A note from the maker
I’m Japanese, but I’m not a teacher or a linguist — just someone who has always loved learning languages. For years I’ve had a few ideas about how a language could be learned more naturally, and pitamaru is my way of sharing them.
I also believe learning should be as fair as possible — it shouldn’t depend on how much you can pay.
So pitamaru is built to be useful for free. Every folk tale is free all the way to the top level, and so are the puzzle, the quiz and your progress. If you only ever use the free part, you can still get to the point where you’re ready to read Japanese elsewhere — NHK News Web Easy, graded readers, the books you’ve always wanted to read.
That’s the point. pitamaru is just a stepping stone, not a place to keep you.
Plus, the supporter membership, opens the higher levels of the literature, all the way to the original texts. But honestly, I’d love you to think of it less as buying more features and more as cheering this project on. It keeps the free part free for the next learner.
And if you use pitamaru for free and move on to bigger things — that makes me just as happy.
Since I’m not an expert, there will be mistakes here and there — an odd translation, an unnatural sentence, a wrong explanation. If you spot one, I’d be grateful if you could . It’s anonymous.
ぴたっと、はまる。
— Yawney Hawn (@yawneyhawn on X ↗)
Read this note in Japanese — like a story