Japanese immersion setup without the Yomitan-plus-Anki tax

You opened a manga page in your browser, hovered a word, and waited. Nothing happened. The popup dictionary you installed last weekend has stopped working since the last Chrome update. Your Anki deck is sitting at 412 reviews. The bridge plugin between them needs a permissions reset you do not remember how to do. You came here to read Japanese for thirty minutes. You will spend the first twenty fixing the tools.

This is what the standard Japanese immersion setup looks like for most people in 2026. A popup dictionary, an SRS, a bridge between them. Refold and TheMoeWay both document it carefully. Once it works, it works well. Getting it to that point, and keeping it there, is a recurring cost that nobody quotes you up front.

I have run that setup. I built immit with my wife because we were tired of paying the tax every time something updated. This post is not a takedown of the standard stack. It is an honest accounting of what the setup actually costs Japanese learners in real time, and a substitution case for a one-tool shape that gives you the same loop without the bridge.

If you are the kind of learner who enjoys configuring tools as part of the hobby, the standard stack is right for you and I will say so plainly at the end. If you are someone who came here to learn Japanese without first learning a tooling stack, keep reading.

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What "immersion setup" actually means for language learning

Immersion learning is the practice of building Japanese ability through native content. You read manga, light novels, and visual novels. You watch anime and YouTube videos with Japanese subtitles. You listen to podcasts. You pick up vocabulary and grammar from context rather than from a textbook chapter. Refold, TheMoeWay, and most of the writers in the modern immersion community describe the same broad shape.

The shape has three jobs.

Lookup

You need a fast way to see a word's reading, definition, and example sentences without leaving the page. Hover-and-read in 0.1 seconds. Anything slower turns reading into a worksheet exercise that gets in the way of comprehension.

Retention

Lookups alone do not stick. Most immersion guides quote a long-running observation that you need to see a new word in context something like seven to fifteen times before it becomes part of your vocabulary. A spaced repetition system schedules those encounters so the word lands in your head before your brain decides to forget it. The process of acquiring vocabulary through immersion works better when you encounter Japanese words in real reading material than when you grind word lists in isolation.

The connection between the two

Words you actually meet while reading are the ones worth scheduling. Random prebuilt decks have shown weaker retention than cards built from your own reading because the brain remembers context, not isolated tokens.

The standard immersion setup answers these three jobs with three separate pieces of software. Yomitan handles the lookup. Anki handles the SRS. AnkiConnect bridges the two so a word you hover can be saved as a card.

This works. It is also where the tax starts. Three pieces of software means three sets of updates, three sets of permissions, three places something can break. The standard stack is a real tool, not a flawed one. It just charges rent in a way that the install screen does not warn you about, and that recurring rent is where most learners I have talked to give up before they finish their first novel.

Active and passive immersion, and where SRS fits

Before the tools, the methodology. The immersion community draws a line between active and passive immersion that is worth understanding because it determines what kind of tool you actually need.

Active immersion (where SRS earns its keep)

Active immersion is when you focus on understanding the content. You read a paragraph, hover the words you do not know, decide which ones are worth remembering, and move on. This is where real learning happens. Active listening is the audio equivalent: you sit down, you focus, and you process what is being said. It is essential for language acquisition because it forces your brain to convert sound into meaning rather than letting Japanese pass through as background noise. Active immersion is also where the lookup and SRS tools earn their keep, because every active session produces a handful of new words that need to enter your review queue. SRS flashcards complement active immersion by reinforcing the vocabulary and grammar patterns you encountered while you were focused.

Passive immersion (limited but real)

Passive immersion is letting Japanese audio run while you do something else. Podcasts in the background while you cook. Anime on a second screen. Passive listening is exactly what it sounds like: listening to the language without paying active attention. It helps your ear acclimatize to Japanese rhythm and pitch, and it keeps the language present in your day. It is not generally expected to yield significant comprehension or vocabulary gains on its own, because without focus your brain does not do the work of mapping sound to meaning. Familiarization yes; acquisition no.

The SRS layer only matters for active immersion. Passive listening produces no flashcards. So when this post talks about "the setup tax", it is talking about the cost of running the active-immersion loop reliably, day after day, so that the words you meet in your reading actually make it into your long-term memory.

Studying grammar alongside immersion

One adjacent point, because it comes up every time someone asks about the immersion stack. Immersion handles vocabulary and reading well. It is slower for grammar, especially for the first 200 to 300 grammar points that take you from beginner to intermediate. Most learners run a dedicated grammar tool (Bunpro or Renshuu are the two I see most often) alongside their reading workflow until they have enough grammar to follow native material without translating in their head. immit is not a grammar tool. It pairs naturally with whatever grammar resource you already use, because grammar drills and vocabulary mining are different jobs that benefit from different shapes of software.

