The Dojo: Where You Drill
The Dojo is the practice hub. It splits into two activities that cover the two halves of fluency.
- Review is your input practice (Reading and Listening), grounded in real sentences and scheduled with spaced repetition (SRS, based on FSRS).
- Roleplay is your output practice (Speaking and Writing), a conversation with an AI partner.
Each side shows your separate per-skill levels, so you always know whether your reading is outrunning your speaking.
Setting Up a Review Session
Tap Review to open the Comprehension Drill setup. You make three choices:
- Modality: Reading or Listening.
- Words pool: drill words you're still Learning or words you already Known.
- View (question style): Flash cards or Multiple choice.
You also pick the Sentence source: your mined sentences (most control), a specific album, or all words. Then hit Begin Drill.
That gives you four possible review experiences. Here's how each plays out.
Reading + Flashcard
A Japanese sentence appears with the target word highlighted. Your job is to work out the meaning in context.
Tap Reveal, check the meaning, optionally read the AI explanation, then self-rate the word: Hard, Easy, or Known. Your rating decides when the word comes back.
Listening + Multiple Choice
A short video clip plays with the target word blanked out of the caption. The clip starts a few seconds early for context and you can replay it, so it feels like immersion, not a pop quiz. You pick the meaning from four options.
Hit Check answer and the app instantly shows the right and wrong choices and updates your schedule automatically. There's no self-rating in multiple choice: a correct answer is treated like Easy, a wrong one like Hard, and getting the same word right four times in a row marks it Known.
Want the deeper breakdown? Tap See Explanation to get the AI's take on the sentence.
The Results Screen
At the end of a session you get a summary of how you did, with a per-question breakdown of what you got right, wrong, or skipped, and the correct answers.
Getting a word right in Review earns Reading or Listening XP and counts toward your daily streak. Remember the SRS caps: learning words top out at a 7-day interval, known words at 90 days.
Roleplay: Practicing Output
Roleplay is where you actually use the language. The AI sets up a short conversation around a scenario (say, a shop clerk and a customer) using words and grammar you're currently learning, plus words you already know, so it stays in reach.
On each of your turns, the app shows what you should try to say in your own language. You answer in Japanese by typing or speaking (tap the mic). The AI voices its own lines out loud and gives you quick feedback on whether your sentence landed.
Producing a correct sentence earns Writing XP (typed) or Speaking XP (spoken) and counts toward your streak. Opening a hint to reveal the answer still finishes the turn, but you earn no XP for it. At the end you get a summary with total XP, a Writing-vs-Speaking split, a per-word breakdown, and your level progress.
Shadowing: Speaking Inside a Video
You don't have to be in Roleplay to practice speaking. While watching a video, you can shadow a line: a "Say it" prompt appears with the target sentence, you tap the mic, and you repeat what you hear.
You get a pronunciation score out of 100. Hitting a score of at least 90 is considered a success.
Shadowing gives a small boost to a word's Speaking XP. It's a nice warmup, but forming your own sentences in Roleplay is where most of your speaking progress comes from.
How XP, Levels, and Streaks Work
This is the part the old guide never explained, so pay attention. Your progress is measured in XP earned at the word level, across four skills grouped into two categories:
- Input: Reading and Listening
- Output: Writing and Speaking
Each word can earn up to 10 XP per skill (40 XP total). Hit 10 XP in a skill and that word is mastered in that skill. You can see this on any word's dictionary page, where each of the four skills has its own XP bar.
What earns XP:
- Rating a word Easy or Known in a Reading or Listening flashcard review.
- Answering a Reading or Listening comprehension question correctly.
- Producing a correct sentence in Roleplay (typing = Writing XP, speaking = Speaking XP).
What does NOT earn XP: simply seeing a word in a video. That only bumps the word's seen count, which is tracked separately. XP is also deduplicated, so grinding the same sentence for the same word won't farm extra XP. Only new, distinct correct work counts. Both vocabulary and grammar use this exact model.
All that XP rolls up into an Overall Level plus separate per-skill levels. Higher levels can have gates, meaning they require a minimum amount of Input or Output XP. So if you have the total XP but you've been dodging speaking practice, the app will show you exactly how much Output XP you still need.
Streaks
A day counts toward your streak if you do at least one qualifying activity:
- a Review reading quiz
- a Review listening quiz
- about 1 minute of video watching
- shadowing a sentence
- a correct Roleplay translation
Streak days follow your local timezone, and credit fires the moment you cross the threshold. Your streak flame lives in the top bar so you always see it.
Importing Your Own Videos
Want to study a specific YouTube video that isn't in our library? You can import it.
You can do this through the app/web-app or through the HayaiLearn Chrome Extension.
Once a video is processed, all the good stuff (clickable subtitles, word cards, grammar, AI explanations) will be available and your word exposure gets tracked while you watch those videos.
Read the Chrome extension guide for the full walkthrough.
Why an import might fail:
- The YouTube video has no "Japanese" or "Japanese (auto-generated)" subtitle.
- The video is blocked in a country we don't support yet.
- It's a premium content that is limited to paid YouTube members.
- It's a channel members-only video
Read: our guide to finding Japanese YouTube videos for tips on hunting down importable content. The short version: search with Japanese keywords and turn on YouTube's "Subtitles" filter.
Bonus: Train YouTube's Algorithm
Here's a trick. Set up a dedicated YouTube account just for Japanese, and keep it logged in on a separate tab. When you play videos in HayaiLearn, they land in that account's history, which feeds YouTube's recommendation engine and surfaces more Japanese content you'll like.
Warning: this only works on desktop. On mobile, being logged into YouTube on another tab can break video embeds with an "An error occurred" message. If that happens, log out of YouTube.
Your Profile and Settings
Open the menu in the top right (your avatar and the three-dot icon) to reach Profile & Stats, Subscription, and Logout.
Profile and Stats
Your profile is the scoreboard. It shows your level and streak, your Vocabulary and Grammar counts (learning vs known), your total watch time, videos completed and watched, and a weekly progress grid.
Subscription and Pricing
HayaiLearn has two paid plans, each available monthly or yearly:
- Pro for learners who just want to watch, immerse, import videos, and do listening/reading drills.
- Platinum which adds shadowing, speaking exercises, and Roleplay.
A few billing notes: yearly plans include a free trial (monthly plans don't), and yearly trials convert to a paid plan unless you cancel 24 hrs before free trial ends. Manage all of this on the Subscription page.
A Recommended Learning Loop
Tie it all together and a solid daily session looks like this:
- Build a foundation first with kana, basic kanji, and verb conjugations (one time, up front).
- Pick words strategically from the frequency list.
- Find videos at your level using difficulty scores, the Most comprehensible lane, and filters.
- Immerse with the AI tools: popup dictionary, grammar lessons, AI explanations.
- Mine sentences worth keeping.
- Practice in the Dojo: Review for reading and listening, Roleplay for speaking and writing.
Rinse and repeat. The streak and XP systems are there to keep you honest.
The Bottom Line
HayaiLearn works because it keeps you in content you enjoy while quietly doing the hard parts for you: parsing the Japanese, picking the right meaning, scheduling your reviews, and grading your speaking. Your only job is to show up, watch, mine, and drill.
Start with the Getting Started checklist, build a daily loop around the Dojo, and let the streak keep you coming back. The more you explore, the faster it all clicks.
Welcome to HayaiLearn, and happy learning.
Join Our Discord Community
Got questions or want the latest updates? Join us on Discord or email [email protected].