Kana LS Touch

I’ve only had this app for a little bit, but I am already learning a lot. I appreciate how when you look at the individual “symbols” they include commonly used words they are in and their romaji. A nice feature would be though would be symbols searcher, where if you draw a “sign” and it will show the sign and the romaji and whatever.

I'm a college student taking beginning Japanese. I've downloaded a wide variety of iphone apps devoted to learning Hiragana and Katakana. Some of them have been free, others have been paid apps. Of the many that I've tried, Kana LS is by far the best and well worth the price. I really appreciate that this app tracks which characters you remember and which ones you don't so that you don't have to waste time practicing ones you already know over and over. The writing practice and writing tests are extremely helpful. It teaches you the proper stroke order in addition to the proper shape. You can choose to start out with just Hiragana or just Katakana which is nice, but you can also drill down to an even smaller level and choose exactly which characters to begin with. This was very helpful for me since some apps try to have you learn them all at once which I found overwhelming. On the tests you can choose from various levels of difficulty. You can have it test you on just recognizing the characters and translating them into their romanization or by being able to draw the characters when given the romanization. You can choose from directly giving the correct answer or by having multiple choice, and if you pick multiple choice you can set the amount of seconds that you're given to answer. Once you've taken a test, it tracks which ones you got wrong. From there, you can choose to only practice those characters and then retake the test with only them. I use this app while I'm on the bus or waiting around and it's already made a noticeable improvement. Apparently the same developer also made a similar app for Kanji. When I graduate to learning Kanji, I'll definitely be buying that one too.

This is a fantastic learning tool. I would enthusiastically recommend it to any student of Japanese. This also goes for its companion, Kanji LS. I do have a few issues with it, though. Firstly, it has crashed on me a few times. I'm not sure what the cause is. Considering how frequently I use it, the amount of crashes is rare enough not to bother me too much. Secondly, the user interface could use some tweaking. My biggest gripe is how the top "bar" of the screen you draw your kana on eats up valuable screen real estate. I often start drawing a downward stroke, but it doesn't appear because I was too close to that top bar. Worse, the "solve" button is in the upper right corner on that bar. If I get to close to it when drawing my "ten ten", I prematurely trigger the solution screen for that kana. I really wish the controls in the top bar could be moved to the bottom bar where I think this wouldn't be as much of an issue. Switching test modes is awkward and selecting ranges of kana to study is also a bit tedious (you have to type in the kana numbers). Despite these issues, I absolutely love this app. It was worth every penny.