The standard Yomitan-plus-Anki stack, end to end

Before I argue against the stack, I want to describe what it does well, because the substitution case only works if I describe the thing being substituted with respect.

Yomitan

A free, open-source popup dictionary maintained by the yomidevs community. It supports custom dictionary imports in the Yomichan-format ecosystem, which is the largest collection of Japanese-English, Japanese-Japanese, and specialized dictionaries available anywhere. It is fast. It is customizable down to the keyboard shortcut. It is free forever. The Reddit and Discord immersion community treats it as the default lookup tool and recommends it before anything else, and for good reason. If you measure lookup quality by depth of dictionary coverage, Yomitan is hard to beat.

Anki

A free SRS that has been the standard for vocabulary retention in language learning since the mid-2000s. It runs the FSRS scheduler, which Anki added as an option in late 2023 and which most immersion learners now use. FSRS reduces the daily review load compared to the older SM-2 algorithm at the same retention rate. Anki's card format is fully customizable. Your decks are local files you own. The format is well-documented, the user base is enormous, and you can find a template for almost anything.

AnkiConnect

The plugin that lets Yomitan talk to Anki. It runs as a local server inside Anki and exposes an API that Yomitan calls when you press the "save to Anki" hotkey. It is the connective tissue that makes mining work. Without AnkiConnect, Yomitan is a lookup tool and Anki is an SRS, and the two have no relationship.

Migaku (the closest commercial alternative)

If you have looked at the standard stack and decided you would rather pay for something integrated, Migaku is the option most learners evaluate next. It lets you create Anki flashcards from Netflix, YouTube, and other video sources, and it teaches pitch accent for most words you encounter while watching. The Migaku Course (Academy 1) is a real reason some learners pay for it: a structured curriculum is one thing the open-source stack does not give you, and it is the part of Migaku that most paying users say justifies the subscription. I will come back to Migaku in the substitution section.

Weblio and the J-J dictionary question

If you start studying grammar and vocabulary at a monolingual level, you eventually want a Japanese-Japanese dictionary. Weblio is the user-friendly J-J dictionary that most learners reach for, both inside Yomitan via Yomichan-format imports and as a standalone reference for creating sentence flashcards. It is a useful resource. It is also one more thing in the stack.

These pieces are good. They are also four to five pieces by the time you finish setting up a serious immersion workflow. The "tax" in this post's title is what happens when these pieces have to stay in sync across browser updates, OS updates, Anki releases, dictionary refreshes, and subscription renewals. The next section walks through the actual install, in actual minutes.

The install-day test: setting up the standard stack, step by step

This is the walkthrough as I ran it the first time. Times are real minutes from a fresh laptop with Chrome already installed. I am writing what happened, not the brochure version.

Step 1: Install Yomitan from the Chrome Web Store (3 minutes)

Open the Chrome Web Store, search Yomitan, install. The extension lands in your toolbar. So far so easy. The extension on its own does nothing useful yet. It needs dictionaries.

Step 2: Download Japanese-English and Japanese-Japanese dictionaries (8 minutes)

Yomitan does not bundle dictionaries with the extension itself, but the Settings page has a "Recommended dictionaries" section where you can download JMdict (Japanese-English), JMnedict (proper nouns), and KANJIDIC (kanji data) directly. That covers the basics in a few clicks. For monolingual Japanese-Japanese coverage, pitch accent, or frequency lists, you still go out to community-maintained dictionary lists (TheMoeWay maintains the most-cited one) and import the files separately. Each dictionary is a separate file, sometimes tens or hundreds of megabytes, and each is a separate import in Yomitan's settings page. If your computer is slow or your Wi-Fi is patchy, this step is the one where most first-timers walk away to make coffee.

Step 3: Install Anki and the FSRS preset (5 minutes)

Download Anki from ankiweb.net, install. Open Preferences and switch the scheduler to FSRS. Set your retention target. If you are new to Anki this is also where you have to decide on a card format and a deck name, which sounds trivial and is not.

Step 4: Install AnkiConnect (4 minutes)

Inside Anki, open Tools, then Add-ons, then "Get Add-ons", and paste the AnkiConnect code from the AnkiWeb listing. Restart Anki. The first time AnkiConnect runs, it asks for permissions and Yomitan asks you to confirm the connection. On macOS the first connection prompt is buried behind a system permission dialog that is easy to miss.

