Episode Details

Kotomora https://kotomora.com

Markus J. Diplama looks at Kotomora, a Japanese dictionary and grammar reference built in Tokyo by a team of language learners working alongside native speakers. The episode explores what sits behind its dictionary of more than 216,000 words: a sentence analyzer, 862 JLPT graded grammar patterns, kanji stroke order, pitch accent and translation guides that compare similar words side by side. It makes the case for treating a language as a connected map rather than a flat list of definitions, and for teaching nuance and register instead of handing over a verdict. Worth a listen for anyone learning Japanese, or building learning tools.

Have you ever looked up a word in another language, found what looked like the perfect translation, used it in a real conversation, and then watched the other person's face do something you did not quite expect? Not confusion exactly. Something gentler than that. A small flicker that says, I understand you, and also, that is not quite how we would have said it. If you have ever had that moment, you already understand the problem that today's business is built around, and you already know that it is a much bigger problem than most dictionaries are willing to admit.

Hello and welcome back to The Next Biz Thing. I am Markus J. Diplama, and every episode I go looking for the companies that are quietly fixing something the rest of us have simply learned to live with. Not the loud launches, not the companies that exist mostly to be talked about, but the ones building something careful and useful and then getting on with it. Today I want to talk about a company working in a field that is extraordinarily crowded and yet, strangely, still full of gaps. Language learning. And specifically, a Japanese dictionary and grammar reference called Kotomora.

Kotomora was built in Tokyo by a team of language learners working alongside native Japanese speakers, and I want to sit on that detail for a second because I think it explains almost everything that follows. This is not a product designed by people who finished learning Japanese and then forgot what the hard parts felt like. It was made by people who were in it, who kept running into the same wall, and who had the good sense to build the thing they wished existed rather than just complaining about the thing that did.

The wall, as they describe it, is the gap between a dictionary definition and real world usage. Every learner meets this wall eventually. You look up an English word and the dictionary hands you back four Japanese options with no guidance about which one a real person would actually reach for. They all mean the thing. They do not all mean the thing in the same room, to the same person, at the same moment. One is warm, one is formal, one is what you would write but never say, and one would make a colleague think you had learned the language entirely from television. The dictionary is not wrong. It is just not finished.

So Kotomora set out to finish it. Their whole approach is built around explaining how words and patterns are actually used, which means nuance, register, and context, rather than simply handing over a gloss and wishing you luck. That sounds like a small shift in emphasis. In practice it changes what the product has to be.

Let me walk you through what they have built, because the scope of it genuinely surprised me. At the centre there is a dictionary with more than two hundred and sixteen thousand searchable words. That alone would be a serious reference. But around it sits a set of tools that do the work a dictionary normally leaves to you. There is a sentence analyzer that takes a complete Japanese sentence and breaks it apart, giving you the readings and showing you the grammar holding it together. If you have ever stared at a wall of Japanese text knowing every individual word and still having no idea what the sentence was d