Shiori（栞, “bookmark”）is a desktop reading companion built around comprehensible input: the primary activity is reading real Japanese text, and every other feature exists to support that.
Free & open source · Windows x86_64 · no accounts, no subscription, no cloud
Import any book. Read it. Click the words you don’t know — Shiori shows the dictionary entry, the usage register, the conjugation explained piece by piece — and one click later the word is in spaced repetition, anchored to the exact sentence you found it in. The app tracks every word you’ve ever met, grades each book in your library against what you know, and tells you what to read next.
Furigana appears only over words you haven’t learned — and in its strictest mode, only over the first few occurrences of each word per book: scaffolding that fades as you read deeper. Clicking a conjugated verb selects the whole phrase (読んでいる, not 読) and explains the form component by component.
The reading clock is honest, too: pages you flip through too fast don’t count, and the app pauses itself when you wander off.
Chat with a native-speaker persona that converses with you and never corrects you mid-conversation. Instead, your messages come back marked up like a paper: red underlines for grammar errors, orange for phrasing a native wouldn’t use, with the explanation one hover away.
Bring your own brain: Anthropic’s API, any local model through Ollama (nothing leaves your machine), or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
Search JMdict by kanji, kana, or any word form. Every kanji in your query gets a card — readings, meanings, school grade, and a numbered stroke-order diagram drawn from KanjiVG data — and you can add any hit straight to spaced repetition.
Search Aozora Bunko’s 17,000+ public-domain works and Japanese Wikisource, then import straight into your library — Shift_JIS, ruby markup and all. Aozora’s catalog is cached after the first fetch, so every search after that runs locally and instantly.
Every book is graded against what you actually know, with coverage forecasts, reading velocity, and a JLPT-graded comfortable reading level.
Cards show the word inside the sentence you found it in, framed by its neighbors, plus examples from your other books.
Export your cards with scheduling, or import an existing deck — SM-2 state seeds FSRS.
Unknown / learning / known / ignored, so names and noise never pollute your stats.
Dark / light / sepia themes, gothic or mincho Japanese fonts, rebindable shortcuts, adjustable typography.
Everything but LLM calls and online search works with no network. One SQLite file, one-click backup & restore.
.txt, .md, .html (Aozora), .epub, .pdf — UTF-8 or Shift_JIS, by dialog or drag-and-drop.
Grab the latest shiori-*-windows-x86_64.zip, unzip, and run
shiori.exe. On first launch Shiori downloads its reference data
(~20 MB) and you’re reading.