Step 5: Configure the Yomitan-to-Anki card template (10 to 20 minutes)

This is the step that nobody warns you about. Yomitan needs to know which Anki fields receive the word, the reading, the definition, the example sentence, the pitch accent, and optionally the audio. The default templates are usable but not great. Most learners end up importing one of the community card templates (the "JP Mining Note" template from the TheMoeWay wiki is the most common reference). You spend twenty minutes pasting field maps and previewing test cards before the first save actually produces a card you can review.

Pitch accent and kanji study: where they fit in the card

A quick note, because both come up here and confuse a lot of intermediate learners.

Pitch accent is the part of Japanese pronunciation that tells you which mora in a word carries the high tone. Adding a pitch-accent field to your mining cards is optional but useful for learners who want their spoken Japanese to sound native rather than textbook-correct. Migaku teaches pitch accent for most encountered words as a built-in feature. In the Yomitan + Anki stack, you add a pitch-accent dictionary (NHK or Wadoku-based) as another Yomichan-format import, and map it to a card field in step 5.

Kanji is the other field choice. Some learners want a separate kanji card that drills the readings and meanings of each kanji as a standalone unit; others prefer to learn kanji passively through the vocabulary they mine. If you want a structured route to study kanji (and to write kanji by hand), a tool like WaniKani or RTK is the standard recommendation in the community, and the relationship between an immersion vocabulary loop and a kanji curriculum is something I cover in a separate post. For mining cards, the practical default is to include the word in kanji form, the reading in kana, and the definition, without a dedicated kanji-drill field.

That is two more dictionaries and one more field decision before step 6.

Step 6: Run a test save from a real Japanese page (2 minutes if everything works)

Open a manga page or a news article. Hover a word. Press the save hotkey. Switch to Anki and verify the card landed correctly with all fields populated. If anything is off, you go back to step 5.

End-to-end on a clean laptop with no interruptions: around 35 minutes, of which 20 are step 5. With one Anki permission issue or one bad dictionary import, the same setup runs 60 to 90 minutes. The TheMoeWay wiki documents this carefully and is the best free guide I have read. The point of walking through it here is not that the standard stack is broken. It is that "35 to 90 minutes of setup before the first card" is the actual cost, and the cost is recurring, not one-time. See the next section.

Where the setup tax actually shows up

Install-day cost is the part everyone talks about. It is the smaller cost.

The recurring cost shows up four ways.

Chrome updates

Chrome moved to Manifest V3 in 2024. Yomitan has worked through the transition, but learners who installed older builds or older forks (Yomichan, the earlier version) still hit "extension not supported" warnings on update. Each update is a 5 to 30 minute event where you check which build you are running, whether the dictionaries survived the migration, and whether your AnkiConnect bridge still authenticates.

Anki updates

Anki ships frequent releases. Most are fine. Occasionally a release changes how add-ons authenticate, and AnkiConnect has to be reinstalled or the permission has to be re-granted. The fix is usually fast once you find the right Reddit thread.

Card template drift

You imported a community template six months ago. The community has since improved it. Your old cards have the old fields and your new saves use the new fields. You either migrate the old cards or accept that your deck has two formats.

Dictionary updates

JMdict ships new versions. If you want the latest entries you re-download and re-import. Pitch accent dictionaries have their own update cycle. None of this is hard. All of it is friction that arrives on a normal Tuesday when you wanted to read.

None of these are catastrophic on their own. Stacked across a year of immersion reading, they add up to something. The community signal I see most often, on r/LearnJapanese and in mining-workflow Discord channels, is a common arc. A learner climbs from beginner grammar through a thousand mined cards, hits a configuration problem on a Chrome or Anki update, takes a week off to fix it, and then takes another week off because the momentum is gone. The plateau is not a study problem. It is a tooling problem. And the tools were good. They were just three of them.

There is a shape that does not have this failure mode. Try immit free for a week and see if the loop holds.

Reading material that makes Japanese learning sustainable

A quick interlude, because the setup tax matters most for active immersion, and active immersion is only sustainable when the reading material is content you actually want to engage with.

The best Japanese immersion materials are the ones you enjoy and can keep coming back to for extended periods. Visual novels and light novels are popular because the prose is at a difficulty level that intermediate learners can follow with a popup dictionary, and the stories are designed to pull you forward. Manga works for similar reasons with a lighter text load per page. Graded readers (the NHK News Web Easy site, the White Rabbit series, Satori Reader) sit a level below native material and are valuable when you are between textbook chapters and your first real novel: comprehensible input that is slightly above your current level but still understandable enough to follow along.

