For universities, schools and language programs

Your students already have the textbook. Give them the hours.

Nihoner is a complete Japanese learning platform with a teaching layer on top. Your department gets classes, assignments that mark themselves, and a register that shows who is quietly falling behind — weeks before an exam would.

Every student on your licence gets the full paid platform. Not a stripped classroom edition — the same 669,996-entry dictionary, 229 books and AI tutor that individual members pay for.

See the three programs Talk to a person first

Set up in an afternoon · Students join with a link · Nothing to install

One licence, three doors

Everybody gets a different platform

The person who buys, the people who teach, and the people who learn need completely different things. Nihoner gives each of them their own dashboard and shows them nothing that is not theirs. You do not configure this. It follows from the role.

管 Administrator /campus/ The person who buys

Owns the licence and every seat on it
Creates classes and assigns a teacher to each
Bulk-invites by paste — drop in a column of emails from your student system, any format, and send
Email-domain auto-join — anyone registering with @your.ac.uk lands in your organisation automatically, with no invite at all
Adds teachers and promotes existing members
Sees seats used, seats left, and a 12-week seat history
Teacher adoption report — which of your staff are actually using it, and which have not logged in
Organisation-wide progress summary across every class
Exports the whole organisation to CSV for your own reporting
Duplicates a class for next term, complete with its assignments
Archives finished classes without deleting anything
Previews any student's exact view to answer a support question in ten seconds
A setup checklist that tells you what is still undone
Licence page with your renewal date and seat count

One administrator is included. Add more at no cost.

教 Teacher /campus-teacher/ Runs the class

Class dashboard — every student, ranked by who needs attention first
24 kinds of assignment, and every one marks itself: courses, quizzes, adaptive reading, vocabulary, games, real literature and handwriting — plus daily missions, listening checks, spoken and written Can-do proofs, daily ability stacks, Contrast Lab and grammar repairs
Ready-made assignments — pick from packs written for the first week, building a habit, before a test, and catching up. They name real books from the library and set a sensible deadline.
Nothing to prepare. Reading assignments generate text from the kanji that student knows, so a beginner and a third-year get different work from one instruction
Binary activity register — eight weeks at a glance, who showed up
Grades and marks, recorded as score out of total rather than a percentage you have to reverse-engineer
Post a notice to the whole class
Email the class from inside the dashboard
“Worth a word” panel — surfaces the student who quietly improved most this week, so praise is not only for the top of the table
Students can ask you a question privately from their own dashboard
Certificates on course completion
Per-student report: progress, coursework, engagement, what they are stuck on
Export any class to CSV
Add a co-teacher to any class
Role-aware manual at /campus-help/ and an info icon beside every control

Unlimited teachers on every plan.

学 Student /campus-me/ + the whole site Gets full Premium

The entire paid platform, at no cost to them — the same account an individual pays for monthly
Their own dashboard: what is set, what is done, what is due
A deadline banner that names the teacher and links straight into the work — “due tomorrow”, not “2026-09-30”
Reading written from the kanji they personally know, checked before they see it
229 real Japanese books — tap any word for its reading, meaning and kanji
A review deck built from the words they actually missed, in the sentence they met them in
AI tutor that names the grammar rule instead of guessing
Courses N5 → N1, quizzes, certificates
16 learning games that feed the same progress record
Pronunciation trainer and listening practice
Ask their teacher a question without leaving the site
Their account is theirs. Progress survives the course ending, and they keep the free tier forever after

Worth $120 a year each at our own list price.

Why departments buy this

The gap is not the teaching. It is the other 160 hours.

Four contact hours a week is not enough Japanese for anybody, and everyone in the department knows it. What is missing is not better lectures — it is a way to make the hours between them count, and a way to see whether they did.

What happens now

You find out someone is lost at the midterm, when it is too late to do much about it.

What happens here

The register shows falling activity in week three, by name, before anyone has failed anything.

What happens now

Setting meaningful homework for thirty students at five different levels means writing five worksheets.

What happens here

One instruction. Each student gets text built from their own vocabulary, and it marks itself.

What happens now

Students read the textbook and nothing else, because real Japanese is too hard to look up.

What happens here

229 real books where every word is one tap from its meaning. The lookup cost is gone.

What happens now

You have no idea what any individual student actually knows — only what they scored.

What happens here

A per-student model of which words and characters they can read, built from everything they do.

What happens now

Half the class stops after week five and you cannot prove it to anyone.

What happens here

An eight-week attendance grid you can put in front of a course committee.

Included for every seat

Students get the real product, not a classroom edition

This is the part institutions expect to be worse than the consumer version. It is the same version.

読

Reading written for them

Passages generated from the exact characters that student knows, checked character by character before it is shown. Up to 20 a day.

本

229 real books

Public-domain Japanese literature — Sōseki, Akutagawa, Dazai, Miyazawa. Complete, with the furigana the original editor printed.

語

Every word explained in place

Tap anything: reading, meaning, the kanji it is built from, the dictionary entry. Places and historical figures link to their own pages.

札

A review deck of their own mistakes

Words they met and did not know, returned in the sentence they read them in — not a shared vocabulary list.

師

An AI tutor that names the rule

Ask anything in plain English and get the grammar point identified, not a paraphrase. 60 questions an hour.

