Immersion Reader

This is the best simple reader app for Japanese if you are a more advanced Japanese learner whomdoesn,t want much more than to display a book and have a nice dictionary. The only things I wish it had are continuous scrolling mode like the browser version of the ttsunreader that it uses. And also when you delete a book, the statistics should be deleted. Because when you add a new book ttsunis going tomuse the lowest available ID and then the statistics for multiple books get all garbled up. Similarly, if you skip to another part in a book, maybe because you read a certain amount in another app or debice, it is going to skyrocket the reading speed stat.

I much prefer this to the bloat and confusion of Manabi reader. It would be absolutely perfect to me if there was iCloud sync for the books you’re reading and where you are in them. There is that one issue where when you swipe out without pressing the bookmark button it doesn’t save your spot, but it doesn’t bother me too much. Haven’t tried the premium browser within, so I can’t speak on that, but I may try it in the near future. Thank you for developing this! So so useful to have these tools on iOS.

This app does what it advertises — it’s a great tool for Japanese learners to read books and makes learning vocabulary much easier. Crucially, it imported the epub I tested correctly, with vertical text and right-to-left reading. (Surprisingly, some other similar apps failed to do so.) However, there are a few issues that are quite big to me. When looking up a compound word like 無邪気 the dictionary doesn’t treat the whole word as a single tappable “link”. Meaning, if I tap 無, I get the whole compound word. However, if I tap 邪, I get 邪気. And similarly, 気 gets the single character. The expected behavior, from many other apps, is that tapping on any character of a compound word will give the definition of the whole compound word. Also annoying: swiping the book does close it, but doesn’t save the page you were on. To do that, you have to tap the exit button. I also couldn’t find a way to go to a specific page (though there is a table of contents). For more minor issues, the e-reader is just not very refined at this point. It’s not exactly fair to compare this to the pre-installed Apple Books app, but it would be nice to have features like auto day-night mode, tap to flip pages, and page flipping animations. That all said, I’m very glad this app exists and I’m hoping to see future updates resolve these issues. At it’s core, I think this is a great app.