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Everything you need to know about Wakatta! and learning Japanese with sentence analysis.
Last updated: March 15, 2026
Wakatta! (分かった — "I understood!") is a Japanese sentence analyzer for iOS and Android. You paste any Japanese sentence and it gives you a complete breakdown: a natural translation, furigana readings over every kanji, a word-by-word analysis with contextual meanings and parts of speech, and grammar explanations tagged with JLPT levels.
The app uses AI with a strict structured output schema, which means every analysis follows the same consistent format — translation first, then words, then grammar. You paste a sentence, tap Analyze, and within a few seconds the results stream in piece by piece. It works with kanji, hiragana, katakana, and even romaji input.
Wakatta! is free to use with a generous daily analysis limit. Wakatta! Pro removes that limit for unlimited daily analyses.
Wakatta (わかった) is the past tense of the Japanese verb 分かる (wakaru), which means "to understand." So 分かった literally translates to "I understood" or "got it!" in English. It's one of the most common words in everyday Japanese — you'll hear it constantly in conversation, anime, and on social media as a casual way of saying "I get it" or "understood."
The word is written in three ways:
The correct ways to write it are wakatta (romanization), わかった (hiragana), and 分かった (kanji). Common misspellings by non-Japanese speakers include "wakata" (one T), "wakkatta", "wakkata", "wagatta", and "wakatsuta". The correct romanization is wakatta with a double T, because the った represents a glottal stop (called a 促音/sokuon) followed by た. In Japanese, single vs. double consonants change meaning entirely: かた (kata, "shoulder") and かった (katta, "won/bought") are completely different words. Spelling it "wakata" misses this distinction.
We named the app Wakatta! because it captures that lightbulb moment — when a confusing Japanese sentence suddenly clicks and you think 分かった! That's the feeling the app is designed to give you with every analysis.
Wakatta is written 分かった in kanji, or わかった in hiragana. Both are correct and widely used — the kanji version is more common in formal writing, while the hiragana version appears frequently in casual texts, manga, and social media.
The kanji 分 (わ・かる) carries meanings related to dividing, understanding, and distinguishing. It's one of the first kanji Japanese learners encounter, classified as JLPT N5 level. The かった ending is the past-tense conjugation written in hiragana.
You may also see the katakana form ワカッタ, used for emphasis or stylistic effect (similar to writing in all caps in English). Note the small ッ (sokuon) — it represents the double consonant "tt" and is essential. Without it, the word would sound and mean something entirely different.
When you paste Japanese text containing 分かった or わかった into Wakatta!, the app automatically adds furigana readings above the kanji so you can see both the character and its pronunciation at a glance.
Yes, Wakatta! is free. You get a generous number of sentence analyses per day, with all features included — translation, furigana, word breakdown, grammar explanations, JLPT levels, and history. There are no locked features in the free version.
Wakatta! Pro gives you unlimited analyses per day. Pricing is available directly in the app through Google Play or the App Store. You can also restore purchases if you switch devices.
Every feature is available in the free version. There is no paywall on functionality — free users get the exact same analysis quality as Pro users: full translations, furigana readings, word-by-word breakdowns with contextual meanings, grammar explanations with JLPT levels, and saved history on your device.
The only difference is the daily limit. Free users get a generous number of daily analyses — more than enough for casual study. Pro users get unlimited analyses, which is useful for intensive reading practice or JLPT preparation.
Wakatta! analyzes Japanese sentences and produces output in three languages: English, Spanish, and French. You can switch the output language in Settings.
This means the translation, word meanings, grammar explanations, and part-of-speech labels all appear in your chosen language. The Japanese input side accepts anything — kanji, hiragana, katakana, romaji, or a mix of all four. The app interface itself is also available in English, Spanish, and French.
No. Wakatta! requires an internet connection because each analysis is processed by AI on the server side. There's no offline analysis mode.
However, your analysis history is saved locally on your device. So if you've previously analyzed a sentence, you can pull it up from History without being connected. This is useful for reviewing past breakdowns on the go — say, on a subway in Tokyo where you might lose signal.
They solve fundamentally different problems. Google Translate tells you what a sentence means. Wakatta! tells you why it means that and how the language works.
Google Translate gives you a single flat translation with romaji — no furigana over kanji, no word-by-word breakdown, no grammar explanations, no JLPT levels, no contextual word meanings. You get the gist but learn nothing about the language mechanics.
