Your favorite content at your level

LangShift takes popular Japanese books, like Sword Art Online or Norwegian Wood, and makes them easier to read. Our goal is to help learners read their favorite Japanese content, which would otherwise be too challenging for their current level.

Sure. Here's the first paragraph from Murakami's 1Q84.

タクシーのラジオは、ＦＭ放送のクラシック音楽番組を流していた。曲はヤナーチェックの『シンフォニエッタ』。渋滞に巻き込まれたタクシーの中で聴くのにうってつけの音楽とは言えないはずだ。運転手もとくに熱心にその音楽に耳を澄ませているようには見えなかった。中年の運転手は、まるで舳先へさきに立って不吉な潮目を読む老練な漁師のように、前方に途切れなく並んだ車の列を、ただ口を閉ざして見つめていた。青豆あおまめは後部席のシートに深くもたれ、軽く目をつむって音楽を聴いていた。

Roughly translated:

The radio in the cab was playing a classical music program on FM. The music was "Sinfonietta" by Janacek. It was not the best music to listen to in a cab stuck in traffic. The driver did not seem to be listening to the music with particular attention. The middle-aged driver just stared at the endless line of cars in front of him with a closed mouth, like an old fisherman who stands at the bow of a ship to read the ominous tide. Aomame was leaning deeply into the back seat, listening to the music with her eyes lightly closed.

And here's our simplified version.

タクシーの中で、クラシック音楽が流れていた。曲はヤナーチェックの『シンフォニエッタ』。渋滞に巻き込まれたタクシーの中で、運転手は前方の車の列を見つめていた。青豆は後部席で音楽を聴いていた。

Roughly translated:

In the cab, classical music was playing. The tune was "Sinfonietta" by Janacek. The cab was stuck in traffic, and the driver was staring at the line of cars ahead of him. Aomame was in the back seat listening to the music.

In alpha, we're operating under fair use and therefore only display the first few pages of each book. In beta, we'll allow you to read full books, but ask you to prove that you bought it (e.g. on Amazon). We may also support uploading your own books. In the future, we'll try to arrange a deal with the publishers to avoid this awkwardness.

Extremely new. We're just getting started, and we expect to have lots of problems. Please try it out and send feedback to us at hello.langshift@gmail.com.

Alpha is basically a demo. You can read up to 15 pages of each text, but you should expect it to generally have lots of bugs and issues. For example, the text might be too hard, or inconsistently hard, or have some other problems. Beta will be more useful: it'll have features like accounts, full books, more correct explanations, and more.

LangShift is completely free while it's in alpha. Once we're out of alpha, we'll charge per-month to use LangShift, or give access for free but charge to access Japanese-Japanese definitions, or something. We want to do something fair and reasonable, but haven't figured out what that is yet. Regardless, you'll have to prove to us that you bought the book from the publisher (e.g. on Amazon) before we'll let you read it on LangShift. This is not a piracy platform, and it's important to pay authors for their work!

As you might have guessed, we're using large language models under the hood.

The purpose of the Japanese definitions is to help newer learners transition into Japanese-only reading. Therefore, we prefer definitions like "an airplane is a flying car" to "an airplane is a powered flying vehicle with fixed wings and a weight greater than that of the air it displaces."

If you can stumble through the first few sentences on the homepage, and want to read one of our supported books, this is for you. Our goal is to help learners read their favorite Japanese content way earlier than they'd be able to otherwise.

Expect more control over the difficulty controls in beta, including easier settings for current texts.

If you care that the content you read is exactly as the author wrote it, this definitely isn't for you. We're liberally tranforming the texts to make them enjoyable for new learners.

We want people to start using our current product as quickly as possible, so we can gather feedback about what's working and what isn't.

For beta, we're going to add some highly requested features:

• Accounts, so you can track your progress, and we can dynamically adjust the difficulty of the text to suit your level.
• The ability to read full books, and upload your own.

We believe that learning to read a language can eventually be a smooth process where you wake up every day and read a book that you like. It'll automatically control things like the rate of introduction of new words and grammar to keep reading enjoyable.

If we do a really good job, it'll feel like Stephenson's The Diamond Age!