The spaced-repetition system decides what you study and when — that's the point of it. But sometimes you want to go looking: check whether a word you met in the wild is coming up, review everything you've learned at N4, or collect the food vocabulary you'll need next month.
That's what the vocabulary catalog is for.
Search and filter the whole corpus
Cotobara's catalog holds 8,000+ curated Japanese words from N5 to N1, and it's fully searchable — in Japanese, in romaji, or in English.
Filters let you narrow by:
- JLPT level — N5 through N1.
- Part of speech — verbs, い-adjectives, な-adjectives, nouns, adverbs, counters and more.
- My words only — just the vocabulary you've actually started, so you can review what you own rather than what exists.
- Bookmarked only — your own lists.
Every result shows your current SRS stage for that word, so a browse is also a status check: what's Mastered, what's still Learning, what you haven't touched.
The JLPT readiness bars on the dashboard link straight into filtered views here, which is the fastest way to answer "what N3 vocabulary haven't I started yet?"
Every word has a real page
Click any word and you get its full entry:
- Reading with furigana, kanji, romaji, and pitch accent.
- The primary meaning plus every alternate meaning the grader accepts.
- Part of speech, JLPT level, and how common the word actually is.
- The word breakdown — kanji components, construction, a mental model, usage notes.
- Example sentences with native audio and hover-to-translate glossing.
- Links to more vocabulary at the same level.
These pages are public. You don't need an account, and you don't hit a signup wall — look up a Japanese word from a search engine and you get the real entry. If it's a word you'd like to actually learn, the app's a click away.
Your own layer: bookmarks, notes, custom answers
A shared corpus can't know what you find hard. Three tools let you build on top of it.
Bookmarks with your own tags
Bookmark any word and tag it however you like — restaurant, work, keeps beating me, chapter 4. Up to ten tags per word, and the browse filter shows you your bookmarks on demand.
This is your manual list on top of the automatic system: the words you want to find again for a reason the SRS has no way to know about.
Personal notes
Any word you've started can carry your own note. The single best use is disambiguation — the note that says "this is the one with the ん, unlike the other one." Most Japanese vocabulary difficulty isn't a word being hard in isolation; it's two similar words interfering with each other. A note in your own words, written at the moment you confused them, is worth more than any explanation someone else can write for you.
Your notes appear right in the review feedback, so you see them at the exact moment you need them.
Alternative meanings — teach the grader
This one quietly fixes the most annoying thing about vocabulary apps.
Cotobara grades meaning answers against the word's primary meaning plus a curated set of synonyms, and it forgives small typos. But English is wide, and eventually you'll type an answer that's genuinely correct and get marked wrong — you said "quit" and it wanted "resign," you said "sofa" and it wanted "couch."
Add your answer as an alternative meaning and it counts from then on. Miss a word on a meaning card and the editor even pre-fills what you typed, so accepting your own answer is one click.
The point isn't leniency, it's accuracy. A grader that rejects answers you clearly knew doesn't make you study harder — it makes your accuracy statistics lie, and those statistics are what tells you whether your pace is right.
What's free and what's Premium
Reading is free and open: browse, search, and every word's full public page, account or not.
The personal layer — bookmarks, notes, alternative meanings, and word breakdowns — is Premium, and every new account gets a 30-day trial with no card required. If your trial ends, nothing you wrote is deleted; it's locked, and it's all there again the moment you subscribe.
Start free · Browse the vocabulary · See the full feature tour