Shirabe vs Renshuu

Renshuu is one of the most quietly impressive things in this space. A grammar system, vocabulary, kanji, schedules, games, a genuinely enormous free tier, and years of careful work by someone who obviously cares. Its free offering is more generous than most competitors’ paid ones.

Two honest things before anything else. Renshuu teaches grammar and Shirabe does not: ours is planned and not shipped. And Renshuu’s free tier is more generous than ours. Both of those are real, and if either decides it for you, that’s a reasonable decision.

What follows is where we’re actually different.

The dictionary as the front door, not a feature inside the app

Renshuu is a study application with a dictionary in it. Shirabe is a dictionary that grew a study system.

That ordering shows up in how you use them. Shirabe’s dictionary is free, public, indexed, and needs no account: fast enough to be the tab you keep open while reading, with kanji, radicals, readings, pitch accent, audio and examples. Saving a word into your reviews is what happens when a lookup is worth keeping, not a separate mode you switch into.

The practical effect is that studying starts from real reading rather than from opening a study app and deciding to study.

FSRS, not a staged schedule

Renshuu’s scheduling is its own system, developed over years, and it works.

Shirabe uses FSRS: a modern, published, open algorithm that fits itself to your review history and predicts when each individual card is about to slip. In practice it means fewer reviews for the same retention, and it isn’t something you configure. It’s just how scheduling works here.

If you like knowing what your scheduler is doing and why, that transparency is worth something.

Your own material

Renshuu’s content is well organised into schedules, lists and levels. That structure is genuinely helpful, and it’s also the limit: your vocabulary comes from lists somebody else curated.

In Shirabe the list is whatever you’re reading. Look a word up from an article, a manga page or a subtitle, and study that. Coverage, known-word counts and kanji progress are all derived from what you’ve actually saved, so they track your real reading rather than a curriculum’s idea of your level.

Grammar, plainly

Renshuu has real grammar coverage. Shirabe’s is planned and not shipped.

If you want one tool that does grammar and vocabulary, Renshuu does that today and we don’t. We’d rather you know that from us than discover it after subscribing.

Where Renshuu wins

Grammar. Present, mature, and integrated with everything else.

The free tier. Genuinely large, not a trial in disguise.

Breadth. Kanji, vocabulary, grammar, listening, games, schedules: a lot in one place.

Community and gamification. Years of accumulated polish, and people who’ve been there for a decade.

Where Shirabe is ahead

• A free, public, multilingual dictionary as the front door, usable without an account.
• Spanish at the dictionary level, not an English-first interface.
• FSRS rather than a bespoke schedule.
• Anki import preserving scheduling and history.
• Bring-your-own-material study, and personal Yomitan dictionary uploads that follow your account.
• A modern, quiet interface. Renshuu’s is dense with features; ours deliberately isn’t.

Who should stay on Renshuu

• You want grammar and vocabulary in one subscription.
• The free tier covers what you need. That’s hard to argue with.
• You like the gamification and the community.
• You want structured schedules rather than choosing your own words.

Who Shirabe is for

• You want a dictionary first, and studying as a byproduct of looking things up.
• You learn Japanese through Spanish.
• You want FSRS specifically.
• You’re bringing Anki decks and don’t want to lose their history.
• You prefer a calmer interface with fewer things on screen.

The honest summary

Renshuu does more than we do, for less, and has grammar. If breadth per euro is the metric, it wins.

Shirabe is narrower on purpose: the best free dictionary we can build, with a modern SRS attached, in Spanish as well as English. If that’s the shape you want, we’re the better fit. If you want one tool for everything, that’s Renshuu.