Toku Reader

As a Chinese speaker who also ships an iOS app, the "no accounts, no streaks, runs on-device" stance is the part I respect most — most language apps throw up a login wall and a streak counter before you can read a single sentence. Curious from the build side: bundling full JP + CN engines and offline dictionaries usually means a chunky download and some battery cost. Roughly how big is the app, and does the parsing stay snappy on older phones?

How does the on-device engine handle really obscure kanji or rare compound words that might not be in the bundled offline dictionaries — does it just leave you stuck on those?

the synced word-tappable transcript for podcasts and youtube is the part i'd want to stress test before trusting it. japanese in particular has a ton of homophones and casual speech drops particles constantly, so an on-device engine transcribing real conversational audio (not clean narration) seems like the hard part. does it show any confidence signal when it's guessing on a mumbled or fast line, or does it just silently give you its best guess as if it were certain

The on-device offline dictionary part is what stands out to me, most language tools want you online for lookups. On the Chinese side specifically, word segmentation is the hard part since there are no spaces to tell you where one word ends and the next begins, and it's easy to tap-split a compound wrong. Also curious whether it handles both simplified and traditional, since a lot of Chinese content someone might paste in (Taiwan sites, older text) is traditional even if the learner studied simplified.

how does it handle the furigana lookup for kanji compounds that have multiple readings depending on context, like 当て字 or rare names?

the "tap any word on a youtube video or podcast" part is the bit that matters. most immersion apps make you leave the content to look something up, which kills the flow and the motivation right when you had it. keeping the lookup in place on real native material (novels, podcasts, video) is how people actually stick with a language instead of grinding flashcards. congrats on the launch.

Hi Product Hunt 👋 I'm Darren, the maker of Toku.

I built it because reading native Japanese and Chinese — a news article, a novel, a podcast — meant constantly stopping to look words up, and that kills the flow. So Toku does the looking-up for you: tap any word and its reading, meaning, and dictionary entry appear right there.

It works on text you paste, web pages, and the part I'm most excited about — real podcasts and YouTube videos. You get a synced, word-tappable transcript: tap a word to learn it, slow the audio down, replay a line, or pause after each sentence to repeat it out loud (shadowing).

Under the hood it runs its own Japanese & Chinese engine on-device with offline dictionaries — fast, private, works on a plane. No accounts, no streaks nagging you. Just reading.

I'd genuinely love your feedback — what's confusing, what's missing, what you'd want next. Thank you for taking a look 🙏