About Maxime Pitaval, Yomimaru's Founder

I am Maxime Pitaval, and I make Yomimaru. I am also French, which matters here, because the first foreign language that gave me real trouble was English, not Japanese. I did what everyone does back home: six or seven years of it in school, and at the end I still spoke it badly.

Then, in about two years, I went from that mediocre school level to something close to native, and the biggest part of how was reading. I read the news in English every day. I read books in English. The language slowly became mine. I did not study my way there. I read my way there.

The waiting, and the admin

It was harder than it should have been, though, in two ways I still think about. The first one is that I had to wait. My English had to already be decent before I could pick up a real book or a news article without drowning, so the thing that helped me the most was locked behind the level I was trying to reach. The second one is that once I could read, the reading barely felt like reading. Every few words I was in a dictionary, or chasing down a grammar point, writing it out, then copying it by hand into an Anki deck later. Most of my effort went to the admin around the reading instead of the reading itself.

Yomimaru is honestly the tool I wish I had had back then, and nobody had built it for English.

Then Japanese, which is its own kind of hard

So when I fell in love with Japanese, I already had a suspicion about how this works. But Japanese hands you nothing. After two or three years of it, self-taught at first and then at the ISI Language School in Tokyo, I still could not read a message from a Japanese friend, and a menu in a restaurant could still beat me. I had studied plenty of kanji. They just did not stick, because I was memorizing them in isolation and almost never meeting them in a real sentence about something I cared about.

Where Yomimaru came from

I was a university student around then, and I started doing something a little silly. I got an AI to write me stories in Japanese about my own life. Stories about my dreams, about the films and the books I loved, sometimes with my friends dropped into them. Dumb little stories, at a level I could almost handle. And for the first time, studying Japanese was fun. I wanted to open it, which had never really happened to me before.

It took me a while to understand what was really happening. It was not the AI. The AI was only the trick that got me to the real thing, which was this: I was finally reading Japanese I actually cared about, every single day, and it was sticking. The same lesson English had already taught me, now in a language with three writing systems. Read something you enjoy, a little above your level, every day, and you get better almost without noticing.

So I turned a silly personal habit into something anyone could use, at any level, from someone who does not know a single kana to someone already deep into novels. The idea has not really changed since that first experiment at university. Put Japanese you enjoy in front of you, at a level you can handle, and make it easy to come back to it tomorrow.

And the two things that made my English reading so much harder than it needed to be are gone from this one. You do not wait around until you are good enough, because the reading meets you where you are from the very first day. You do not drift off into dictionary tabs and hand-made flashcards either, because everything the reading asks for, from looking a word up to keeping the ones you want to remember, happens right where you are reading. That was always the point. To let you actually read.

If you only want to speak

Some of you will tell me you only care about speaking, that you do not really need to read, that maybe you can even skip kanji. I understand that, and the moments from Japanese I treasure most are spoken ones. But reading is what feeds speaking. It widened my vocabulary far faster than conversation practice alone ever did, so now when I talk I fumble for words much less. It is also what makes the words stay. When you meet a word inside a real sentence, you attach its meaning to the shape of the kanji, to how it is written, to how it sounds, and to the moment you read it. That web is why it sticks.

How I use it myself

On my commute I open a story at an easier level, something I enjoy, or the news at a level that is not too challenging, and I save the few words I do not know as I go. That is the daily one, and it never really feels like studying.

Then a few times a week I sit down for a proper study session with something more challenging, and I read it slowly, the way you have to when a sentence does not give itself up. Afterwards I go through the vocabulary flashcards of the new words I just met. They come back to me carrying the sentence I first read them in, and I never had to copy them into a deck by hand for that to happen. That is exactly what I was missing when I was memorizing kanji on their own.

Who is behind the guides

The guides in the Learn section carry my name, so you should know what that means. Some of them started as problems I hit myself, like how to make kanji actually stay, or what to read once graded readers stop being tolerable. Others exist because learners kept asking me the same question, and I wanted one clear answer in one place instead of half an answer scattered across old forum threads. I decide what goes into every one of them, and I read it before it goes up.

I am not a linguist and I am not going to pretend to be one. I am a developer who learned Japanese the slow way, alone and then in a classroom in Tokyo, and who still reads it as a daily habit. If something in a guide is wrong, I would genuinely rather hear it from you than leave it standing.

Three of them I would hand to a friend

How to Start Reading Native Japanese Content. The one I wish someone had handed me at the point where the textbook stopped being enough and native Japanese still felt like a wall.
Graded Readers Fail. Native Japanese Content Wins. Why the material that is safe for your level is so often the material you cannot make yourself open.
Master Japanese Vocabulary: SRS + Reading. The kanji-in-isolation problem I lost years to, and what to do instead of that.

What all of it is for

None of this is really about an app. Learning Japanese is not easy and it asks for real dedication, but every single hour of it has paid me back, and reading is what opened the doors I did not see coming. I could sign my own apartment contract. Sleeping in a temple at Koyasan, I could read the Japanese explanation of why that place is spiritually enormous and what it has meant to certain Japanese writers, and I would have walked straight past all of it if I could not read a word. I can follow Japanese dramas that never got English subtitles, like 黒革の手帖 or the ライアーゲーム live action, and simply enjoy them.

And the spoken memories are there too, and they are precious to me. A night spent laughing with drunk locals at a bar in Wakayama City. A grandmother teaching me the traditional Obon dance in Gujo Hachiman. Every one of those doors opened because at some point I stopped only studying Japanese and started reading it.

Where to find me

Yomimaru is a small project and I read everything that comes in. If a guide is off, or the app broke on you, or you just want to talk about learning Japanese, my inbox is open.