Anki is very good at reviewing flashcards and quite bad at making them. Looking a word up, finding a sentence it lives in, typing it all into a card — it's slow enough that most people just don't, and the word gets forgotten instead. NaraNote is the other half of that: the part where you collect what you meet, so reviewing it later is easy.
Mine what you read. Paste in Japanese from anywhere — a manga page, a news article, subtitles, a class handout. It comes back split into words with their readings and meanings. Save the ones you don't know, and the sentence they came from is saved with them, because a word without context is much harder to remember.
Words you've already saved appear dimmed, so any text you paste quietly shows you how much of it you already know.
Look up any kanji. Readings, meanings, stroke count, JLPT level, and a stroke-order diagram with every stroke numbered. Each character shows what it's built from, and those components link onward — so 待 opens into 彳, 土 and 寸.
It also shows what's true of you: the words in your collection that contain it, how you've been getting on writing it, and which other characters you're studying are built the same way.
Practise writing by hand. You're shown a meaning and its readings; you draw the character from memory. Then the real one appears with every stroke numbered — and your own strokes are numbered too, in the order you made them, so you can see not just whether you got it right but exactly where your stroke order went wrong. Flashcard apps can't check handwriting; you have to mark yourself, and marking yourself is how bad habits set in.
Review, if you want to. Words and characters come back when they're due, using the same scheduling algorithm Anki uses. You don't have to review here — but you shouldn't need a second app just to be useful.
Take it to Anki whenever you like. Everything you've collected exports as a real deck, each word carrying the sentence you met it in. Re-exporting updates the same cards rather than duplicating them, so nothing you've already reviewed is lost. The export is a door, not a requirement.
See what you actually did. The home page is a calendar that fills itself in — characters drawn, words reviewed, things added — with no streaks and nothing carried forward. Beside it sits a short list of what's worth doing right now, worked out from your own collection rather than typed in by you. You can add your own tasks too, and give them a day or a character.
Finding a kanji by its English meaning or its reading, rather than needing to type the character. Decks, so a collection can be more than one list. Your own card designs.
Early development. There are no accounts yet, so it runs for one person on one machine.
Dictionary data from JMdict, KANJIDIC2 and KRADFILE (EDRDG, CC BY-SA). Stroke-order diagrams from KanjiVG © Ulrich Apel, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Building on this? See docs/development.md.