Explain This Sentence
Paste any Japanese sentence and get furigana, a word-by-word gloss, and plain-English grammar notes — the explanation I wish I'd had on the Gotō Islands.
- TRANSLATION
- WORD FOR WORD
What you’re looking at
Tap any word in the sentence to see its reading, part of speech, and meaning in context. Below that: a natural translation, a word-for-word version, and the grammar points worth knowing.
Behind the scenes, one request goes to Claude Haiku 4.5, Anthropic’s smallest and fastest current model. It isn’t asked to write an essay. It has to fill in a strict form — every word with its reading, gloss, and dictionary form; a list of grammar points; a rough JLPT level. The API guarantees the answer matches that form (this is called structured output), so the page can lay it out as furigana and tappable words instead of a wall of text.
Why this matters for learners
When I started learning Japanese, the bottleneck was never motivation — it was the twenty minutes of dictionary lookups per sentence. A parsing tool that also explains — why it’s 行ったほうがいい and not just 行く — turns a real sentence from a wall into a lesson.
Where it goes wrong
- Word boundaries are a judgment call. Japanese has no spaces, and textbooks disagree on whether 寝ています is one word or three. The model picks one consistent style, but it won’t always match your textbook.
- Readings of rare kanji and names can be wrong. Treat unusual readings as a hint to double-check, not an answer.
- The JLPT level is a rough guess. The JLPT hasn’t published official vocabulary lists since its 2010 revision, so no tool can be precise here.
Guardrails
Each visitor gets 20 explanations a day, requests go through a Cloudflare human check, and the whole lab has a daily spending cap. Nothing you paste is stored by this site.