考え方The approach

Real progress in Japanese starts when you can read. Once reading clicks, vocabulary and nuance compound naturally from contact with real text. The hard part of intermediate study isn't finding material — it's that authentic text is studded with words, kanji, and grammar just past your reach, and the constant dictionary-and-tab-switching breaks the reading flow that makes reading worth doing.

The goal isn't comprehensive mastery — it's staying in the text: reading natural Japanese with help one tap away, so the reading itself does the teaching.

Who it's for

You read hiragana and katakana, you've worked through a beginner foundation (Genki I, Minna no Nihongo, or equivalent), and you want to push from "I can read simple sentences" toward "I can read everyday Japanese — stories, novels, blogs, news." Dokusho is built for short, frequent reading sessions on iPhone (and iPad), with everything you need to decode a passage living inside the passage.

How it relates to Nihongo Dominos

Dokusho and Dominos are two doors into the same learning data — the same frequency-built vocabulary, kanji, and grammar lists, and the very same flip-card back faces. The difference is mode:

Dominos is a recognition drill — a grid of tiles you flip and clear, training retrieval out of context.
Dokusho is a reader — words arrive embedded in a story, and you meet them in the order and register a real sentence supplies. Tap one and the same back-face card you'd see in Dominos opens in place.

Drill and read reinforce each other: a tile you cleared in Dominos turns up again, alive, in a Dokusho sentence; a word you tripped over while reading is waiting for you back in the drill.

日本語読書 · NihonGO Dokusho