Is the Learn section free?

Yes. The vocabulary lists, scene breakdowns, and the flashcard videos are all free to read and watch — no account, no download. Playto itself is a separate desktop app for reading your own games as you play.

Where do the words and JLPT levels come from?

From real game screens. The vocabulary pages use the same JLPT wordlist data that powers Playto's difficulty tags, and the scene breakdowns are transcribed from actual in-game recordings — so the levels reflect what's genuinely on screen, not a generic textbook list.

Will more games and screens be added?

That's the plan. The section grows alongside our flashcard video series and per-game scans — more screen-by-screen vocabulary sets and more scene breakdowns as they're produced.

New: a Learn section built from real game screens

Most vocabulary lists for learners are built from textbooks. Games use a different Japanese — system words like 会心の一撃 and 状態異常 that no course teaches, sitting next to genuinely useful everyday words like 商人 and 休憩. If games are where you spend your reading time, that’s the vocabulary that actually unlocks them.

So we started publishing it. The new Learn section collects material built from real game screens:

What’s there now

JRPG Japanese vocabulary: 35 words, screen by screen — the words grouped by the screen they appear on: battle, menu, status, dungeon, shop, quest board, boss fight. Each word comes with furigana, romaji, its JLPT level where it has one, and two example sentences in game register. The flashcard videos from our YouTube series are embedded alongside each screen, so you can quiz yourself before reading the list.

Read Sekiro in Japanese: the Genichiro scene — a real cutscene, seven lines, read line by line: what each word is doing, why the grammar sounds centuries old, and what 御子 actually means (it’s a title, not “your child”). There’s a full video version of the breakdown too.

Why screens, not word lists

Frequency lists tell you what’s common across all Japanese. Screens tell you what’s in front of you right now. Learning 与える, 得る and 付与する as a set won’t help with a newspaper — but it reads almost every card in a deckbuilder, and that’s the moment the game stops being a wall.

The same thinking runs through the rest of the site: the games pages measure how hard each title’s Japanese actually is, and Playto reads your screen live while you play. The Learn section sits between the two — free reading material for the games you already own.

If there’s a game or a screen you want broken down next, tell us on Discord.