Terms of Service

The short version

Tsukigo helps you learn a language by reading and listening to graded material, with vocabulary tracking, practice, and audio. It is currently free and generally available without an account. Within the limits set out below, you may quote from it, study with it, and teach with it without asking us. Some of what you read is ours and some of it is public domain. What you must not do is take the library wholesale and rebuild this product with it.

This summary is here to be read. Where it differs from the sections below, those sections govern.

1. Acceptance of these terms

By accessing or using Tsukigo (the "Service"), you agree to these Terms of Service and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

2. The Service

Tsukigo is a language-learning tool for reading and listening to graded content. It is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis.

We may change, add, suspend, withdraw, or discontinue any part of the Service, any feature, and any content at any time. We may give notice, but we are not required to. Some features may be offered on a trial, preview, or experimental basis, and may be less reliable than the rest of the Service or removed entirely.

3. Cost

The Service is currently free to use. We may introduce paid features. You will not be charged for anything without being told the price and agreeing to it first. Nothing here requires us to keep any feature free, or available, for any period.

4. Eligibility

The Service is open to readers of any age. To create an account you must be at least 13 years old, and where the law where you live sets a higher minimum age for consenting to the processing of personal data, a parent or guardian must agree to these terms on your behalf.

We may limit, condition, or require registration or an access code for all or part of the Service.

5. Accounts

An account is optional. You are responsible for all activity under your account and for keeping your sign-in credentials secure. You must give accurate information when registering and keep it current. You may delete your account at any time from your account page; what that removes, and what is retained, is described in the Privacy Policy.

We may refuse, suspend, restrict, or close any account.

6. Acceptable use

You must not:

• disrupt or interfere with the Service, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to it, to any account, or to any system or network connected to it;
• use the Service to break the law, to infringe anyone's rights, or to transmit malicious code;
• misrepresent your identity or your affiliation with anyone; or
• circumvent any access control, usage limit, or technical restriction.

Restrictions on automated access and on reuse of our content are set out below, under "Our content, and what you may do with it".

7. Our content, and what you may do with it

What is ours. The name Tsukigo, our logo, and our other brand features; the software, design, and interface; the library as a curated and arranged collection; and the layer we build on top of every text — word-by-word breakdowns, readings, dictionary forms, glosses, translations, difficulty grading, grammar tagging, recorded audio, and illustrations. We own or license these to the extent they are protected, and we rely on copyright in those materials, on our rights in the collection as a compilation whose selection and arrangement are our own work, and on any equivalent rights available in your country. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

What is not ours. Many of the texts we publish are public-domain works — poems, folk tales, and stories whose copyright has expired. We claim no ownership of those works. Works we publish on that basis are identified on our Sources & rights page, with such information about their origin and status as we hold. You are as free to use those originals as we are.

What you may do. Subject to these terms, we give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable permission to read and listen to what we make available to you, to quote from it, to keep a copy for your own study, to share a link or a passage, and to use it in your own teaching. You do not need to ask us. This permission lasts only while the Service is available to you, and we may vary or withdraw it.

What you must not do. You must not:

• extract, copy, or collect the library, or any substantial part of it, in bulk, by scraping, crawling, automated means, or systematic manual copying;
• republish or redistribute a substantial part of the collection, or of the layer we add to it, whether or not for profit;
• use either to build or operate a product or service that substantially reproduces, or acts as a substitute for, the library or the layer we add to it; or
• use our name, logo, or brand features, or anything confusingly similar to them, including in a domain name, app name, or account name, in a way that suggests we endorse, supply, or are connected with you or with anything you offer.

Access by search engines and archives is permitted to the extent our robots.txt allows, which we may change at any time. We claim no rights in the public-domain works themselves, and nothing here restricts what you do with copies you obtain from their own sources. The restrictions above continue to apply to our selection and arrangement of those works, and to the layer we add to them.

Where we expressly release specific material under a separate open licence, that licence governs that material and takes precedence over this section.