Wakatta! gives you the translation plus everything you need to actually understand the sentence as a learner. Take 猫が静かに窓辺で眠っている. Google Translate will say "The cat is sleeping quietly by the window." Wakatta! will show you that が marks 猫 as the subject, that 静かに is the adverb form of the な-adjective 静か, that で marks the location of the action, and that ている indicates an ongoing state. Each point is tagged with its JLPT level and grammatical category.
Google Translate also has well-documented issues with Japanese specifically. According to Abroad in Japan and multiple Google Translate Community threads, it frequently guesses the wrong subject (Japanese often omits subjects), flattens politeness levels that are grammatically distinct in Japanese, and struggles with idiomatic expressions. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have documented how translation systems fail to convey Japanese honorific nuance. For getting the rough meaning of a sign while traveling, Google Translate is fine. For actually learning the language, it gives you a fish without teaching you to fish.
You can, and for some use cases general-purpose AI chatbots work. But there are real tradeoffs that apply across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and similar tools.
These models can break down Japanese sentences when you ask them to. The problem is consistency and accuracy. A review by Coto Japanese Academy found that roughly 60% of ChatGPT's grammar explanations were correct and useful. The other 40% ranged from confusing to flat-out wrong — and AI chatbots deliver incorrect information with the same confident tone as correct information. The Self Taught Japanese blog documented cases where ChatGPT invented grammar rules that don't exist in Japanese, like claiming がは is a "compound particle." Claude and Gemini are subject to the same class of hallucination problems — they're general-purpose models, not Japanese language specialists. If you're a beginner, you have no way to tell what's right and what's made up.
There are also practical issues shared by all AI chatbots. None of them can render furigana above kanji — they can only put readings in parentheses, which is harder to scan. Users have formally requested furigana support from OpenAI, but it hasn't been implemented, and the same limitation exists in Claude and Gemini's interfaces. Every response is formatted differently depending on how you prompt it, so there's no consistent structure between sessions. Research by Sam Passaglia also found that GPT models require more than twice as many tokens to represent Japanese text compared to equivalent English, which can affect response quality — a constraint that applies to all large language models processing Japanese.
Wakatta! uses AI under the hood too, but wraps it in a strict schema that guarantees the same structured output every time: translation, then furigana, then word breakdown, then grammar. No prompt engineering needed. The format is designed for quick scanning on a phone, which matters when you're reading Japanese social media and want to check a sentence in 30 seconds, not have a back-and-forth conversation with a chatbot.
The other thing: AI chatbots have no persistent memory of your Japanese learning across sessions. Wakatta! saves every analysis on your device so you can revisit past sentences anytime.
Jisho is a dictionary. Wakatta! is a sentence analyzer. They're complementary tools that work at different levels.
Jisho.org excels at looking up individual words. It draws from JMdict (roughly 170,000 entries), supports radical search via RADKFILE, and includes example sentences from the Tatoeba project. Type in 食べる and you get every possible definition, readings, example sentences, and kanji details. It can also segment a sentence into tokens and let you tap each one to look it up.
But as noted in Jisho's own forum discussions, it doesn't explain how words work together, which grammar patterns are at play, which meaning of a word applies in your specific context, or what conjugation chain produced the verb form you're looking at. Tofugu's review of Jisho confirms it's a reference tool, not a learning tool.
This is the gap that Wakatta! fills. Paste a full sentence and you get contextual meanings (not a list of every possible definition), grammar explanations for the patterns in that specific sentence, furigana over every kanji, and a difficulty estimate. It's the difference between looking up every ingredient in a recipe versus having someone explain the cooking technique.
A common frustration described on r/LearnJapanese is that learners juggle 3-5 separate tools to understand a single sentence: a dictionary for words, a grammar reference for patterns, maybe Google Translate for a sanity check, and a conjugation chart for verb forms. Wakatta! does all of that in one tap.
It depends on what you mean by "understand."
If you want a quick translation — the gist of what something means — Google Translate or DeepL will do. If you want to look up individual words, Jisho.org is the standard. If you want to study grammar systematically with spaced repetition, Bunpro is excellent for its 900+ grammar points organized by JLPT level.
But if you're holding a Japanese sentence and thinking "I want to understand every piece of this — what each word means in context, what the grammar is doing, and how hard this is for my level" — that's where sentence analyzers come in.
