Janau
Janau
Get Janau

For language learners

See how a language thinks, in colour.

Most translation apps hand you a sentence and leave you to trust it. Janau gives every matching pair of words the same colour on both lines, so you can see which word became which, notice where the order changes, and start to understand why.

English

The old man watched the harbour lights fade.

Spanish

El anciano miraba apagarse las luces del puerto.

Point at any phrase to light up its partner. Notice *fade* and *apagarse* swap places — the colour is how you spot it. Tap a phrase to learn why.

How it works

Every word, matched and coloured.

Janau translates, then does the part other apps skip: it works out which words in your sentence became which words in the translation, and gives each pair a colour you can follow with your eye, so the answer also shows its working.

01

Type it, say it, or point your camera

Type, paste, dictate, or point the camera at a menu or a sign. It all lands in the same place, and the water ripples while Janau thinks, so the wait feels alive rather than stuck.

02

Each pair gets its own colour

Colours follow your sentence in reading order and repeat on the translation, so one colour means one thing on both lines. When the two languages order their words differently, you see it at once.

03

Tap a word to learn why

Tap any pair and Janau explains it: what it means literally, how formal it is, and the other words it could have chosen. Press and hold to lift a pair out on its own.

The water

The loading screen is water you can push.

Not a decoration — a real wave simulation, the same code the app runs. Drag a finger and the water piles up beside it; let go and the piles roll away as waves, hit the edges, and come back.

Drag anywhere across this card. Tap to send a 🌊.

12 pills/s How fast a crest travels, roughly 1.3 s end to end.
5.0 s For a ripple to settle to 3% of its size.
80 % Of the water you push goes ahead of a fast swipe. The rest slips behind, as it does.
3 tiers Levels of detail, picked by what your iPhone can run at 120Hz.

In the interest of honesty: this does nothing

The water translates nothing, measures nothing, and tells you nothing about your sentence. It is a wave simulation built for a loading screen, kept because a thing you see a dozen times a day may as well be worth looking at — and because it was fun to make. That is the whole justification, and we are at peace with it.

The colours

Six colours, chosen for every kind of eye.

When colour does the work, it has to work for everyone — including the one in twelve men who see two hues as one. Janau’s six colours are spaced so that no two neighbours blur together under the common kinds of colour blindness, and each is also a different brightness, so the pairs stay distinct even in black and white.

Amber #EAB861 The first pair in every sentence. The brightest, so it reads as the anchor.
Blue #588AFB Safe against amber for every common form of colour blindness.
Lilac #C8A4F9 Kept lighter than blue so the two never meet in the middle.
Teal #2BAB96 The only green in the set, kept far from amber for that reason.
Magenta #D367BC The darkest of the six. Carries long phrases without shimmering.
Pale blue #B7CDDC The sixth and quietest, for the tail of a long sentence.

Colour is not the only clue

Pairs stay apart for the common kinds of colour blindness, and tapping any word names its partner in plain text — so you are never guessing from colour alone.

More than six pairs? The colours repeat

Rather than squeeze in a seventh colour that would crowd the others, long sentences start the set again — and Janau checks that a repeated colour never lands next to its twin.

The app

Three screens do the whole job.

The Janau result screen: an English sentence above its Spanish translation, each matching pair of words underlined in the same colour.
The result, in colour Both sentences side by side, every pair tied to its colour, with a quick sweep as the colours land.
The word detail sheet for “bite the bullet”, showing its meaning, why the idiom changes in Spanish, and a list of equivalents.
Word details Tap a word for what it means literally, how formal it is, and the alternatives that lost — tinted in the pair's colour.
A held pair: “bite the bullet” and “tragarme el miedo” highlighted in lilac, with the pair lifted into a glowing bubble at the bottom of the screen.
A pair, held Press and hold and the pair lifts out on its own, lit by its colour, with the glow beneath following it.

Pricing

Free to start. Pro to go deeper.

Janau Free No account, no trial. A daily allowance.
Type, paste, speak, or snap Every pair in colour Word details and romanisation ·Last 30 translations kept
Download
Popular
Janau Pro $7.99 /month Monthly, cancel any time. No yearly plan yet.
Everything in Free, with higher limits Stronger models, richer explanations Unlimited history, synced across devices Flashcards to review what you learn Auto-detects the language you type Deeper explanations for every word
Start Pro

Have your own AI key? Use it on any plan. Requests go straight from your phone to the provider, and you pay them, not us.

Questions

The vast majority of the world's languages, with colour matching on all of them. The translations themselves come from leading AI models rather than from us, so quality can vary a little between languages — we test constantly and swap in better models as they arrive.

Sometimes, and Janau says so rather than pretending. When a word has no clean partner — an idiom, a subject the other language adds, a pronoun it drops — it is left uncoloured and marked as unmatched in the details, so you know exactly where to look twice.

Your history lives on your phone. On Pro, it also syncs through Janau’s own servers so it follows you across devices. Each sentence is sent to the AI model to be translated, and beyond your own history, nothing is stored.

Yes. Janau follows your iPhone’s Reduce Motion setting everywhere, with one deliberate exception: the loading water keeps moving, because a loading screen with nothing moving looks frozen rather than calm. Everything else goes still, and Settings has its own Motion switch on top of the system one.

Yes, on iOS 16 and up. The water runs at three levels of detail, chosen by what your phone can comfortably handle — the simplest one drops the finer ripples and the glare, which is the difference between a warm phone and a cool one. Everything else works the same on every model.

Nowhere. Dictation and camera text use the speech and text recognition already built into your iPhone, so they work on the device itself. No audio and no photo is uploaded, and none is saved — not even on the phone. Only the recognised words go on to be translated.

Yes — the translations and the explanations come from AI models. What Janau adds is the craft around them: carefully written instructions that ask for the pairing, the tone and the alternatives, and constant testing of new models and new approaches so the quality keeps rising. We don’t build the models; we choose and direct them.

Yes, on Free or Pro. Add a key from your AI provider and every request goes straight from your phone to them — nothing passes through Janau’s servers, and you pay the provider directly at their rates.

See what your translator has been hiding.

Free on the App Store. Pro when you want more, never before.

Download on iOS

Aligned pair

The old man

El anciano
Literally the ancient one
Register Neutral, slightly literary.
Why this word Placeholder explanation.
Passed over