Licenses & Attribution
Version 1.0.0 · effective 2026-08-26
Everything on this platform that we did not write ourselves, where it came from, and what its licence requires of us. We keep this page complete on purpose: it is easier to build carefully now than to remove content later because rights were unclear.
What is ours
Our mnemonics in English and Arabic, lesson design, culture cards, folktale retellings, illustrations, translations, interface, brand and the mascot Fenn are original works © Yalla Nihongo. They are not covered by the third-party licences below, and the third-party material below is not covered by our copyright. Keeping those two apart is deliberate.
KanjiVG — stroke-order data
The stroke paths behind every stroke-order animation and tracing exercise, and the や glyph in our app icon.
- Where it comes from
- KanjiVG, © Ulrich Apel and contributors
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- What the licence requires
- Credit the author and name the licence — and, because share-alike applies, license any adapted files under CC BY-SA 3.0 too.
- How we comply
- We credit KanjiVG in the footer of every page, here, and in each derived file. Our derived files stay under CC BY-SA 3.0 and are published as such in the LICENSES/ folder of our repository, so anyone can take them under the same terms. Our own mnemonics and lessons sit alongside them without being merged into them.
Derived files and full notice: LICENSES/ in our repository
JMdict / EDICT and KANJIDIC — dictionary dataWhen this ships
Word meanings and readings behind vocabulary features.
- Where it comes from
- The Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG), Monash University
- Licence
- CC BY-SA (EDRDG licence)
- What the licence requires
- Acknowledge that the files are the property of the EDRDG, used in conformance with its licence, and link to that licence.
- How we comply
- These files are the property of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, and are used in conformance with the Group's licence, linked here. The acknowledgement appears on this page and in the repository.
Tatoeba — example sentencesWhen this ships
Real example sentences shown with vocabulary.
- Where it comes from
- The Tatoeba Project and its contributors
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0 FR
- What the licence requires
- Attribute each sentence to its author.
- How we comply
- Attribution is stored per sentence in an attribution field on the sentence record, and shown on request through the info icon beside any example sentence — so credit travels with the sentence rather than sitting in a general footnote.
Open-source software
ts-fsrs (the spaced-repetition scheduler), WanaKana (kana ↔ romaji), Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS, the Supabase client and every other package we build on.
- Where it comes from
- Their respective authors, via npm
- What the licence requires
- Retain each package's copyright notice and licence text.
- How we comply
- We generate a machine-readable inventory of every installed package and its declared licence into LICENSES/npm-licenses.json, regenerated whenever dependencies change. Today that covers 394 packages across 12 licences, all permissive.
Full inventory: LICENSES/npm-licenses.json
Fonts
Zen Maru Gothic for Japanese and display, Karla for Latin text, Cairo for Arabic.
- Where it comes from
- Google Fonts
- Licence
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
- What the licence requires
- Keep the licence with the fonts; do not sell them on their own; do not misrepresent authorship.
- How we comply
- Karla and Cairo are self-hosted with their licence recorded; Zen Maru Gothic loads through Google Fonts. We do not rename, sell, or claim authorship of any of them.
Illustrations and photographs
Every illustration on the site — the hero painting, the card artwork, Fenn.
- Where it comes from
- Made for this project
- Licence
- © Yalla Nihongo
- What the licence requires
- Nothing from third parties, because there are none in this category today.
- How we comply
- Each image file is recorded in content/asset-register.json with its origin and date, and a build-time test fails if any image ships without an entry. If we ever use Irasutoya's free illustrations, we will use them within its published terms — including its limit on how many items may appear in one work — and record each one here. Stock photography would be recorded per file with its source URL, licence and date before it could ship.
Audio
Pronunciation audio. Today the app speaks through your device's own Japanese voice; recorded audio is planned.
- Where it comes from
- Our own recordings, or per-file-licensed Creative Commons audio
- Licence
- © Yalla Nihongo, or the file's own licence
- What the licence requires
- For contributed voice work, a clear written grant; for Commons audio, per-file attribution.
- How we comply
- Voice contributors sign a short written release granting us a perpetual licence to use their recordings, kept on file. Any Commons audio is logged in the asset register with its licence and attribution before use.
What we deliberately do not use
- No stills, frames, artwork, characters or audio from anime, films, manga or games — not as illustrations, not as example material, not as decoration.
- No entertainment brand names used as our own branding, and no logos of companies we are not working with.
- No "fair use" gambles on entertainment intellectual property. Where we would need someone's permission, we either get it or we build our own.
- Folktales and traditional stories are public-domain works, retold in our own words rather than copied from a modern translation, which would carry its own copyright.
- Trademarks such as JLPT, Duolingo, Anki or Nintendo are referenced nominatively — to describe the thing they name — and remain the property of their owners. Their use here implies no affiliation with, sponsorship by, or endorsement from them.
Copyright complaints and takedown
We take rights seriously in both directions. If you own rights in material that appears on this platform and believe it is used without permission, write to our legal address with enough detail for us to find it.
Please include
- Your name and contact details, and the rights holder you represent.
- A link to the page, and enough description to identify the exact material.
- The basis of your claim — what the work is and why our use is not permitted.
- A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the rights holder or the law.
We acknowledge complaints within 5 days. We then remove or restrict the material while we look into it, or explain in good faith why we believe our use is licensed — for instance when the material is open data used within its licence. We keep a record of every complaint and its outcome. Where a user posted the material, we notify them and give them a chance to respond, and accounts that repeatedly infringe lose the ability to post. This procedure follows the shape of DMCA practice because that is the international common language of takedown, not because US law governs us.
If we removed your content and you disagree
Reply to the notice we sent you, explaining why you have the right to post the material. A person reviews every appeal, and we restore content when the claim does not hold up.
Questions?
Write to us and a human will answer.