Reibun

Learn Japanese through real sentences.

A searchable database of annotated Japanese sentences. Every sentence comes with furigana, romaji, a natural and literal translation, grammar commentary, and clickable tags. Every word has a dictionary breakdown a tap away.

18,750 sentences · 6,404 tags · 2,441 grammar points

Featured Sentence

The kettle must be boiling.

Literal

Kettle [topic-は] is-boiling [certainty-に違いない].

~に違いない ('there's no doubt that') expresses strong certainty based on inference — stronger than だろう, less neutral than はずだ. ~ている on 沸騰する gives the progressive 'is boiling.' The word 薬缶 is a Sino-Japanese compound literally meaning 'medicine can' — historically kettles were used to heat medicinal water, and the name stuck even as the everyday use shifted to tea and cooking.

Browse sentences

Filter by difficulty, formality, grammar, tags. Sort by engagement or difficulty. Infinite scroll through real, annotated sentences.

Explore tags

Every grammar point, topic, and pattern in the corpus. Click through to see real sentences that use it.