My passion for Japan and their culture has been growing bigger and bigger over the years. Probably was the countless hours I’ve spent watching anime or the taste of my BFF for Japanese music. Either way, I’ve fallen in love with this intriguing, different, and “strange” culture. One of the reasons I wanted to learn Japanese was because of a manga: Ao Haru Ride (Blue Spring Ride in English). I loved it soo much I wanted to buy it to have in my shelf, but it was only translated into French, German, and Spanish (at the time). I didn’t want to buy a copy just because, I wanted to be able to read it as well. And if I had to learn a new language to be able to do that, then I might just learn Japanese. I don’t want to become fluent in it, so far all I want is to be able to read mangas, nothing too complicated.

All this adventure started a year ago. I learned the entire Hiragana table and was so impressed with myself that I became lazy to learn the Katakana afterwards. Not only that, but I also didn’t know what to do next. I wasn’t following any book or doing any course, so I suddenly stopped. Back in January, I was determined to learn Japanese again, but this time, I wasn’t doing it on my own. I searched for apps that could help me take the next steps and also have fun. And now here we are!

Kana Dojo

This app is great to start learning Japanese. It’s completely free, and you can learn at your own pace. It has both tables (Hiragana and Katakana), flashcards to study, and quizzes to test yourself. The flashcards and quizzes can be customized to which kana you want to focus on studying, instead of having to work on them all at once.

It also has two games to make learning Japanese fun! The Match Maker is a memory card game where you need to pair the kana with the romanji. I was never able to play it on my phone, for some reason it kept freezing and kicking me out of the app. And the Eye Spy is a game to recognize kana. It’s quite fun, and a great way to familiarize with this new writing. You have 60 seconds to correctly identify as much kana as you can. I’ve become addicted to it.

Since I already knew the Hiragana table – and was still lazy to learn Katakana – I didn’t take much advantage of this app to study. Instead, I used it to refresh my memory and to test my knowledge with the quizzes and the game. However, it’s a simple app to learn kana and enjoy your time.

Infinite Japanese

As cute as it might look it’s not the best app to learn. It focuses on basic vocabulary (like numbers, colours, animals…) and it plays out as a game. So as you complete the levels, you’ll earn stars that will help you unlock new categories. Each level centres on two words: one spoken and another written.

The gameplay is very simple, you have to correctly identify what the word means before the drop gets to the bottom of the screen. Every drop as two possible answers making it 50-50 to get it right. Answering correctly all the words in that level you win 3 stars, if you fail one word then 2 stars, and if you fail more than 3 then you have to repeat the level.

Every spoken word is always read at the same speed and can make some words quite hard to understand. On a positive note, you can disable or enable romanji which is great. When you already know the Hiragana and Katakana my heart, it’s great to leave the romanji aside and start learning with the kana instead.

One of the problems I found with this app is that it’s easily forgettable. The game is so simple you fly by an entire category in half an hour, and you want to go on to the next one. Although the brain didn’t have time to actually learn most of the words, and there is no point to go back to levels you already beat just to hear the words a couple more times.

Drops Japanese

Turns out Drops is actually a quite popular app! It has Japanese, French, German, Spanish, English and many other languages you can choose from to learn. They pray themselves to be an app to learn a new language with only 5 minutes a day and to teach practical vocabulary. The entire app is filled with categories and subcategories from basics to sports, from food to weather. They have everything! You can even learn kana, so you can be a beginner and still use this app. Every session is timed which is only the down point for me, but you can earn more time by using it every day. And also the timer resets after 10 hours so you don’t have to wait exactly a day to start on a new session.

Every session is composed of different games, from matching the image to the word to matching the word to the image. They have a Tinder-like-game (swipe right for correct and left for wrong), and word building exercises. You don’t get to choose the games – sadly – they are random in every session, but you do can choose if you want to use romanji or not.

If you get something wrong, the app won’t tell you the correct answer (except the Tinder game). If you find yourself stuck in a word that you have no idea what it is, the game has a help option that shows the solution so you can move on instead of spending the entire 5 minutes on one word, but it’s up to you.

Even though this app has the time pressure, it’s still up to you to take as much time as you want. There is no goal to achieve on any session. Therefore, if you only learn one word it’s fine, and if you learned 10 it’s the same. It doesn’t matter how long you take. Every subcategory has a number of words to learn and only when you went through them all, you unlock the next subcategory. This pushes you to try and do as much with the 5 minutes to be able to unlock more things as quickly as possible, but it still is a choice. Once you have learned all the words it starts tracking your accuracy. This way you are tempted to go back and do more sessions to raise that percentage. This is when you actually start to learn, you keep on repeating and repeating to get it right. Unlike Infinite Japanese, you don’t finish a subcategory by just going through all the words, it gives you a reason to go back and train.

This app also has a premium paid version where you have all the categories unlocked and you can make the sessions last longer. The app keeps pushing to buy it, though the free version works fine. It just takes a little longer to go through all of it. It also has a collection tab where every word you learned is listed alongside an image of it. You can also hear how to pronounce it at a normal and slow speed to help you better understand.

These are all the apps I’ve used so far to help me learn Japanese. I will do more posts focused on Japan and their culture in the future, and keep on showing you more resources that help me in this journey.