According to JLPT Samurai's 2025 roundup, the main options are ichi.moe (free web tool, basic parsing), Hanabira (AI-powered web analyzer), and Wakatta! (mobile app with AI analysis). Wakatta! is the only mobile-native option that combines translation, furigana, contextual word-by-word breakdown, grammar explanations with JLPT tagging, and local history in a single interface. It's built specifically for the workflow of reading Japanese in the wild — see a sentence, paste it in, understand it in 30 seconds.
No single tool replaces everything. But as multiple discussions on r/LearnJapanese confirm, the fewer tools you have to juggle, the more likely you are to actually look things up instead of skipping past what you don't understand.
This is one of the biggest frustrations in learning Japanese. You see a character you don't recognize, and you can't even look it up because you don't know how to read it — and you can't type what you can't read.
There are a few approaches:
The real issue is that dictionaries give you the reading of individual kanji but don't always handle compound words where the reading changes. For example, 今日 is not read as いま+にち but as きょう. Wakatta! handles compound readings correctly because it analyzes words in context, not character by character.
Traditional approach: look up each grammar pattern individually. If you see ている in a sentence, you'd search "Japanese ている grammar" or check a reference like Tae Kim's Guide or Bunpro. If there are multiple grammar points in one sentence (there usually are), you repeat this for each one. It works, but it's slow.
Faster approach: use a sentence analyzer that identifies grammar patterns automatically. Paste the full sentence into Wakatta! and it pulls out every grammar point — particles, verb conjugations, sentence patterns — and explains each one in context. Each grammar point is tagged with its JLPT level (N5 through N1) and grammatical category (particle, verb conjugation, sentence pattern, etc.).
For example, if you paste 猫が静かに窓辺で眠っている, Wakatta! identifies four grammar points: が as a subject marker (N5), 静かに as the adverb form of a な-adjective (N5), で as a location marker (N5), and ている as the continuous aspect (N5). Each one gets a contextual explanation specific to that sentence, not a generic textbook definition.
This is especially helpful for stacked conjugations that intermediate learners struggle with. Japanese verbs can pile up forms — causative, passive, te-form — and as noted in JLPT Samurai's analysis of learner pain points, most dictionaries either recognize the base form or fail entirely. An analyzer that explains the full conjugation chain saves a lot of headaches.
JLPT levels (N5 to N1) measure Japanese proficiency, and knowing where a sentence falls on that scale is genuinely useful for learners. If you're studying for N4 and you're trying to read N2-level sentences, you'll be frustrated. If you're reading mostly N5 content, it might be time to push harder.
Wakatta! estimates the JLPT difficulty of every sentence you analyze, based on the hardest vocabulary and grammar it contains. The level shows up as a badge on the translation card — so you immediately know whether you're reading beginner or advanced material.
There's no official tool from the JLPT organization that rates sentences by level. According to the Japan Foundation, they do not publish official grammar or vocabulary lists for each level — they explicitly state they don't release "Test Content Specifications." All the N5/N4/N3/N2/N1 classifications that exist are community-maintained estimates based on analysis of past exams, compiled by resources like JLPTsensei, Bunpro, and Kanshudo. Wakatta! uses these widely-accepted classifications to tag individual grammar points and estimate overall sentence difficulty.
Japanese doesn't use spaces between words, which makes word boundaries invisible to beginners. The sentence 猫が静かに窓辺で眠っている is one continuous string of characters. Where does one word end and the next begin?
A few tools can segment Japanese sentences into words:
Wakatta! gives a full word-by-word breakdown with contextual meaning (not just a list of every possible definition), the reading in hiragana, the part of speech, and usage notes. The key difference is "contextual" — when 静かに appears in a sentence about a sleeping cat, Wakatta! tells you it means "quietly" and that it's the adverb form of a な-adjective, not just that 静か can mean "quiet," "calm," "peaceful," or "still."
Yes, and this is actually the use case Wakatta! was built for.
The developer started learning Japanese by following Japanese accounts on Threads. The problem was the gap between seeing a post and understanding it. You'd copy a word, look it up, go back, try to figure out the grammar, maybe open Google Translate — and by then you've lost the momentum of just scrolling and reading.
Wakatta! is designed for that exact workflow: see a Japanese post, copy it, paste it into the app, get a full breakdown in seconds, and go back to scrolling. Social media Japanese is particularly well-suited for this because posts are short (usually under Wakatta!'s 500-character input limit) and use real, everyday language — not textbook sentences nobody actually says.
The approach is backed by research. Linguist Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis — one of the most cited theories in second language acquisition — shows that language is best acquired through exposure to real content that's slightly above your current level. A 10-month study at a Japanese university found that students using authentic materials outperformed the textbook-only group in 5 of 8 communicative competence measures. Social media posts fit this model well: short, authentic, and endlessly varied.
The JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) has five levels measuring Japanese ability, from N5 (beginner) to N1 (advanced). According to official JLPT statistics, over 1.7 million people applied to take the test worldwide in 2024, across 81 countries.
N5 — You understand basic Japanese. You can read simple sentences in hiragana, katakana, and about 100 kanji. You can follow slow, short conversations about everyday topics. Think: ordering food, basic self-introductions, reading simple signs. Estimated 350-500 study hours from zero, according to Japanese language schools.
N4 — You handle everyday Japanese. Around 300 kanji and 1,500 vocabulary words. You can read short passages on familiar topics and follow slow everyday conversations. Think: shopping, getting directions, understanding basic instructions. About 550-800 study hours.
N3 — The bridge level. Around 650 kanji and 3,750 words. You can read newspaper headlines, follow natural-speed conversations about everyday topics, and generally survive in Japan. This is often called the "livable" level. Roughly 900-1,100 study hours.
N2 — Professional level. About 1,000 kanji and 6,000 words. You can read newspaper articles, follow news broadcasts, and understand the logical flow of complex discussions. Most Japanese employers require N2 as a minimum for foreign hires. Around 1,500-2,200 study hours.
N1 — Advanced fluency. 2,000+ kanji, 10,000+ words. You can read abstract texts, follow lectures at natural speed, and grasp implied meaning. Required for specialized professional roles and graduate school in Japan. Pass rate data from JLPTsensei shows the N1 pass rate hovers around 30%. About 3,000-4,500 study hours.
Important detail: the Japan Foundation does not publish official vocabulary or grammar lists for any level. All the "N5 grammar" and "N3 vocabulary" lists you see online are community-maintained estimates based on past exam analysis, from resources like JLPTsensei, Kanshudo, and Bunpro.
Wakatta! tags every grammar point it identifies with its JLPT level, so you can see at a glance whether a sentence is N5 beginner material or N2 advanced content.
This is the single most-asked Japanese grammar question, and for good reason. As Tofugu's comprehensive guide notes, it trips up beginners and still gives intermediate learners trouble. Even after 50 years of academic research, linguists still debate the finer points.
The short version: は marks what the sentence is about (the topic). が marks who or what does the action (the subject). English doesn't make this distinction, which is why it feels so foreign.
は (the topic marker) says "as for X, let me tell you something about it." It frames the conversation. 猫は寝ている means "As for the cat, it's sleeping" — we already know which cat; we're commenting on what it's doing. According to 80/20 Japanese, は also always carries an implication of contrast: コーヒーは飲みます means "I drink coffee" but subtly implies "...though maybe not tea."
が (the subject marker) identifies or introduces something specific. 猫が寝ている means "A cat is sleeping" or "It's a cat that's sleeping" — we're pointing out the cat as new information. As Tae Kim's Guide explains, が also appears when answering "who" or "what" questions: 誰が来た？田中さんが来た (Who came? Tanaka came.)
A practical pattern that shows both together: この映画は音楽がすばらしい — "As for this movie (は), the music (が) is wonderful." は sets the broad topic, が identifies the specific thing being commented on. Wasabi-JPN calls this [Topic] は [Subject] が [Predicate] pattern one of the most common structures in Japanese.
The reason it's so hard: in many sentences, both は and が are grammatically correct but convey different nuances. The choice depends on context — what's already been said, what the listener knows, what the speaker wants to emphasize. Native speakers don't think about rules; they absorbed the patterns from years of exposure.
The practical advice from Tofugu and Migaku: rather than memorizing rules, expose yourself to large amounts of real Japanese and the patterns will gradually feel natural. Tools like Wakatta! help here — every time you analyze a sentence containing は or が, you see an explanation of exactly how that particle functions in that specific context. Seeing が explained as a subject marker in ten different real sentences is far more effective than memorizing the rule once from a textbook.
Furigana (振り仮名) are the small hiragana characters printed above kanji to show their pronunciation. If you see 食 with たべ written above it in small text, that's furigana telling you this character is read "tabe."
In Japan, furigana appears in children's books, most manga aimed at younger readers (shonen/shojo), and occasionally in newspapers for rare kanji. According to Tofugu's guide on furigana, when furigana is applied to every kanji in a text, it's called sourubi (総ルビ). By the end of elementary school, Japanese children know about 1,026 kyōiku kanji and start reading without furigana. Adults are expected to handle the 2,136 jōyō (common-use) kanji without help, per the Japanese Ministry of Education standards.