8. Material you send us

If you send us feedback, suggestions, bug reports, or any other material, you grant us a perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable right to use, store, reproduce, modify, and otherwise exploit it for any purpose connected with the Service, without any obligation, attribution, or payment to you.

You must not send us anything confidential, anything containing personal data about other people, or anything you do not have the right to send. We are not obliged to keep, respond to, act on, or return anything you send.

9. Rights complaints

If you believe that anything we publish infringes your copyright or other rights, or that a work we describe as public domain is not, contact us at hello@tsukigo.com with enough detail to identify the material and the basis of your claim.

We consider reports we receive and may remove, restrict, or reinstate material at our discretion. Nothing in this section is an admission of liability or a waiver of any right or defence available to us.

10. Privacy

How we handle personal data is described in our Privacy Policy. It is not a set of contractual promises about the Service; it explains what we do with your data and the rights you have.

11. Third-party services and links

The Service relies on third-party providers and may link to or interoperate with services we do not control. We are not responsible for those services, their content, or their terms, and your use of them is between you and them.

12. Suspension and ending your use

You may stop using the Service at any time and may delete your account from your account page.

We may suspend, restrict, or end your access to all or part of the Service at any time, including where these terms are breached or where we consider it necessary to protect the Service, ourselves, or others. We may give notice, but we are not required to do so.

Any provision which by its nature should survive the end of your use of the Service — including those covering our content, material you send us, disclaimers, liability, your responsibility, governing law, and the general provisions — continues to apply.

13. Disclaimers

The Service is an educational aid and does not provide professional advice of any kind.

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, certified by, or connected to any examination, assessment, or standards body, including those responsible for the JLPT, the HSK, and the CEFR. Any level, band, or difficulty estimate we use or show is our own assessment, arrived at by our own methods, and may not correspond to how any such body would classify the same material. The Service is not examination preparation, and we do not promise that it will improve your proficiency, prepare you for any test, or produce any result or score.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, and without affecting any statutory rights you have as a consumer, the Service is provided without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, or quiet enjoyment.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free; that any content, translation, reading, grading, explanation, or generated material is accurate or complete; that any defect will be corrected; or that use of the Service will produce any particular learning outcome. Content is produced in part by automated means and may contain errors. You are responsible for how you use the Service and anything you take from it.

14. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, and taking into account that the Service is provided free of charge, Luminary LLC will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, data, or anticipated savings, arising out of or relating to the Service or these terms, however caused and on any theory of liability.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service or these terms will not exceed the greater of ¥10,000 or the total amount you paid us for the Service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. Where the applicable law so provides, this includes liability for our own intentional misconduct or gross negligence, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, and for fraud. Where any exclusion or limitation in this section is held unenforceable, the remainder continues to apply to the fullest extent permitted.

15. Your responsibility

If a third party brings a claim against us because you broke these terms or infringed their rights, you are responsible for that claim, including our reasonable costs of dealing with it, to the extent it was caused by your own fault.

16. Governing law and disputes

These terms, and any dispute arising out of or in connection with them or the Service, are governed by the laws of Japan, without regard to conflict-of-law rules.

Before starting proceedings, email us and allow 30 days for us to resolve the matter. We will do the same before bringing any claim against you.

The courts of Tokyo, Japan have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, except where mandatory law gives you the right to bring proceedings in another country.

17. General

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary or severed, and the rest continues to apply. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of it.

You may not assign or transfer your rights or obligations under these terms. We may assign or transfer ours, including to a successor if the Service changes hands.

We are not liable for any failure or delay caused by events beyond our reasonable control. Nothing in these terms creates any partnership, agency, or employment relationship, and there are no third-party beneficiaries.

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service and replace anything said before.

These terms are written in English. Any translation is provided for convenience only, and the English version governs.

18. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms where the Service, the law, our providers, or our security or operational needs change. When we do, we will publish the revised terms and the date they take effect on this page before that date, and where a change materially affects you we will take reasonable steps to bring it to your attention.

Your continued use of the Service after the revised terms take effect means you accept them. If you do not accept them, stop using the Service; you may also delete your account at any time.

19. Contact

Questions about these terms? Email us.