For video, anime, Japanese TV shows on Netflix, and Japanese YouTube channels at your interest level all work. Animelon is a community-built option that pairs anime with Japanese subtitles for learners who want subtitles in the target language rather than English subtitles for casual viewing.

The pattern across all of these: pick material you find interesting, accept that the first chapter or first episode of anything new will be hard, and let the lookup-and-save loop do its work. Which loop you use is the rest of this post.

A simpler shape: one tool, no bridge

If three pieces of software is the shape that creates the tax, the substitution case is one piece of software that does all three jobs.

That is what immit is. A popup Japanese dictionary with built-in spaced repetition, available as a Chrome extension and as a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Hover a word, see the reading, definition, example sentences, and pronunciation in 0.1 seconds. Press save. The word becomes an SRS card with an 8-stage scheduler that reviews you at increasing intervals. No bridge, no plugin, no card template tuning. Works offline. No account required for the free tier. Free for the core lookup and review loop.

The install on a fresh laptop

1. Install the immit Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store, or download the desktop app from immit.co, or both.

2. Hover a word on any Japanese page.

3. Press save.

End-to-end: The dictionary is built in. The SRS is built in. The bridge does not exist because nothing needs bridging. The card template is a default that we designed against the same JP Mining Note shape the community recommends, with the fields you actually want pre-populated.

The dictionary scope is JP-EN, EN-JP, JP-JP, and EN-EN. It is reviewed and corrected by immit's internal audit engine, which is the part of the company that monitors dictionary entries for accuracy and updates the corpus when reports come in. we designed it because the most common failure mode of immersion dictionaries is that no one is responsible for keeping the entries correct over time.

What you do not get from the substitution shape is unlimited customizability. Yomitan lets you write your own Anki card templates from scratch. immit's card format is sensible for most users and not user-editable in the same depth. If template control is the part of the hobby you actually enjoy, this post is not for you and I will say so plainly in the second-to-last section.

What you do get is workflow continuity. You read, you hover, you save, you review. Tomorrow the browser updates and the loop still runs because there are no plugin permissions to re-grant and no bridge to re-authenticate. That continuity is what I could not buy at any price with the three-tool stack, and it is the only thing that actually predicts whether I finish the manga.

What you keep, what you lose

A substitution case is a fair trade only if I tell you both sides.

What you keep when you move from Yomitan + Anki to immit

The reading workflow is the same. Hover, see definition, save, review. Cards are scheduled at increasing intervals. The dictionary depth is comparable for JP-EN and JP-JP lookup, with the audit engine layer that the community-maintained Yomichan format does not have. Sentence mining still works the way you expect, with context sentence and source page saved with the card. Using flashcards in conjunction with active immersion is the part of the methodology immit is designed to make easier, not change.

What you lose

You lose the ability to write your own Anki card template from scratch. You lose the AnkiConnect API surface if you were using it to script other tools into your workflow. You lose the immense library of community-built Yomichan-format dictionaries, in the sense that immit does not currently import them. immit ships its own audited corpus instead.

What you should consider before switching

Your existing Anki deck. If you have years of mined cards in Anki, moving them to immit is not a one-click migration. The honest answer is that for now, you keep your old deck in Anki for the historical cards and start new mining in immit. Some learners do this deliberately during the switch and find that the new cards (in context, audited, no template churn) ride better than the legacy deck.

The trade is not "immit is better at everything Yomitan is good at". The trade is "you give up some configurability and you get continuity". Whether that is the right trade depends on which part of the hobby you actually want to spend your time on.

When the standard stack is still the right answer

There are several reader profiles where I think the standard Yomitan + Anki + AnkiConnect stack is still the better choice, and I want to name them so you can self-identify.

You enjoy configuration as part of the hobby

If writing your own card templates, fine-tuning FSRS parameters, and reading add-on changelogs is fun for you, the standard stack will give you more surface area to enjoy. immit's "sensible defaults" approach removes the configuration as a feature, which for you is removing the part you came for.

You have a large existing Anki investment

If you have 8,000 mined cards in Anki and a card template you tuned over two years, the cost of migrating is real and the marginal continuity gain may not be worth it. Keep the stack you have.

You depend on a specialized Yomichan-format dictionary

A handful of subject-specific dictionaries in the Yomichan ecosystem (specialized legal, medical, or classical-Japanese dictionaries) are not yet in immit's corpus. If your reading depends on one of those, Yomitan stays the right lookup tool for now.

You are deep into a separate kanji curriculum

If your daily study is primarily structured kanji review (RTK, WaniKani, the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course) and your reading is secondary, the standard stack pairs naturally with that workflow because Anki is where most of those courses live. immit can run alongside the same kanji curriculum, but if you are not yet at the point of mining a lot of new vocabulary from reading, the continuity gain immit offers is smaller for you.

