花 hannari

物語

About Hannari

Hannari is a Chrome extension that adds furigana to kanji on any Japanese page. It exists because the person who built it needed it.

The problem

Reading Japanese online turns into a translation exercise.

If you're studying Japanese — anywhere between N5 and N3 — you can probably get through most of an article. Hiragana flows. Katakana you've memorized. Then a kanji shows up, the sentence stops, and you're back in a dictionary.

Existing tools either show furigana over everything (annoying once you know the basics), require you to configure dictionaries and shortcut keys, or only work on a handful of sites.

The name

Why “Hannari”?

はんなり (hannari) is a Kyoto-dialect word for an elegant, soft, refined kind of beauty — the quiet kind that doesn't demand attention. That's the feeling we want when you read Japanese with the extension on: present, helpful, and unobtrusive.

How it started

Built by a learner, for learners.

I'm a Brazilian developer who started studying Japanese a few years ago. After enough time to recognize all the kana and a few hundred kanji, I tried reading actual Japanese — news sites, blogs, posts.

It didn't work. Every paragraph turned into a stop-and-research session. I'd lose the meaning of one sentence by the time I'd looked up the kanji in the next one.

I tried every browser extension I could find. None did the simple thing I wanted: show me the reading on top of kanji, only kanji, on any site. So I built it.

Principles

Three things we won't compromise on.

  1. Privacy by default. Everything runs in your browser. We never send what you read to a server. No analytics on your reading patterns.
  2. No subscriptions. You pay once for Pro. You own it. If we stop developing, your installed copy keeps working.
  3. Gets out of your way. The best reading tool is one you don't notice. Hannari fades into the page until you need it.

What's next

On the roadmap.

  • Mobile. Same product, on your phone — next major direction.
  • Reading stats. How much Japanese you've actually read, kanji frequency, time spent — opt-in, stored locally.
  • Firefox & Safari. Once Chrome is stable.

Data sources

Standing on excellent shoulders.

Kanji readings, meanings, and JLPT levels come from Kanjidic2 by EDRDG, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Example word lists are derived from JMdict by EDRDG, licensed under the same CC BY-SA 4.0.

JLPT level lists additionally incorporate the community-maintained kanji-data project by David Gouveia (MIT license).

These datasets are processed and shipped with Hannari following the license requirements (attribution and share-alike).

Acknowledgments

Thank you.

  • EDRDG (Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group) — for maintaining the foundational Japanese-language datasets that make projects like Hannari possible.
  • The Japanese learning community — r/LearnJapanese, Tofugu, and WaniKani — for making Japanese accessible to learners worldwide.

Hannari is free to try.

Install on Chrome