Learn Japanese Kanji and Kana

I own a dozen apps for learning Japanese. Each has their own merits. This one is the absolute best for learning kanji. It is the only one that teaches the radicals that make up the kanji giving you a full understanding of the components that increases recall ability. For example one of the kanji for music is made up of three ‘easier’ kanji for white, ice, and tree. “White ice tree” made me think of singing “Let it go” from the movie from Frozen… and that mental association just made it much easier to recognize and remember that kanji. Also, anyone who ever found it effective to study by writing your class notes over and over will instantly understand how this app reinforces learning by having you write the characters over and over while repeating the sound, so you associate the muscle memory of drawing the strokes with hearing the sound. 100% recommend. I’d give it 10 stars if I could.

Although it’s not perfect, out of all the kanji learning apps I’ve downloaded and used I think this is possibly one of the best. Not a lot of apps have a function to test writing and this is one of the few that does it well in terms of simplicity of the app and needs. The biggest thing holding it back however is the set list unfortunately. It does not have the full N1 and N2 list which is understandable since they are a small team and there is A LOT of N1 words and kanji. Maybe there’s a possibility of releasing it in batches instead of all at once, that would make N1 a little less daunting. One thing I wish it would have though is the option to not repeat kanjis/words if they’ve already been shown once. It does make reviewing big kanji set lists repetitive if trying to test ourselves but other than that this app is great for intermediate level learners and until they can achieve the full set list it has the potential to be a must pick app for Japanese kanji learning.

I’m rarely compelled to write reviews but this app is just so good that I had to. If you wanna master hiragana and katakana, this is probably the most efficient system and best design I’ve ever seen for this process. Most apps will make you do shallow recall where they show you a character and you have to pick the right roumanji or type it in, which isn’t that efficient from a memory standpoint. This app makes you recall how to write them with the correct stroke order…which other apps do, but the difficulty curve is perfect, which no other app seems to get right. You learn each in a group (5 characters per group) and it starts by ghost tracing the character which you then have to trace in yourself while the character is visibly on the screen. Then it moves to tracing it for you and then making the trace disappear so you have to memorize what it looked like and then draw, and then finally no tracing where you have to recall it yourself. Each round takes about 10 to 15 minutes so the recognition really gets burned into your brain. Can’t stress this enough, the design and strategy of this app is AMAZING. Completely worth unlocking the paid version. Thanks y’all. 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