Japanese reading practice websites, sorted by level

There's no shortage of lists of Japanese reading sites. Most were written years ago and quietly rot: links redirect, free tiers close, and the one site every guide recommends moved this year without telling anyone in English.

Every site below was opened and checked in September 2026, sorted by the level where it starts being useful.

First, the NHK thing

If you've read any Japanese learning guide, it told you to use NHK News Web Easy at www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/.

That URL now redirects. NHK folded its web services into a platform called NHK ONE, and the site is now NHKやさしいことばニュース | NEWS WEB EASY, at news.web.nhk/news/easy/.

Three things to know:

• A consent screen appears on your first visit. Click 確認しました / I understand and it's gone.
• NHK states plainly that NHK ONE is intended for use inside Japan and that some video is unavailable from overseas. Article text loads fine from abroad.
• It's still free, still has furigana on every kanji, and still runs about four new stories a day.

It's still the best free Japanese reading site there is. It just isn't where the old links point.

If you have kana and not much else

Tadoku free books (tadoku.org) — the extensive reading foundation's own library. Dozens of graded titles from Level 0 up, readable in the browser or printable as PDFs, many with audio or a YouTube read-along. Level 0 is a few words a page with pictures. This is the gentlest real Japanese in existence, and it costs nothing.

Hukumusume (hukumusume.com) — an enormous archive of Japanese folk tales and children's stories, most with furigana, many with audio. The site looks like 2003. The content is genuinely good.

When simple news becomes readable

NHKやさしいことばニュース — see above. Four short stories a day about things that actually happened, furigana throughout.

Watanoc (watanoc.com) — short news-style articles written for N5–N4, each tagged with its level, furigana over the kanji. Lighter subject matter than NHK, which matters on the weeks the news is grim.

MATCHA Easy Japanese (matcha-jp.com/easy) — a travel magazine's simplified edition, free, furigana throughout. Trains, food, onsen etiquette, festivals. Vocabulary you'd actually use on a trip.

Yomujp (yomujp.com) — graded reading passages sorted N6 through N1, over a hundred pieces at some levels. New articles are free for four weeks after publication; the back catalogue sits behind a membership. Useful for the gap where news is still hard and Tadoku is too easy.

When you're ready for real Japanese

NHK News Web — the unsimplified version of the same stories. Reading the easy version first and the adult version second is the most efficient trick in Japanese reading practice: you already know the content, so you're only fighting the language.

Aozora Bunko (aozora.gr.jp) — Japan's public domain library. Sōseki, Dazai, Akutagawa, free, plain HTML. Older texts use pre-war orthography, so it's not the soft landing it looks like.

Syosetu (syosetu.com) — the web novel site a surprising share of your anime originally came from. Millions of free chapters in plain text, and the isekai end is written in very plain language. Where to start with those.

Pixiv (pixiv.net) — fiction and comics from a live community. Informal register, wildly varying difficulty.

Worth paying for, if you want it handed to you

Satori Reader (about $9/month) — professionally written and narrated stories with per-word grammar notes and an unusually good app. The best-produced thing in this category; people look for alternatives because of the price, not the quality.

Todaii (japanese.todaiinews.com) — a news aggregator (NHK's easy news, the Asahi and others) with built-in dictionary, JLPT tagging and quizzes. Free with ads, paid upgrade; the sources themselves are free.

japanese.io — layers a dictionary over its own library and text you import.

The part these lists always skip

A reading site gives you text. It does not give you a way to survive the words you don't know, and that's where the habit actually dies.

Three options, in order of friction:

• A dictionary tab. Jisho open beside your reading, copy-paste each unknown word. It works, and it breaks your reading rhythm every thirty seconds.
• A pop-up dictionary. Yomitan gives instant hover definitions on any Japanese page on desktop. Free and excellent — and it stops at the definition. Nothing is kept.
• A reader that collects as you go. Tap the word, get the meaning, and have it saved with the sentence it came from so it comes back before you forget it.

That choice matters more than which site you pick. Reading Japanese without collecting words means looking up 見つける for the ninth time in three weeks.

Which one should I start with?

Kana only: Tadoku Level 0.

A few hundred words: NHKやさしいことばニュース, one story a day.

Can get through an easy news story without stopping: pick a Syosetu novel and read a chapter a night.

One site, daily, beats five sites bookmarked.

The wider method is here: how to learn Japanese by reading, and the same approach in any language.