Terms of Use

Yomi is operated by Synapse Social, a sole proprietorship registered in Singapore with UEN [UEN], at [REGISTERED ADDRESS] (“Yomi”, “we”, “us”).

These Terms of Use are a contract between you and us. They apply when you use the Yomi mobile app, the website at yomilang.com, or anything else we provide (together, the “Service”). By using the Service you accept these terms. If you don’t accept them, don’t use the Service.

Our Privacy Policy explains what we do with personal data and forms part of these terms.

Yomi helps you learn Japanese from real native speech. Specifically, the Service:

• indexes short segments — typically 10 to 40 seconds — of Japanese-language videos that are publicly available on YouTube;
• plays those segments inside YouTube’s official embedded player, which streams directly from YouTube;
• displays our own study layer alongside: a word-by-word transcript, readings (furigana), romanisation, dictionary definitions, English translations, estimated difficulty levels, and a record of which words you know;
• schedules those words for review using spaced repetition.

We do not host, store, stream, download or sell video. We do not claim any rights in the videos. See §8.

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you are under 18, you may only use it with the consent of a parent or legal guardian, and only that parent or guardian may make a purchase.

The Service is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal data, contact us at [CONTACT EMAIL] and we will delete it.

Parts of the Service work without an account. Where an account is required, you agree to give accurate information, to keep your login details to yourself, and to tell us promptly if you think someone else has access. You are responsible for what happens under your account.

You can ask us to delete your account at any time by emailing [CONTACT EMAIL]. Deleting your account ends your access; it does not automatically refund a subscription (see §7).

Some features require a paid subscription. Current prices, in US dollars:

• Monthly — US$10.99 per month.
• Yearly — US$59.99 per year, which works out to under US$5 per month, and includes a 7-day free trial.

The App Store and Google Play show prices in your local currency, and the price you see at checkout is the price that applies. Prices exclude taxes unless the store states otherwise; GST or equivalent may be added.

If you take a free trial and do not cancel at least 24 hours before it ends, it converts into a paid subscription and you are charged. Starting a new trial on the same store account may not be possible. If you buy a subscription during a trial, the trial ends immediately.

We may change prices. If we do, we will tell you before the change affects you, and the new price will only apply from your next renewal. You can cancel before then.

We may offer a one-time “lifetime” purchase, currently US$39.99, sold only as a pre-order before Yomi launches and before all features exist. It is not sold after launch. If you buy one, please understand exactly what you are buying:

• What you get — access to the paid features of Yomi without a recurring charge, for as long as we operate the Service.
• What “lifetime” means — the lifetime of the Service, not your lifetime. If we stop operating Yomi, access ends. It is not a perpetual licence and it is not transferable.
• What it does not include — anything we later launch as a genuinely separate product, and any third-party costs.
• Features are not guaranteed — we describe what we intend to build. Roadmaps change. We do not promise a specific feature by a specific date, and a feature not arriving is not itself a breach of these terms.
• If we shut down — if we cease operating the Service within [COMMITMENT WINDOW — e.g. 12 months] of your purchase, we will refund you on a pro-rata basis. After that window, no refund is due.

Purchases made through the App Store or Google Play are processed by Apple or Google, and their refund policies apply. We cannot issue refunds for those purchases — you need to request one from the store. We will help where we can.

For anything you buy directly from us, contact [CONTACT EMAIL] within [DIRECT REFUND WINDOW — e.g. 14 days] and we will refund you, provided you have not substantially used the Service in that period.

Nothing here limits the rights you have under Singapore consumer law, including the Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act 2003, or under the consumer law of your own country where that applies.

This is the most important section in these terms, so we will be precise about it.

Every video segment in Yomi is a segment of a video hosted on YouTube and owned by the person or organisation that uploaded it. We have no ownership of it, we claim none, and we do not download, copy, cache or re-host it. Playback happens inside YouTube’s official embedded player, streaming from YouTube, with the uploader credited and a link to the original.

Your subscription buys our study layer, not access to the videos. Every video we index is free to watch on YouTube by anyone, subscriber or not, and Yomi does not gate, paywall or restrict any video. What a subscription pays for is the work we do on top: transcription, word-level segmentation of Japanese text, dictionary and reading data, translations, difficulty estimates, the word-state system, and spaced-repetition scheduling.

Because playback is YouTube’s, using Yomi also means using YouTube. You agree to the YouTube Terms of Service, and Google’s handling of your data is governed by the Google Privacy Policy. Yomi uses YouTube API Services.

