About this site
My name is Bogdan. I am a fourth-year computer science student, and I have been learning Japanese for a while now. This site exists because of a very ordinary frustration.
The problem I actually had
I wanted to study with physical flashcards. Not an app — paper cards I could shuffle, sort into piles and carry in my pocket. Making them by hand turned out to be miserable: screenshot a word, crop it, print it, then write the reading and the translation on the back of every single card. After twenty or thirty cards I was too worn out to actually study them. I spent more time producing flashcards than learning from them.
So I looked for a tool. Everything I found was either digital-only, or printed on A4 sheets that you then had to cut out by hand, or wanted an account and a subscription. Nothing simply took a list of words and printed them onto small cards, front and back, the way I needed.
So I built it
I wrote this tool for myself, in plain HTML and JavaScript, and then decided to put it online for free. It does one thing: you pick a range from the 1000 most common Japanese words, print all the fronts, flip the stack, print the backs. That is it. No account, no paywall, no limits.
Where the words come from
The vocabulary is a frequency list of the 1000 most common Japanese words. For each word I added the form written in kanji where one is normally used, the reading in hiragana or katakana, the romaji transcription, and translations. The list covers a large part of the vocabulary tested at JLPT N5 and N4 level, which makes it a reasonable starting point for most beginners.
The site is available in seven languages — English, Romanian, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish and French — and the translation on the back of each card is in the language you chose.
How it is built
Everything runs in your browser. There is no server that processes your words, no database, no tracking of what you print. The page generates the cards locally and hands them straight to your printer's own print dialog. That also means the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded.
- Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript — no framework, no build step in the browser
- Card size, text size and text position are all adjustable
- Hosted as static files, so it loads fast and cannot break in interesting ways
Why it is free
Because I made it for myself anyway, and because the version of me who was cutting cards by hand at midnight would have been very glad if someone else had published this first. The site shows a few ads to cover hosting; nothing is gated behind them.
Contact
If something is broken, if a translation is wrong, or if you have an idea for the tool, I would genuinely like to hear it: b3radu@gmail.com. Corrections to the word list are especially welcome — I am still learning too.