課

Courses N5 → N1

3,588 lessons and 1,136 quizzes on a path that always says what comes next. Certificates on completion.

戯

16 learning games

Conjugation, particles, counters, stroke order, kanji duels. Every round feeds the same record of what they know.

書

Writing, not just reading

A handwriting pad covering 6,702 characters — every kana and every kanji with stroke data — scored on order and direction, in the browser. Plus a daily composition task marked the moment it is submitted.

声

Speaking and listening

A pronunciation trainer that shows where it drifted, and native narration for sentences in the library.

地

Japan itself

1,680 towns and 3,251 historical figures, in Japanese, linked from whatever they are reading.

Before your data protection officer asks

Staff see coursework. Staff never see content.

We were asked to build full activity surveillance and declined. A student who believes their teacher can read what they asked the tutor stops asking the tutor — and then the most useful thing on the platform is dead. The line below is enforced in code, not in policy.

What a teacher can see

Whether each assignment is done, and how far through
Course, lesson and quiz progress
Whether the student was active in a given week
How many words and characters they can read
Grades and marks the teacher recorded
Questions the student chose to send them

What nobody on staff can see

Anything the student asked the AI tutor
Which passages or books they chose to read
What they wrote in any free-text field
Activity outside your organisation's classes
Anything at all after they leave the course

Also: students keep their account and their progress when the course ends. Data is processed in the EU. We do not sell data, we do not advertise to your students, and there is a named contact for subject-access requests at [email protected]. Full terms on the licensing page.

Three programs

Priced per program, not per seat

One number a year. Unlimited teachers, unlimited classes, unlimited assignments. Add students up to your band whenever you like — nobody has to count licences in March.

Small Program

≤ 200 learners

$5,000/year

≈ $25 per student, per year, at full capacity

Full Premium for every student
Unlimited teachers and classes
All 24 self-marking assignment types
Bulk invite and email-domain auto-join
Register, grades and CSV export
Organisation-wide reporting
Support answered by a person

Start this program

Most departments

Medium Program

200 – 1,000 learners

$12,000/year

≈ $12 per student, per year, at full capacity

Full Premium for every student
Unlimited teachers and classes
All 24 self-marking assignment types
Bulk invite and email-domain auto-join
Register, grades and CSV export
Organisation-wide reporting
Support answered by a person

Start this program

Large Campus

1,000+ learners

$20,000/year

≈ $10 per student, per year, at full capacity

Full Premium for every student
Unlimited teachers and classes
All 24 self-marking assignment types
Bulk invite and email-domain auto-join
Register, grades and CSV export
Organisation-wide reporting
Support answered by a person

Start this program

For comparison: Premium costs an individual $9.99 a month — $119.88 a year. A program of 200 students buying it themselves would spend $23,976. The Small Program licence covers all of them, plus the entire teaching layer, for $5,000. That is roughly the price of one set of textbooks that nobody opens after November.

Before you commit a department

One class, one term, $750

Everything above, for a single class for 12 weeks. The full teaching layer, full Premium for those students, and unlimited teachers — not a cut-down demonstration.

The whole fee comes off your first annual licence if you go ahead within twelve months. If you do not, you have still had a term of it and a progress report to show for the money.

Why it is not free

Free pilots in education die quietly. Nobody's budget is on the line, the term gets busy, and no decision is ever made — which helps neither of us. A small fee means there is a real decision, a real owner, and a real answer at the end of it.

Request a pilot term

The first afternoon

From payment to a class doing homework

No implementation project. No integration. No training day.

You pay

You land on your administrator welcome page with your organisation already created and a checklist of what is left.

You add teachers

Paste their emails. They get a link, set a password, and arrive on a teacher welcome page that explains their dashboard in four steps.

Students join

Paste a column of student emails, or switch on email-domain joining and simply tell them to register with their university address.

Set one assignment

Use a ready-made one. It names a real book and a sensible deadline. Students see it on their dashboard the moment they log in.

The questions procurement always asks

Do students need to install anything?

No. It runs in a browser on any device, including phones. There is nothing to deploy, no licence keys to distribute and no IT ticket.

Does it integrate with our LMS?

It does not need to, and that is deliberate — the teaching layer is built in, so nothing has to be mirrored into Moodle or Canvas. Everything exports to CSV if you need it in your own system.

What happens to student accounts when the licence ends?

They keep the account and everything in it, on the free tier. Nobody is locked out of their own progress, and nothing is deleted.

Can we exceed our band mid-year?

Yes. Nothing stops working. We will contact the administrator about moving band at renewal rather than cutting anyone off in term time.

Who owns the content students produce?

They do. See the licensing page for the full statement.

Is the material appropriate for a university course?

The library is public-domain Japanese literature — the same authors taught on a Japanese literature syllabus. Every text names the printed edition it was set from, so you can check it against your reading list.

Can a teacher see what a student asked the AI tutor?

No, and there is no setting that turns it on. That is a design decision, not an oversight — see the privacy section above.

How do we pay?

Card at checkout, or invoice and bank transfer if your finance office requires it. Email [email protected] and we will raise one.

Start with one class this term

You will know inside three weeks whether it is working, because for the first time you will be able to see it.

Choose a program Ask a question first

Included on every plan

Full Premium for every student
Unlimited teachers and classes
Bulk import and domain auto-join
Register, grades, CSV export
Invoice billing on request
A person who answers email