Hover any of the six items above. Try it with the keyboard too — Tab to move, ↓ to open a panel, Esc to close. Scroll down: the bar stays put. Narrow the window past 1060px to see the mobile drawer.
Everything the current menu had, plus everything it was missing. All 51 destinations verified live.
Audited against menus 3, 117, 118 and 844.
| Destination | Old menu | Now in |
|---|---|---|
| Japanese History (whole section) | Absent | History — its own panel |
| AI Japanese Teacher | Absent | AI Tools |
| AI Pronunciation Trainer | Top bar only | AI Tools |
| Kanji Duel | Absent | Games → Kanji |
| Chimei — Japan City Game | Absent | Games → Japan |
| Kanji Ronin, Blade Forge, Hangman, Vocab Swipe, Audio Samurai | Absent | Games |
| Encyclopedia | Absent | Kanji & Words · Japan |
| Furigana & Japanese converters | Top bar only | Kanji & Words → Text tools |
| Japanese Oracle | Logged-in only | Japan → Culture |
| Courses, Quizzes, Flashcards, Grammar, Vocabulary, Dictionary, Lexicon, Kanji, Books, Cities, Prefectures, Pricing, Blog | Present | All kept |
Three things you reported, and what was actually wrong.
The <script> was printed before the menu markup, so querySelector('.nmm') returned null and the whole script bailed on its first line. It now emits after the markup and waits for DOMContentLoaded, so it cannot break again if the call is moved.
A CSS specificity collision: .nmm a (0-1-1) out-ranked .nmm-cta (0-1-0), so color: inherit won and the white was discarded. Every colour-critical rule is now written at 0-2-1 so it cannot be out-specified.
A slim dark bar above the main navigation with the six most-used look-ups, plus Blog, Pricing and your account. Frequent tasks now take one click from anywhere.
Each choice is doing a specific job, not decoration.
Decision time grows with the number of simultaneous options. The old menu put 22 items on the bar. This puts 6, and hides the depth until you ask for it — so the first glance is calm, not busy.
Learn · Dictionary · Tools · Games · History · Japan. No insider vocabulary, nothing to decode. "Kanji & Words" became "Dictionary" precisely because everyone already knows what a dictionary is.
Menu items are 17px and link titles 16px, up from 15px and 14.5px. The muted grey went from #8a8a95 to #63636f. Targets are 78px tall on the bar and 48px on mobile — comfortable for imprecise pointing and older eyes.
"Lexicon" tells you nothing. "194,458 words — the largest list online" tells you whether to click. Descriptions cut the back-and-forth of opening a page just to find out what it is.
13,071 reads as a measurement; "13,000+" reads as marketing. Every count comes from the database and is cached for a day, so it can never quietly become false.
An isolated, visually distinct element gets looked at first. Each panel opens with a red card so the eye lands somewhere deliberate instead of scanning a flat list of links.
Full-height hit areas on the bar, generous padding on every row, and a pointer "safe triangle" so moving diagonally into a panel doesn't swap it out from under you — the most common mega-menu annoyance there is.
学 遊 史 漢 日 智 instead of emoji. Unmistakably on-brand for a Japanese site, visually quieter than emoji, and it teaches six characters to anyone who looks twice.
History carries a badge while the corpus is small, and automatically swaps to a real entry count once it passes 1,000 pages. Honest at both stages, with no one having to remember to change it.
Real buttons with aria-expanded, arrow-down to enter a panel, Escape to close and return focus, focus-visible rings, and full prefers-reduced-motion support. Every link still works with JavaScript off.
Clicking "History" goes to the history hub rather than only opening a panel. A menu item that does nothing but expand is a dead end for anyone who clicks before reading.