物語
About Hannari
Hannari is a Chrome extension that adds furigana to kanji on any Japanese page. It exists because the person who built it needed it.
The problem
Reading Japanese online turns into a translation exercise.
If you're studying Japanese — anywhere between N5 and N3 — you can probably get through most of an article. Hiragana flows. Katakana you've memorized. Then a kanji shows up, the sentence stops, and you're back in a dictionary.
Existing tools either show furigana over everything (annoying once you know the basics), require you to configure dictionaries and shortcut keys, or only work on a handful of sites.
The name
Why “Hannari”?
はんなり (hannari) is a Kyoto-dialect word for an elegant, soft, refined kind of beauty — the quiet kind that doesn't demand attention. That's the feeling we want when you read Japanese with the extension on: present, helpful, and unobtrusive.
How it started
Built by a learner, for learners.
I'm a Brazilian developer who started studying Japanese a few years ago. After enough time to recognize all the kana and a few hundred kanji, I tried reading actual Japanese — news sites, blogs, posts.
It didn't work. Every paragraph turned into a stop-and-research session. I'd lose the meaning of one sentence by the time I'd looked up the kanji in the next one.
I tried every browser extension I could find. None did the simple thing I wanted: show me the reading on top of kanji, only kanji, on any site. So I built it.
Principles
Three things we won't compromise on.
- Privacy by default. Everything runs in your browser. We never send what you read to a server. No analytics on your reading patterns.
- No subscriptions. You pay once for Pro. You own it. If we stop developing, your installed copy keeps working.
- Gets out of your way. The best reading tool is one you don't notice. Hannari fades into the page until you need it.
What's next
On the roadmap.
- Mobile. Same product, on your phone — next major direction.
- Reading stats. How much Japanese you've actually read, kanji frequency, time spent — opt-in, stored locally.
- Firefox & Safari. Once Chrome is stable.
Hannari is free to try.
Install on Chrome