You want a structured course alongside immersion

If you want a paid curriculum that walks you from N5 to N3 with lessons, drills, and a video player, Migaku Academy 1 is the option to look at. immit is not a course. It is a reading and SRS tool. For everyone else, especially intermediate learners who came to immersion to read Japanese rather than to learn a tooling stack, the substitution case is real and the continuity gain is the one that compounds.

Frequently asked questions

What is the standard Japanese immersion setup?

The community-standard setup is a popup dictionary (Yomitan), a spaced repetition system (Anki with FSRS), and a bridge plugin (AnkiConnect) that lets the dictionary save mined words as cards. It is documented in the Refold and TheMoeWay guides and works well once configured. The configuration takes around 35 minutes with the official docs on a fresh laptop and longer if dictionary imports or the Anki bridge run into permission issues.

Do I need Anki for Japanese immersion learning?

No. Anki is the most common SRS in the immersion community, but the underlying need is "review Japanese words you encounter at increasing intervals". Any SRS that does this can fill the same job. immit has its own 8-stage scheduler built into the lookup tool, so you get the SRS without installing Anki separately or running the AnkiConnect bridge.

How long does it actually take to set up Yomitan with Anki?

On a fresh laptop with no issues, around 35 minutes end to end (Yomitan install, dictionary downloads, Anki install with FSRS, AnkiConnect install, card template configuration, first test save). With one permission issue or one bad dictionary import, the same setup runs 60 to 90 minutes. The TheMoeWay wiki is the most reliable free guide for the full walkthrough.

Is immit a Yomitan or Anki replacement, or a third tool I add?

immit is positioned as a replacement for the Yomitan + Anki + AnkiConnect stack, not as a third tool to add on top. The lookup, the SRS, and the connection between them all live in one piece of software. You can run both stacks side by side during a migration if you want, but the design intent is substitution.

What happens to my existing Anki deck if I switch to immit?

Your Anki deck stays in Anki. immit does not currently import Anki decks. Most learners who switch keep the old deck for review of legacy cards and start new mining in immit. Over a few months the new deck becomes the active one and the old deck gradually retires.

Can I do sentence mining without AnkiConnect?

Yes. Sentence mining is the practice of saving a word together with the sentence you found it in, and reviewing it later. AnkiConnect is one way to route Yomitan saves into Anki. immit does it natively without a bridge plugin.

Should I use graded readers or jump straight to native material?

Graded readers like Satori Reader and NHK News Web Easy are useful when you finish your first grammar resource and your first novel still feels too hard. They sit at a difficulty level slightly above your current ability but still understandable from context, which is the definition of comprehensible input. Once you can follow a graded reader without looking up more than a few words per page, switching to easier native material (manga, light novels at lower reading levels) is the next step.

Does passive immersion help if I run Japanese audio while I work?

A bit. Passive listening helps you get used to the rhythm and pitch of Japanese and keeps the language present in your day. It does not, on its own, build vocabulary or grammar the way active immersion does. Treat it as a supplement to active reading and SRS, not a replacement.

What is the difference between active listening and passive listening for Japanese?

Active listening means you sit down and focus on what is being said. Your brain maps sound to meaning, which is essential for language acquisition. Passive listening means Japanese audio is running while your attention is somewhere else (cooking, driving, working). Passive listening can familiarize your ear with the rhythm and pitch of Japanese, but it is not generally expected to produce significant comprehension gains on its own. Most successful immersion learners do both, and weight their study time heavily toward active sessions because that is where vocabulary and grammar actually move into long-term memory.

Is the Yomitan + Anki stack still worth setting up in 2026?

If you enjoy configuration as part of the hobby, yes. If you have a large existing Anki investment, yes. If you depend on a specialized Yomichan-format dictionary that immit does not yet carry, yes. Otherwise the one-tool shape is the more sustainable choice.

Does immit work offline and without an account?

Yes. The Chrome extension and the desktop app (Mac, Windows, Linux) both work without an account on the free tier and run lookups offline. Pro at $9 per month adds multi-device sync and flashcard backup.

Try the one-tool shape

The standard stack is good. It is not the only shape immersion learning takes. If the setup tax is the part of your week that is eating the time you wanted to spend reading, the one-tool shape exists and is free to try. Install the immit Chrome extension or the desktop app from immit.co, hover a word, press save. If after a week the loop is smoother than the stack you were running, keep it. If not, your Anki deck is still where you left it.