Todaii alternatives: the same Japanese news, without the app

Todaii, the app that used to be called Easy Japanese News and is now "Todaii: Learn Japanese N5–N1", earned its 4.7 rating honestly. Fresh Japanese articles every day, tagged by JLPT level, furigana you can switch on and off, and a dictionary one tap away. For a lot of people it was the first place Japanese news felt readable.

People go looking for an alternative for three reasons. The ads and the upgrade prompts got loud. The app grew into a Swiss-army knife (AI conversation partner, speaking scores, 72 dialogue lessons, mock tests) when all they wanted was the news reader. Or they simply outgrew a JLPT-sorted feed and want the real Japanese internet.

Here's the thing that changes the search: Todaii is an aggregator. Its articles come from NHK's easy news, the Asahi Shimbun, the Chunichi Shimbun, Japanese-language CNN and BBC, and others. Everything it shows you is already on the open web. So the alternative isn't another app. It's the sources themselves, plus the two things Todaii layered on top: a dictionary tap and furigana.

First, what you're replacing

Todaii is a website (japanese.todaiinews.com) and an iOS/Android app from a small team in Hanoi. The free version has ads and delivers ten-plus new items a day. Premium removes the ads and adds offline reading and sync; on the App Store today that's $12.99 a month, $54.99 a year or $69.99 for life, though the numbers move with region and promotions. Audio is machine-generated. The dictionary has handwriting input. Articles carry a colour bar showing how much of the vocabulary sits at each JLPT level.

Tofugu's review back in 2021 called the core reader strong and the rest "tacked on". Five years and a dozen features later, that's still the fairest one-line summary.

If it was the easy news: NHK has it, free, with furigana and audio

Todaii's N5 and N4 feed is largely NHK's easy news, and NHK gives it away. NHKやさしいことばニュース (the old NEWS WEB EASY, which moved to news.web.nhk/news/easy/ in 2026) publishes about four stories a day: real news rewritten in simple Japanese, furigana on every kanji with a toggle to hide it, an audio button, and a link to the unsimplified original. That last link is the best study trick in Japanese news reading, and the routine built around it is here.

What you lose against Todaii: volume. Four stories a day, not ten. If you want more at the same difficulty, the fix isn't another aggregator; it's the ladder of free Japanese reading sites, which has graded readers below NHK Easy and real news above it.

If it was the tap dictionary: put one on the real sites

This is Todaii's actual value, and it's the easiest part to replace, because a dictionary layer can sit on any Japanese page, not just the ones an app chose to import.

Yomitan is the free, open-source hover dictionary. Point it at NHK, Yahoo! Japan News or the Asahi and every word is a hover away, with an optional Anki export for the committed. Setup takes an evening and some dictionary files, and it's worth it if you like owning your tools.

Mossglen (full disclosure: ours) is the no-setup version. It's a free Chrome extension: open any Japanese article, or a YouTube video, and it becomes a clean reading view. Tap a word for the reading and meaning, and it's saved with the sentence it came from. Reviews run on FSRS, the current generation of spaced repetition, with no cards to build. A short quiz after reading keeps the next article at your level, which is what Todaii's JLPT colour bar was trying to do by hand.

What you give up: the JLPT tags and the mock tests. Mossglen doesn't label articles N3 or N2; it learns what you can read and adjusts. And it gives readings on tap rather than furigana on every kanji, which is the point once you're past N4: you want to be tested by the kanji, not rescued from it.

If it was the JLPT practice

Be honest about which half of Todaii you used. The 356 reading exercises and the mock tests are a test-prep app that happens to share a login with a news reader.

For that half, the official sample questions and practice workbooks on jlpt.jp are free and are the actual exam format. Pair them with a proper textbook series for your level. News reading was never going to get you through the grammar section, on Todaii or anywhere else. (Burnt out on a kanji queue while you're at it? WaniKani alternatives, by where you quit.)

If you outgrew the feed: the real internet

The best Todaii alternative for anyone around N2 is to stop reading pre-sorted articles at all.

NHK ONE NEWS, the unsimplified originals. Yahoo! Japan News, which adds the comment sections, where the Japanese is real in a way no textbook is. The Asahi and Mainichi for long-form. For fiction, Syosetu and the free web-novel sites; for pictures with words, manga in Japanese, legally and free. If you want the whole path from easy news to novels laid out, that's the Japanese reading guide.

None of these have a dictionary built in. That's what the previous section was for.

Todaii vs NHK News Web Easy

The direct question, since people ask it. NHK Easy is the source; Todaii is a reader that pulls from it and others. Todaii adds the tap dictionary, the JLPT filter, extra volume from other outlets and the quizzes, and charges you in ads or a subscription for the bundle. If you only ever read the easy news, go to NHK directly and add a browser dictionary. You'll have the same articles, better audio, and no upsell.

The short version

What you used Todaii for	Go to	Cost
Easy news with furigana and audio	NHKやさしいことばニュース	Free
Tap-to-define on any Japanese site	Mossglen, or Yomitan	Free
More volume at your level	Graded readers and the site ladder; Satori Reader if you want stories	Free / about $9 a month
JLPT mock tests	Official samples on jlpt.jp plus a textbook series	Free / books
Real news, no training wheels	NHK ONE NEWS, Yahoo! Japan News, Asahi	Free

Todaii's real insight was that Japanese news is the best reading material for learners: short, daily, and about the world you already know. That's still true. You just don't need an app between you and it.