Lirer: Learn Japanese

Out of all the apps that require you to pay a subscription for full access, this is the only one that i think deserves the money. Every lesson is made with helpful examples and they're organized well so you can go down the lists of each category at your own pace. The repetition of reading the furigana, writing the character out, placing the characters in the correct order and matching them to the right words in english is so much more beneficial than other apps i've used, as it has helped me to retain the words better. If you're looking for an app that will really push to help you memorize vocabulary, this is the one. Their other app, Bunpo, is also incredible for grammar!! It has the same methods of teaching + there are languages other than Japanese. Overall, the creators behind these apps know what they're doing. (Note: The N5 Lesson 9 under the category 'things' is bugged, I can't complete it during the review because it won't allow my keyboard to pop up.)

I’ve been looking for a good vocabulary app for ages and I was excited to find this one. It has so much potential to be great. But it is plagued by typos. For example, it listed the meaning of 奥さん as “your wise” instead of “your wife” in almost every instance. This also makes the review system difficult, because it usually only accepts the wrong, typo answer as correct instead of the actual correct answer. For example, it asked me to type the meaning of 計算する. I typed “to calculate.” Wrong. It was “to caluculate.” Another example - it asked me to translate 三人. Three people, right? Easy. But nope. It wanted me to type “three peoplem.” For being $30, I expect better quality control and I regret spending my money when I could have gotten some vocabulary books instead. Edit: After using this app more, I discovered a bug(?) where the list of review words disappears after a few days. I logged in expecting to review a couple hundred words and discovered the review space empty. Reviewing words is the most important part of studying vocabulary. Now I have to go back and redo hundreds of lessons? It’s awful. What a waste of time. In addition, this app could be improved a lot by showing the English translation and/or reading when doing reviews. Right now, it just says “Correct!” if I guess that (for example) 幼稚園 is read as ようちえん, but there is no re-enforcement of the word’s meaning. There are lots of times when I can read the kanji correctly but I don’t remember the meaning of the words. This app has potential if all these issues are fixed, and if it improves, I would be willing to increase my star rating. But as for now, I’m keeping it one star.

Review 3: I love the Bunpo, lirer suite but both apps are truly broken to the point of being practically useless. What’s a study app with a broken review session. Especially Lirer where reviewing words is the most important piece to remembering them? My suggestion to the developers is to revert this app(and Bunpo) to the older version that actually worked and let your users benefit from the chance to actually use the app to study. If you’re developing in a version controlled environment (GitHub or some other app) please use that environment during this time to give us an older but working version of this app. I paid for this app and would like to get my moneys worth.Review 2: during the fix of the bug I just mentioned below in my first review, something else has completely broken. I now have many words I have studied but the review area doesn’t not recognize it. It says “complete one lesson to start review” as if I haven’t done 10s or maybe even 100 reviews already. Even with it being completely broken however I did not lower the stars to 2 because the customer server here is great. I got a response quickly and was informed that the bug would be fixed. When that happens I will give full stars and change my review. Review 1: When finishing new words it starts me at 6/8stars. This makes it so that I don’t see the words very often in my review. Other than that, this is among my top study tools along with Bunpo. I did however have to give 3 stars and not 5 because right now it’s not very helpful since I can’t review my vocabulary properly. But I will change it to 5 as soon as this bug is fixed