Terms of Service

1. Overview

These terms govern your use of Nichiyomu ("the Service"), operated by Nichiyomu e.U., Hermann-Bahr Gasse 10, 8020 Graz, Austria. By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these terms.

2. Definitions

In these terms:

• "Nichiyomu", "we" and "us" mean Nichiyomu e.U., the operator named in section 1.
• "The Service" means the Nichiyomu website and application, including the reading app, your account, and everything we make available through them.
• "Learning material" means the Japanese passages, translations, kanji breakdowns, grammar explanations and audio we provide through the Service. How it is produced is described in section 7.
• "Your content" means anything you submit to the Service yourself, which is your display name and the content reports you send us. Section 9 covers it.
• "You" means the person who holds the account.

3. Accounts

• You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. You confirm that you are when you sign up. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16, we will close it and delete its data - see the Privacy Policy.
• Your account must be created and used by a person. Accounts registered by bots or by any automated method are not permitted.
• An account is for one person. Do not share your login and do not let anyone else use your account. If several people want to use Nichiyomu, each of them needs their own account.
• Your display name is not shown to other users, but it must not impersonate anyone, infringe anyone's rights, or be offensive. We may change or remove one that does.
• You must provide accurate information when creating an account.
• You are responsible for keeping your login credentials secure.
• You may delete your account at any time from the settings page.

4. Subscriptions, trials and payments

Paid plans are sold and billed through Polar, our Merchant of Record and the seller of record for your purchase. Polar is your contractual counterparty for the transaction and is responsible for billing, invoicing and applicable taxes. By subscribing, you authorise recurring charges until you cancel.

Prices and billing cycle. Plan prices are shown on the pricing page and include any applicable VAT. Subscriptions are billed monthly in advance and renew automatically each month until cancelled. You can cancel at any time from the settings page, which opens the Polar billing portal.

Free trial. New subscribers may be offered a 7-day free trial. The trial is limited to one per customer and is not available if you have used one before. Unless you cancel before the trial ends, it converts automatically into a paid monthly subscription at the price of the plan you are on when the trial ends - the plan price shown at checkout, unless you have switched plans since - and you will be charged from that point onward. You can cancel at any time during the trial from the settings page and you will not be charged.

Changing plans. You can switch between Reader and Learner at any time from the billing portal, which you reach from the settings page. A switch takes effect immediately. The price difference for the rest of the current billing period is added to your next invoice, or deducted from it when you move to a cheaper plan. The billing portal shows the resulting amount of your next invoice. Switching during the free trial does not start a new trial: the remaining trial days carry over, and you are charged for the new plan when the trial ends.

Price changes. We may change plan prices. We will notify you by email at least 30 days before a change takes effect for your subscription, and that notice will state expressly that continuing to use the Service after the effective date counts as acceptance of the new price. If you do not accept it, you may cancel free of charge at any time before it takes effect. The old price applies until then, and a price change never applies to a period you have already paid for.

Right of withdrawal (EU consumers). As a consumer in the EU you have 14 days to withdraw from the contract, without giving any reason. The period runs from the day the contract is concluded, which is when you complete checkout - so if you start a 7-day free trial, the withdrawal period covers the whole trial and a further seven days.

How to withdraw. Because Polar is the seller of record, the withdrawal declaration is owed to Polar: send a clear statement to support@polar.sh, quoting the Polar order ID from your receipt email. You may also send it to us at legal@nichiyomu.com - we will pass it on to Polar and treat it as received on the day it reaches us, so writing to either address keeps you inside the 14 days. Any unequivocal statement will do; no particular wording is required.

Immediate access. At checkout you are asked to expressly request immediate access to the Service and to acknowledge that you thereby lose your right of withdrawal once access is granted. To the extent permitted by applicable law, the right of withdrawal therefore lapses when we begin performance. Where mandatory consumer-protection law nevertheless preserves your right of withdrawal - in particular for ongoing services that are not fully performed within the withdrawal period - you may still withdraw within 14 days; in that case you owe a proportionate amount for the Service provided up to the time you inform Polar or us of your withdrawal, and anything you have paid beyond that will be refunded. If you subscribed without being asked for that consent and acknowledgement, your 14-day right of withdrawal remains fully intact.

If you cancel a subscription, access continues until the end of the paid period; we do not provide pro-rata refunds for the unused part of a billing period except where required by mandatory consumer-protection law.

5. Cancellation and termination

You may cancel your subscription or delete your account at any time from the settings page. Deleting your account permanently erases your personal data as described in the Privacy Policy and cannot be undone.

Deleting your account ends any active subscription immediately. You will not be charged again, but the unused part of the period you have already paid for is not refunded, because deletion happens at your request and takes effect at once. If you would rather use up the period you have paid for, cancel the subscription from the settings page instead and delete your account once that period ends.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you materially breach these terms - in particular the acceptable use rules in section 6 - or where we are required to do so by law. Except where a breach is serious or repeated, or where immediate action is needed to protect the Service or other users, we will give you notice and a reasonable opportunity to remedy the breach first. If we terminate your account other than for your breach, we will refund any prepaid fees covering the remainder of the billing period.

We may also decline to provide the Service to someone where we have specific grounds to believe they will use it to break these terms or the law. If you have paid for a period you have not received, we refund it.

We may also discontinue the Service as a whole. In that case we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email and refund any prepaid fees for the period after discontinuation.

6. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Use the Service for any unlawful purpose
• Attempt to access other users' data
• Collect the learning material in bulk, whether by hand, by script or by any automated process. Automated access to our public pages is welcome to the extent our robots.txt allows it; that permission does not extend to anything behind a login, and it is not permission to assemble a copy of the corpus
• Interfere with the operation of the Service
• Submit unlawful, abusive or deliberately false content through the report function

Fair use of the Service. Paid plans have no daily limit on the number of texts you can read, and reading a great deal is exactly what Nichiyomu is for. What is not covered is automated or abnormal use: scripting the app, generating audio for texts you are not reading, or placing a load on the Service far beyond what a person reading could produce. Some features that cost us money per use, such as audio generation, carry a daily ceiling for that reason. If automated or abnormal use is causing a problem, we will contact you first where we reasonably can, and we may limit access to the affected feature. We will not restrict ordinary reading on a paid plan.

7. Content and how it is produced

The learning material on Nichiyomu is generated using artificial intelligence. The Japanese passages, English translations, kanji breakdowns and grammar explanations are produced by AI language models and checked by an automated verification step. Audio readings are synthesised speech generated by an AI text-to-speech system - no human voice is recorded.

We work to keep this material accurate, but AI-generated content can contain mistakes, unnatural phrasing or incorrect explanations. The Service is a study aid intended to supplement your wider Japanese learning, not an authoritative reference, and it is not a substitute for a teacher, a dictionary or professional instruction. Please do not rely on it where accuracy genuinely matters.

If you spot something wrong, use the report button on any text. Reports feed directly into how we correct and recalibrate content, and we read them.

The learning material is provided for your own personal study. You may not redistribute, publish or sell it, and you may not resell access to the Service, rebrand it, or build a product or service on top of it, without our written permission. This is a contractual restriction between you and us; we make no representation as to whether individual AI-generated passages attract copyright protection.

8. Ownership

The Service is ours. That includes the Nichiyomu name and logo, the design and layout of the site and the app, the software that runs it, and the learning material together with the way it is organised and rated. Nothing in these terms transfers any of that to you.

What you get is permission to use the Service for your own study, for as long as your account is open and you keep to these terms. That permission is personal to you and cannot be transferred to anyone else.

You may not use the Nichiyomu name or logo as your own without our written permission. Referring to us by name, linking to us, and writing or talking about Nichiyomu need no permission at all.

9. What you send us

The only things you send us are your display name and the content reports you submit. They stay yours. By sending them you give us permission to store them and to use them to operate, fix and improve the Service, which for a report means reading it, acting on it, and correcting or removing the text it concerns. We do not publish your reports, show them to other users, or use them for anything else.

You are responsible for what you send. Do not submit anything unlawful, abusive or deliberately false, and please do not put personal information about yourself or anyone else into a report - we do not need it and it is not the right place for it. We may remove a display name or a report that breaks these rules.

Suggestions. If you send us an idea for how Nichiyomu could be better, we may use it freely and without owing you anything for it. That applies only to the suggestion itself and gives us no rights over anything else of yours.

If you delete your account, your reports are deleted with it, as described in the Privacy Policy.

10. Reporting illegal content or rights infringements

Everything you read on the Service is produced by us rather than posted by other users (see section 7), so the Service does not host public user content. If you nonetheless believe something on the Service is unlawful or infringes your rights, write to legal@nichiyomu.com. That is the address for such notices, including copyright complaints.

Please describe the content, where it appears, and why you believe it is unlawful or infringing, and give us a way to reach you. We will confirm receipt, assess the notice without undue delay, tell you what we decided, and explain how to contest that decision.

11. Availability and liability

We aim for high availability but do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free access, and we may carry out maintenance that briefly interrupts the Service.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury, for intent or gross negligence, under the Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz), or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited. Subject to that, and to the extent permitted by law, our liability for slight negligence is limited to foreseeable damage typical for this kind of contract, and in any event to the amount you have paid for the Service in the 12 months preceding the claim.

Your statutory warranty rights as a consumer are unaffected.

12. Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms are governed by the laws of Austria, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of the country where you are habitually resident.

If you are a consumer, you may bring proceedings against us in the courts of your country of residence or in Austria, and we may bring proceedings against you only in the courts of your country of residence. If you are not a consumer, the exclusive place of jurisdiction is Graz, Austria.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. We will notify you of material changes - those that affect your rights or obligations - by email or an in-app notice at least 30 days before they take effect, and the version number and date at the top of this page will change. Corrections that do not affect your rights or obligations, such as fixing a typo or clarifying wording, may be made without notice. No change applies retroactively to anything that happened before it took effect.

That notice will state expressly that if you do not object before the effective date, your continued use of the Service counts as acceptance of the change. You have the full 30 days to tell us you do not accept it, by replying to the notice or writing to legal@nichiyomu.com.

If you do not accept a change, you may end the contract at any time before it takes effect - free of charge and with no notice period - by cancelling your subscription or deleting your account. If you object but do not cancel, your subscription simply ends at the close of the period you have already paid for, and you are not charged beyond it.

14. General

Severability. If any provision of these terms is found invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions stay in full force, and the invalid provision is replaced by the lawful provision that comes closest to its purpose.

Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent. We may transfer ours to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, provided your rights are not reduced; if that happens we will tell you in advance and you may cancel.

Force majeure. Neither party is liable for failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control, for as long as that event continues.

Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy form the whole agreement between you and us regarding the Service, and nothing published elsewhere on the site changes them. This does not exclude liability for fraudulent misrepresentation.