“Does Grammarly support Japanese?”
That question keeps getting asked because the answer is no. Grammarly is built for English. Write in Japanese and it won’t check grammar, and it certainly won’t judge politeness level.
For anyone who works in two languages, that leaves half of their writing uncovered — and the uncovered half often has a different problem entirely.
In many languages, the hard part isn’t grammar
Writing in a second language, most people worry about grammar: articles, tenses, prepositions. Grammarly is excellent at exactly that.
Writing in your first language, you almost never make grammatical mistakes. And yet you still stop before hitting send — for other reasons:
- Is this too casual to send outside the company?
- Do all these hedges make me sound uncertain?
- Is this appropriately deferential for someone senior?
- Is that sentence too long to follow?
- Does this read as a request, or as small talk?
The difficulty is register, not correctness. The same content requires different phrasing depending on your relationship to the reader. That’s structurally hard for a grammar checker to address.
Japanese makes this unusually visible, because the distance between casual and business register is encoded in the verb forms themselves — but the underlying problem exists in every language.
The price, and the gap
Grammarly’s published pricing:
| Billing | Per month | Annualized |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $30/mo | $360 |
| Quarterly | $20/mo | — |
| Annual | $12/mo | $144 |
If you write a lot of English, $144/year is a reasonable investment — grammar, spelling, tone suggestions, plagiarism checking.
The problem is for people whose larger volume is in another language: paying $144 fixes none of it.
What fills the other side
For Japanese specifically, the established tool is Bunken (文賢), which goes beyond typos into readability, redundancy, and problematic terminology, at ¥2,178/month per license.
If your job is guaranteeing the quality of a manuscript, dedicated tools earn their depth.
But most people aren’t fixing manuscripts. They’re fixing email, chat, and status updates — dozens a day, each with a two-second hesitation before sending. Not worth carrying into a dedicated editor, but not quite comfortable to send as-is either.
What that needs isn’t depth. It’s fewer steps.
Select, shortcut, paste
MacSide AI’s writing polish targets exactly that. Select what you wrote, press a shortcut, and the cleaned-up version is on your clipboard.
A concrete example, in Japanese:
Before
今日の資料なんだけどまだ少しかかりそうで、たぶん夕方くらいには出せると思う、すんません
After
本日の資料ですが、まだ少しかかりそうです。 たぶん夕方くらいには提出できるかと思います。 申し訳ございません。
More than verb endings changed. One comma-spliced sentence became three, and a slangy apology became a formal one. But “probably” survived — because the uncertainty is information, and deleting it would tell the reader something the writer didn’t say.
And the instruction it runs is editable. Set rules once — “more formal,” “typos only,” “never touch internal abbreviations” — and every rewrite follows them (details here).
Three tools compared
| Grammarly | Bunken | MacSide AI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Excellent | — | Good |
| Japanese | — | Excellent | Good |
| Strength | Grammar, spelling, tone | Manuscript editing, readability | Tidying right before you send |
| Where you use it | Extension / app | Bring the draft into its editor | In the app you’re already in |
| Custom instructions | Limited | Rule settings | Write your own prompt |
| Price | $144/year | ¥2,178/month | $2.99/mo or $59.99 one-time |
Practical combinations
Heavy English writers: keep Grammarly, and fill the other language separately.
People whose deliverable is polished prose: a dedicated editor in that language is worth it. Readability and redundancy analysis are genuinely deeper.
People whose bilingual output is mostly correspondence: one shortcut covering both languages removes more friction than two subscriptions. MacSide AI’s writing polish is the same operation regardless of language.
That third group is large. Twenty emails in one language, three in another, none of them deliverables. For that pattern, one consistent operation gets used; two specialist tools mostly don’t.
Frequently asked questions
Grammarly really doesn’t support other languages?
It’s an English tool. It doesn’t check grammar or register in Japanese.
I only want a politeness check.
Writing polish can raise casual phrasing to the appropriate register, and the prompt can be narrowed to just that.
How does it split with a dedicated editor?
Manuscripts go to the dedicated tool; daily email and chat go through the shortcut. Different purposes, so running both makes sense.
Does the same operation work on English?
Yes — the same shortcut, whichever language the selected text is in.
Will it change my meaning?
It’s built to polish rather than rewrite, and the result lands on your clipboard so you check it before pasting.
Confirm the gap, then fill it deliberately
Grammarly’s English-only scope isn’t laziness — specializing is exactly why the accuracy is what it is.
So the right move is to stop expecting it to cover your other language and decide separately how to cover it.
Manuscripts want a dedicated editor. Everyday messages want something you invoke without leaving the compose window. Which one you need depends on whether what you’re writing is a document or a message.