Videos can be removed, made private, or have embedding disabled by their uploaders at any time, and that is entirely their right. When it happens, the clip stops working and we remove it. We cannot promise that any particular clip will remain available.

If you are a rights holder and you would rather your video was not indexed by Yomi, email [CONTACT EMAIL] and we will remove it. You do not need to send a formal notice, explain yourself, or involve a lawyer. We would rather hear from you directly and act quickly.

You agree not to:

• download, rip, record, scrape or otherwise copy video or audio from the Service or from YouTube through the Service;
• copy, scrape, resell or redistribute our transcripts, translations, or clip data, or use them to train a machine learning model, without our written permission;
• share, resell or sublicense your account or subscription;
• work around any technical limit, rate limit or access control, or use automated tools to access the Service;
• break the law, infringe anyone’s rights, or breach the YouTube Terms of Service;
• interfere with the Service’s operation or security.

The Service — the app, the website, our transcripts and translations, our tokenisation and word-state data, the Yomi name, and Mochi — belongs to us or our licensors, except for the third-party material described in §8 and §11. These terms grant you a personal, revocable, non-transferable, non-exclusive licence to use the Service for your own learning. Nothing more is granted.

Your own data — the words you save, your review history — remains yours.

Yomi’s dictionary layer is built on open data, and we are required to say so:

• Dictionary entries derive from JMdict, a product of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG), used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Furigana alignment derives from JmdictFurigana, also CC BY-SA 4.0.
• JLPT level tags derive from community-reconstructed word lists based on the work of Jonathan Waller. The JLPT organisers have never published an official vocabulary list, so every level we show is an estimate and labelled as one.

Full attributions and the licences of the open-source components we use are in the app under Profile → About & licences.

If you send us an idea, bug report or feature request, you allow us to use it without restriction or payment. We are not obliged to act on it or keep it confidential. Please don’t send us anything you consider secret.

Where you obtained the app from the App Store or Google Play, the following applies and overrides anything inconsistent above:

• These terms are between you and us alone. Apple and Google are not parties to them.
• Apple and Google have no obligation to provide support or maintenance for the app.
• If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple may refund your purchase price. Otherwise Apple has no warranty obligation.
• Apple and Google are not responsible for addressing any claim about the app, including product liability, legal compliance, or intellectual property claims.
• Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms and may enforce them against you.
• You confirm you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo, and are not on any US Government restricted-parties list.

We are building this in public and the Service will change. We may add, alter or remove features. Where a change materially reduces what a paid subscription gives you, we will tell subscribers.

You may stop using the Service at any time. We may suspend or end your access if you breach these terms, if we reasonably suspect fraud or abuse, or if we are required to by law. If we end your access without you having breached anything, we will refund the unused part of your subscription.

We may discontinue the Service entirely. If we do, we will give reasonable notice where we can, and §6 applies to lifetime purchases.

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the extent the law allows, we exclude all implied warranties, including fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Being specific about the part that matters for a learning app: transcripts are generated automatically by speech recognition, and we do not warrant that every transcript, reading, translation, or estimated JLPT level is correct. Japanese is ambiguous, and our data will contain mistakes. Please don’t rely on Yomi alone for anything consequential — an exam, a contract, a medical or legal matter. Tell us when you find an error and we will fix it.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, or that any particular video will stay available (§8).

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded — including under Singapore’s Unfair Contract Terms Act 1994 and the Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act 2003.

Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows:

• we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill; and
• our total liability arising out of or relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or US$100.

If your breach of these terms or your misuse of the Service causes a third-party claim against us, you agree to cover our reasonable losses, damages and legal costs arising from it. This does not apply to the extent the claim results from our own acts.

These terms are governed by the laws of Singapore.

If something goes wrong, please email us first at [CONTACT EMAIL]. Most problems are a misunderstanding and we would rather fix it than argue about it.

If we cannot resolve it, the courts of Singapore have exclusive jurisdiction — except that if you are a consumer resident elsewhere, you may also have the right to bring a claim in your own country’s courts, and nothing here removes that right or the protection of any mandatory consumer law that applies to you.

• Changes to these terms. We may update them. If a change is material we will give notice in the app or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after that means you accept the new version. The “last updated” date at the top always reflects the current version.
• No waiver. If we don’t enforce a term straight away, we haven’t given it up.
• Severability. If a term is unenforceable, the rest still applies.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these terms. We may transfer ours if the business is sold, on notice to you.
• Whole agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us about the Service.

Synapse Social
[REGISTERED ADDRESS]
Email: [CONTACT EMAIL]

For anything about personal data, see the Privacy Policy, which names our Data Protection Officer.