Learn Japanese – Mondly

The big one is the vocabulary cards when you touch an underlined word. At first I thought they had 音読み. (Onyomi, pronunciation from Chinese). But they made no sense. However I also know Mandarin, and they turned out to be Romanized Mandarin, which is very odd. The small oddities include mismatch of speaker to desired text in listening exercises. Imasu vs iru is common. Also, you often get marked wrong for correct kanji and/or kana. I have had better luck with romaji. The free daily lessons are just fine.

I have been really enjoying the app. As it allows you to learn by forming sentences and not just studying flashcards. The only thing that I would improve is it can only be used in portrait orientation and not landscape. This should be fine if you have a small iPhone but I have a large iPad. Hopefully the developers will have a landscape orientation in the future.

This app starts out okay, it works semi well if you look past several of the features which don’t make any sense. For example it will ask you to select which word means mother, but all of the options have pictures of different family members, one which depicts a woman holding a baby. This makes it immediately apparent which is the right answer and hinders any real learning. The deeper problem however is that you can access very little without buying. If you do decide to purchase the ONE month option, for $9.49, you will NOT be notified that the app is continuing to auto-renew this purchase every month, EVEN IF YOU HAVE DELETED THE APP. This is such an easy way for them to make money as most people do not notice until several months in, and they will not refund you. Don’t fall for it!