Learn Japanese - Drops

I am picky about my apps I use to learn new languages, I go on and off an many, but I’ve found Drops as one of, or even THE best, as it helps me remember things and do it in a fun way. I can learn Korean Japanese, French and more on her easier than I’d ever thought I could, and although the “Hangul” or “kanji” and etc, are important, you aren’t required to go through that process on this app, you are allowed to do it on your own free time. It’s amazing. Personally, Drops, Duolingo, Write Japanese, Write Korean, and infinite Korean are my favorite apps. I ten out of ten, so recommend, one hundred percent would do again!😅😊

If you’re coming into this app looking to learn Japanese for the first time, I can tell you there are some serious problems with the way they’re presenting the info. For one thing, the foreign words are written in hiragana when they should be written in katakana (e.g. “salad” should be written as サラダ but they’ve written it as さらだ which is not correct). Changing the writing style to “Kana & Kanji” didn’t seem to correct this. Why teach katakana if you’re not going to use it for the words in the rest of the app? A bigger problem is that they don’t include the accented versions of the characters when you’re learning the alphabet. For example, you learn that は means “ha” but you’ll never learn that ば and ぱ mean “ba” and “pa” and these accented characters are a SIGNIFICANT part of the language, which you’ll plainly see if you look at the rest of the vocabulary in the app. It doesn’t make any sense that they’d completely omit them up front and expect you to know them later on. The presentation is slick and fun to use so they deserve a lot of credit for that but for they price you’re paying you’d expect something a lot more complete.

I've been using this app for about a month now and I love it! I feel like I've already learned a ton of vocabulary, but there're still plenty of sections left to go through! The app keeps things interesting with different ways of learning/reinforcing both the written and vocal versions of the words it's taught, and that's been working well for me. Plus, you can always go back to any sections you complete if you want more practice. I will say, the app hasn't explicitly explained any of the language's grammar to me, but I feel like I've been able to start picking some of it up through context clues. I don't get the impression that I'll be able to use this app to learn the language fluidly without any other aids, but it's still an amazing amount of free content that's a great as a building block, and great for daily practice! I also don't know if the upgraded versions are more helpful for going further with learning, but I'm still very happy with the free version! I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to start out! If anything changes, I might do an updated review later down the line!