For Japanese learners
Learning Japanese from lyrics
A song you love, you will play dozens of times. Not many textbooks hold your attention that long. Think Songs includes a few tools for learning Japanese while you read along: furigana, romaji, and a dictionary that gives you the meaning of any word you tap.
Last updated: 2026-09-02
First, make it readable
Until you can read kanji, lyrics look like patterns. Turn on furigana and you can at least follow the sounds.
On a song page, tap the gear at the top right and open Advanced settings; furigana and romaji each have their own switch. You can show both at once — furigana above the kanji, and romaji above that.
kimi to miageta yozora
きみ みあ よぞら
君 と 見上げた 夜空Romaji here follows a specific set of rules. The apostrophe after ん and the way long vowels are written are covered in a separate article.
Tap a word, get its meaning
Tap a word in the lyrics and a small card appears below with its English meaning. The dictionary is EDICT2 (EDRDG).
光 ひかり n light; illumination; ray; beam; gleam; glow
Conjugated forms work too.Tap 悲しかった and you get 悲しい. When the form you tapped differs from the dictionary headword, the card shows both with an arrow between them — because seeing which form belongs to which word is itself worth learning.
悲しかっ → 悲しい かなしい adj-i sad; miserable; unhappy; sorrowful
Negation is always flagged.Tap 離れない and the meaning shown is that of 離れる. Read as-is, that is the opposite of what the line says, so the card always carries a “negated” badge.
When the meaning alone is not enough — example sentences
“相変わらず = as usual” still does not tell you how the word is actually used. So each card carries an Example section. Tap it to open a sentence using the word, with its English translation.
相変わらず あいかわらず adv as usual; as always; as before ▸ 用例 君は相変わらず健康そうに見える。 You look as healthy as ever.
It is collapsed by default. The card is already busy with the form, reading, part of speech and meaning, and leaving the example open would cover the lyrics. Tap a different word and it returns to the collapsed state.
The examples are drawn from the Tanaka Corpus (Tatoeba Project) and cover about 24,800 words. Measured against real lyrics, roughly 60% of the words you can look up have one. Most of the rest are function words such as いる, こと and よう, where an example would add little anyway.
One word at a time
This dictionary looks up only the single word you tapped. There is no feature that translates a whole line, and there never will be. This is not a feature we left out; it is the premise the whole thing rests on.
Translating lyrics creates a new work derived from the original. What Japan's music rights societies administer is mainly performance and distribution rights; the right of translation is not among them. Looking a word up in a dictionary, on the other hand, is not translation — “光 = light” is a correspondence printed in a dictionary, not an expression from that song.
That holds only as long as it stays one word at a time. Line up the glosses of every word in order and you have an interlinear translation, which is a different thing entirely. So only one card is ever shown, and tapping the next word clears the previous one.
For those whose first language is not English, the card carries a “translate this meaning” link. It opens an external translation service so you can turn the English gloss into your own language. The text on the card can also be selected and copied.
Where it tends to miss
Word segmentation is automatic, so the meaning can come out wrong. These cases miss most often.
Words written the same but read differently (空 as そら or as から), phrasing peculiar to song lyrics, archaic words, and proper nouns. Some words are simply not in the dictionary. Please treat the result as a guide rather than an authority.
For some songs, the person who posted them has registered word substitutions. 御伽の話, for instance, would otherwise split into 御伽 and 話 and return the wrong meaning; with a substitution it is looked up as 御伽話 (fairy tale). When that happens the card shows 御伽の話 → 御伽話 side by side.
The apps work without a signal
The iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows apps carry the dictionary and the examples inside them, so they work the same way with no signal — on the train to school, or on a plane.
The web and the apps use the same dictionary data, so tapping the same word gives the same meaning everywhere.
Sources for the dictionary and examples
The data we rely on. The two are under different licenses, so they are listed separately.
Dictionary: EDICT2 / EDRDG (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Example: Tanaka Corpus / Tatoeba Project (CC BY 2.0 FR)