10 Minute Japanese

It is a bad application even if it were free, and it is definitely not worth the money. This flash-card method of learning is okay for Indo-European languages and other languages that are spelled phonetically—I say okay because in the 7-day trial no grammar has been covered, and because it presents you with the written language in the earliest stages of learning the language, which is a bad practice in general. But it is terrible for Japanese. First of all, it relies on your device’s built-in text-to-speech for audio—this is bad because one character can be read at least two ways depending on context, and the given pronunciation of the character could be wrong for the context and also not match up with the romanization (体 is romanized as “karada” on the card but my phone’s TTS says “tai”). Second, it relies on your device’s voice recognition for pronunciation exercise. Japanese has a myriad of homophones, and when I say 章 [shou], my phone will transcribe your speech as 笑 [shou] and register it as incorrect; I’ve run into 5 such words so far. I give it two stars instead of one because it can be redeemed: if grammar exercise is added, support for homophones is added, if Tokyo-dialect native-speaker audio examples are added, and if connecting pronunciation with meaning is introduced for every word before showing how it is written.

The advertisements are a lie. Absolutely false advertisement. They make it look like we will learn in a fun environment through anime scenes or manga. This is nothing of the sort and is more akin to Duolingo. Which isn’t outright bad, but it is not what is advertised. Also the emphasis on memorizing kanji out of context and without any meaning behind the characters is a waste of time. There are over 2000 kanji to learn and they just throw them in there without reason or academic thought process. And yes, they will respond to this review with “thank you for…blah blah blah…it takes money and time to develop blah blah blah…yes it does. But be upfront about your product and don’t sell it based on a lie. Or maybe say “coming in 2024…then whatever feature you are working on, get it done in time. But their repeated lies on instagram ads should be pulled. Now…cut to the aforementioned “thank you for blah blah blah…we are sorry for blah blah blah…it takes time and money to blah blah blah.

As far as I know, this app is pretty good at exposing you to new vocabulary and what it would actually look and sound like in Japanese. I do wish we could get a little more like the part of speech, how it fits into a sentence, and the like, but I also understand that this is a rapid study on the concepts you choose. I did make the mistake of choosing all the concepts up front, so it feels like a lot of random words and phrases all at once. Overall, it’s been a nice addition to the other practice I do, and it’s helped to cement some associations with some of the kanji which makes them so much easier to remember. I would recommend it, just pace yourself.