About

すごいね (sugoi ne) means “wow, that’s great, isn’t it?” It is what you say when something impresses you, and it is a small, friendly place to start with Japanese.

The site does two things: it gives you one natural phrase a day, and it helps you learn hiragana and katakana well enough to read it.

The phrases

The archive has 141 phrases filed by situation. Each shows the Japanese with furigana over the kanji, romaji, a word-for-word reading, the natural English meaning, a politeness level, and when you would actually say it. The wording is standard Japanese as used across the country, and anything casual or slangy is labelled as such so you do not use it with your boss.

Romaji follows the modified Hepburn system, with long vowels shown with a macron. Press Listen to hear a phrase read by a Japanese voice installed on your device. If your device has none, the page tells you how to add one.

The kana trainer

Drills cover recognition and typing for hiragana and katakana. A miss shows the stroke order. Spaced repetition brings characters back after 1, 3, 7, 14 and 30 days. Your progress is stored in your browser only: no accounts, no tracking.

Credits

• Stroke-order diagrams are drawn from KanjiVG by Ulrich Apel and contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. The derived stroke data on this site is shared under the same licence.
• Type is Noto Sans JP, licensed under the SIL Open Font License, served from this site.

Contact

Spotted a mistake or have a phrase you would like covered? Write to info@sugoi-ne.com.