About HayaiLearn
Hi, I’m Lawrence. I built the Japanese app I wished I had.
Former Lead Engineer at MongoDB, a Nasdaq-listed tech company. 13+ years building software. LinkedIn →
In 2023 I traveled to 10+ countries and tried to learn each language. Textbooks were boring. Apps had lots of features but little depth. Japan stuck with me, so I started there.
For 3 years, my team of engineers and UX designers and I have built HayaiLearn by listening to learners and fixing what slowed them down. The goal: learning Japanese that feels as fun as playing Zelda.
Try it nowWhy it works
Does learning from videos really work?
Yes, with the right support. Research agrees that understanding lots of real language is at the core of how we pick it up. Linguists call it comprehensible input. But videos alone aren’t the whole story.
Linguist Paul Nation suggests balancing four things. HayaiLearn covers all four:
Lots of Japanese you understand
Real videos with readings, tap-any-word lookup, and grammar help. Each video shows how much of it you’ll understand, so you can pick ones at your level.
Speaking practice
Talk with AI characters in real-life roleplays, and shadow lines from the videos you watch.
Focused study
Grammar lessons, plus reviews that bring words back right before you’d forget them. Spaced review is one of the best-proven ways to remember.
Getting faster
Listening drills and rewatching easy videos, so you understand at full speed.
Sources: Krashen, Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition (1982). Nation, “The Four Strands” (2007). Hu & Nation, reading comprehension and known-word coverage (2000).
Quality first
We sweat the details other apps skip.
Japanese has no spaces between words, so an app has to guess where each word starts. Guess wrong, and the dictionary shows the wrong word. We spent years getting this right, so the word you tap is the word you hear.
See how we compare to other apps →What learners say
Real reviews from real learners.
“A really great platform, that needs to get a lot more recognition in the immersion learning community. I happily purchased and I'm pleasantly surprised by the developer's pro-activeness in handling feedback and implementing desired changes. Really nifty tool for immersion learning.”
@glvdtr
“Been studying for 2 months. Just trying out a bunch of apps and figuring out a study schedule still. So much to learn so little time. Really liked your site, so decided to get a sub.”
@jigachu
“I've always believed YouTube videos were the best way to learn Japanese. Until now I've been using online tools to extract the transcripts and manually paste them into Chat GPT / Grok to generate a list of vocabulary words, which didn't always work well. Then I found HayaiLearn which makes it super easy.”
@jamauai
“Great App, it has lots of great features my favourite ones being the fact that you can make album, separate tab for grammar, chat gpt explanations which really aid comprehension, but above all this app provides the best translation quality for japanese compared to every other app that I have tried. I have tried language reactor, LingQ and a few others, but this is the only one with actually good translations”
Emma H
Talk to us
We’re still improving every week. Tell us what you think.
Questions, ideas, or something not working? We read every message.
Join our DiscordHayaiLearn · 211 E 43rd St, New York, NY 10017
