Shirabe vs Jisho

Jisho is the dictionary most of us learned Japanese with. It’s fast, it’s free, it needs no account, and its radical and handwriting search are still the best way to find a kanji you can only draw. This page isn’t an argument that Jisho is bad. It’s an argument about what happens after the lookup.

Because here’s the thing about a dictionary: it has no memory. You look a word up, you understand the sentence, you close the tab. Two weeks later the same word appears and you look it up again. Most people have looked up 調べる more times than they’d like to admit.

The fifth lookup is the problem

Nobody notices the first lookup. Or the second.

What you notice, eventually, is the feeling of recognising a word without being able to produce its meaning: the sense that you’ve met this one before. That’s not a failure of attention. It’s what happens when you read a word once, in one context, and never see it again until chance brings it back.

Spaced repetition exists to fix exactly that, and the reason most people don’t use it is friction: the word is in the dictionary, the study system is somewhere else, and moving one to the other is a chore you do later, which means never.

Shirabe closes that gap by making them the same product. You look a word up, and if it’s worth keeping, one click saves it. The card arrives with the reading, the pitch accent, the audio and an example sentence already attached, not because you assembled it, but because the dictionary already knew all of that.

The dictionary stays free

We want to be direct about this, because it’s the obvious worry: Shirabe’s dictionary is free, permanently, with no account required.

Search, kanji lookup, readings, examples, radical search: free. That’s the front door and it isn’t going behind a login. What’s paid is the study system: saving words, reviews, progress tracking, the AI assistant. If you only ever want the lookup, use Shirabe like you use Jisho and it will cost you nothing.

Multi-language, not English-with-a-detour

If Spanish is your first language, Jisho routes you through English. Japanese word → English definition → your own translation in your head. It works, and millions of people do it, but you’re paying a tax on every lookup.

Shirabe is multilingual at the dictionary level. Definitions in Spanish are real entries, not a machine pass over the English. For a Spanish-speaking learner that’s not a feature, it’s the difference between reading and translating.

What you actually get for the extra click

Saving a word isn’t just storage. It’s what makes the rest of the system possible:

• Reviews scheduled by FSRS, so you see a word again just before you’d forget it, not on a fixed drip.
• Known-word tracking: an honest count of how many words you actually know, which grows as you read.
• Kanji progress derived from the words you’ve saved, rather than a separate curriculum.
• Coverage: how much of a given text you’d understand right now.

None of that is available to a dictionary, because a dictionary doesn’t know who you are.

Who should stay on Jisho

• You want a fast lookup and nothing else. That’s a completely reasonable want.
• You’re already doing spaced repetition somewhere you like, and only need the definition.
• You don’t want an account for anything, ever.
• You rely on a Jisho feature we don’t match. Its handwriting canvas in particular is excellent and years ahead of most.

Who Shirabe is for

• You look words up constantly and retain a fraction of them.
• You’ve thought “I should really be studying these” and never built the habit.
• You read or watch Japanese and want the words from your material, not a fixed list.
• You want the dictionary in Spanish, properly.
• You want to know what you know, a real number, not a feeling.

The honest summary

Jisho answers “what does this mean?” It answers it well and it will keep doing so.

Shirabe answers “what does this mean, and how do I still know it in a month?” If the second question isn’t one you’re asking, Jisho is genuinely the better tool and you should keep using it.