For Japanese learners, furigana is essential for one simple reason: if you can't read a kanji, you can't look it up, and if you can't look it up, you can't learn it. As Utterance's analysis puts it, furigana breaks that cycle by letting you connect the written character with its sound simultaneously.
Furigana also lets you read above your kanji level. A learner who knows 200 kanji can read a sentence containing 500 kanji if furigana is provided — they'll pick up new characters naturally through context, the same way Japanese children do.
Most dictionaries and tools don't provide furigana for arbitrary text. You can look up individual kanji readings, but that's a manual, one-by-one process. Wakatta! adds furigana automatically to every sentence you analyze, so you can read the full sentence aloud even if you don't recognize the kanji yet.
According to JLPT Samurai, the N5 exam provides furigana over kanji, but by N4 it's significantly reduced, and N3 and above provide none at all. Most learners begin weaning off furigana around the N4-N3 transition.
The idea is simple: instead of studying Japanese sentences written for textbooks, read sentences that real Japanese people actually wrote. Social media posts, manga, news articles, song lyrics, video game dialogue — anything authentic.
This approach is grounded in Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis, one of the most influential theories in language acquisition. The core idea: language is acquired through exposure to "comprehensible input" — content that's mostly understandable but has some new elements you figure out from context. According to KatariNeko's analysis of the research, the sweet spot is understanding roughly 85-95% of what you're reading. A 10-month study at a Japanese university found that students using authentic materials outperformed the textbook-only group in 5 of 8 communicative competence measures.
Popular content sources for learners include NHK News Web Easy (simplified news with furigana), beginner-friendly manga like Yotsuba&! and Doraemon, and graded readers from White Rabbit Press. Tofugu's reading guide has a comprehensive list of resources by level.
The challenge, especially for beginners, is that real Japanese content is hard. There's no furigana, the vocabulary assumes native-level knowledge, and grammar includes contractions and casual speech that textbooks never cover. Migaku calls this the "cliff" between textbook material and authentic content.
Here's a practical way to bridge that gap:
The goal isn't to understand everything. It's to read enough that patterns start clicking. When you see が explained as a subject marker for the tenth time in ten different real sentences, it sticks in a way that memorizing the rule from a textbook never does.
If you're starting Japanese, these are the patterns you'll encounter constantly. They make up the bulk of N5 (beginner) grammar. Sources: JLPTsensei N5 grammar list, Coto Academy's 30 must-know N5 patterns, Migaku's N5 guide.
Particles — the backbone of Japanese sentences:
Verb forms:
Sentence-ending patterns:
Adjective conjugation:
Every one of these patterns shows up in Wakatta!'s grammar analysis, tagged with its JLPT level, so you'll naturally learn to recognize them as you analyze real sentences.
No. Wakatta! does not store your sentences on any server. There are no user accounts, no login, no email collection.
Here's what happens when you analyze a sentence: your text is sent to the server, processed by AI, and the result is sent back to your device. The sentence is not stored in a database on Wakatta!'s servers.
Your analysis history is saved locally on your device only. Nobody else can see it. You can delete individual entries or clear all history from the History screen.
For subscriptions, purchases are handled by Google Play or the App Store, and subscription status is managed through RevenueCat. Wakatta! does not receive your payment card details.
Analytics are collected to understand general usage patterns (like daily active users and feature usage), but this is aggregate data, not your sentences. Full details are in the Privacy Policy.
Since Wakatta! stores analysis history locally on your device (not on a server), deleting your data is straightforward:
For any other data-related requests, contact support at the email listed on the Data Deletion page.
Yes. Wakatta! is designed with minimal data collection in mind.
What it doesn't collect: No email addresses, no user accounts, no passwords, no payment card details, no personal information. Your analyzed sentences are not stored in any database on Wakatta!'s servers.
What it does collect: Anonymous usage analytics (app opens, feature usage, device model, OS version) to understand how the app is used and improve it. If you purchase a subscription, Google Play/App Store process the payment and RevenueCat manages subscription status.
What happens with your sentences: When you analyze a sentence, the text is sent to an AI model for processing. The AI provider may process and retain data according to their own policies. Wakatta! does not keep a copy.
Local data: History, preferences, and usage counters are stored on your device only. Uninstalling the app removes everything.
Third-party services used by Wakatta! are listed on the Third-Party Notices page. The full Privacy Policy covers everything in detail.