Verba in CIJ integration: contextual meanings, TTS and more to come

[benwd]

Hey guys,

I built an integration between CIJ and my transcript analysis product Verba and it injects Verba functionality directly into the CIJ website interface.

Here’s a quick video demo and tutorial on how to install it and use it:

Verba is a transcript analysis tool for learning Japanese, the Verba website allows you to work with other kinds of content and will be announced in coming weeks (get updates when main product launches: Verba newsletter), but right now using Verba inside CIJ is available to use right now.

What you get right now is word by word highlighting, slow TTS audio (with gemini flash 3.1 because it is best with pitch accent), and contextual definitions (to get a quick idea of what a word means in context).

When you add the snippet below to Your Userscripts, then a new ‘Verba Transcript’ tab will appear alongside the CIJ Transcript tab. It behaves exactly like a NIJ tab so you can move it to the side of the video. There’s also a ‘Verba Transcript Layout’ button in the layouts settings.

More functionality coming soon. See the demo video attached.

Try it out:

1. go to Your Userscripts , and paste the snippet below, and press save.
2. Then go to Comprehensible Japanese and click the Verba Transcript tab.

Snippet:

(function () {
const s = document.createElement('script')
s.src = 'https://web.verba.app/embed/nij.js?v=' + Date.now()
document.head.appendChild(s)
})()

Would love to hear your feedback.

Cheers!
Ben (founder of Verba)

EDIT:

June 15th, 2026: Update: Analysis Queue

The Verba in CIJ integration now creates a ‘Analysis Queue’ tab that shows you which CIJ videos have been processed with Verba:

and which are in the queue:

June 15th, 2026: Update: Request and See Verba Status in Grid:

You can now request a video or see whether a given video is requested or already analyzed from the watch page

June 19th, 2026: Update: Keyboard Shortcuts and Queue Automation

The integration now gives you a few keyboard shortcuts.

The analysis queue is now automated, so the number of videos with Verba transcripts available will start ramping up.

New demo video:

I integrated my transcript tool into the Comprehensible Japanese™ website!

July 1, 2026: Major Update! Track known words

Verba now automatically tracks which words you have interacted with, and allows you to mark words as ‘known’.

Verba doesn’t just track lemmas, it tracks disambiguated lexical senses, in other words, it knows exactly what word sense is being used for each word, so if you mark a word ‘known’ you’re marking a word sense known. This is helpful for highly polysemous words with many varying usages and meanings like かける (掛ける) that can mean hang, multiply, pour/sprinkle, sit down etc. etc. depending on context.

[gardiac2002]

Interesting idea, but this feels like written by a bot. It is nice that you added a video though. Wish you good luck with your project!

[benwd]

thanks for the feedback @gardiac2002, just so I understand you correctly, do you mean the contextual definitions sound robotic? if so, could you give an example?

or do you mean my actual post?? because I promise I wrote that myself, that’s just how I write!

or do you mean Verba itself? Verba is a project I’ve been working on since way before LLMs, based on my long-term research into linguistics and SLA.

[gardiac2002]

@benwd

I love NIJ, nothing else like it exists but I wanted a way to easily look up what words mean in context, and be able to hear specific words spoken slowly so I can really hear the pronunciation.

I thought that the post was originally written by an AI:

I love NIJ, nothing else like it exists but I wanted a way to easily look up what words mean in context, and be able to hear specific words spoken slowly so I can really hear the pronunciation.

or do you mean Verba itself? No, no, absolutely not. Tokenization in Japanese is quite difficult to get right, I can imagine that it took you a lot of time.
I never really was happy with any results from common Japanese tokenizers.

[benwd]

Got it, I appreciate the honest feedback. Sounds like I went a bit too formal and ended up sounding like an LLM lol. I’ll work on that!

Would love to hear on your thoughts on what could be improved with the Verba functionality inside CIJ/NIJ, have you tried it yet?

[jeshyr]

Looks like it could be super useful - I’ve been using the built in MacOS dictionary for that but it’s less ideal. I made an account and messed around and finally got it set up but the only transcript I could find that exists is the one in your video, all of the rest (I only tried a few) either said “not analysed yet” or the message about Yuki’s videos not being analysed because they’re going to be removed soon. What % of the videos in various categories are analysed?

[benwd]

hi @jeshyr, perhaps i should have pre-emptively processed a lot more transcripts up front, sorry about that.

there are a couple processing right now, and you will get notifications on any that you hit the request button on.

i will see if i can add a ‘Verba Recommendations’ tab alongside the ‘Verba Transcript’ tab that gives you links to all the CIJ videos that have been processed so far

[benwd]

@jeshyr the integration now shows you a new tab that lists available Verba transcripts and what’s in the request queue. let me know if this helps.

[benwd]

i have removed the block on Yuki’s videos.

[japaneseguy67]

Maybe I am missing something, but is this going to be free?? If not I really don’t see a point in using it, because if you are paying for something, you might as well pay for Migaku, which does the same thing except they have native speaker pronunciations and AI generated ones as well as a lot more stuff like making one click audio only cards, getting AI explanations for words in context and not just 1-1 dictionary definitions, their own SRS with the ability to output to Anki, a sort of auto-mining etc.

[benwd]

hi @japaneseguy67

Right now, Verba is free because it’s an early beta product. However, eventually I will need to make Verba into a subscription product because it costs money to run.

I built this integration with CIJ first of all for myself so I can use Verba with CIJ, but also so I can get honest feedback from CIJ community about their experiences with Verba as a tool.

Migaku is excellent and a far more mature product than Verba. If Migaku is working for you, you should stick with it! I want to be clear though, I’m not trying to build a better Migaku, it’s built around a different product vision which will become clear as I reveal functionality over time.

All that being said, I’d love to hear how you use Migaku — how did you settle on it, what is the one key feature you’d never give up and where it still frustrates you?

If you’re up for it, please send me a DM in the CIJ Discord (username: @benwd) or alternatively via @benfromverba on most platforms. Same goes for anyone reading: I’d genuinely love to know how you use whatever you currently use, and what your current frustrations are.

Cheers,
Ben

[benwd]

Major Update! Track known words

Verba now automatically tracks which words you have interacted with, and allows you to mark words as ‘known’.

Verba doesn’t just track lemmas, it tracks disambiguated lexical senses, in other words, it knows exactly what word sense is being used for each word, so if you mark a word ‘known’ you’re marking a word sense known. This is helpful for highly polysemous words with many varying usages and meanings like かける (掛ける) that can mean hang, multiply, pour/sprinkle, sit down etc. etc. depending on context.