Kanji Teacher - Learn Japanese App Reviews

What a great app ! Many thanks...

The best kanji app.

This app is great! Auto-advance with the look back to see the previous card is a great flash card design for mobile. The writing feature is amazing! Dear 漢字 students, please help get this app to the top where it belongs. (Thank you to all who have contributed to all the resources this app pulls from. ありがとうございました！)

This is by far the best learning tool I’ve found (paid or free) for practicing kana and kanji WRITING. It uses the classic four quadrant grid and rates the accuracy of your strokes and the order. Lots of custom options in settings. No gimmicks. Beautiful.

This app has been BEAUTIFULLY put together. It’s based on the scientifically-proven spaced repetition method, already containing everything you need to learn the three Japanese writing systems. And tons of customization options, unlike other apps where you can’t customize your experience. And I LOVE that you can see your statistics. As a data analyst in real life, this is exactly what I need for motivation. Thanks to the devs, your hard work is much appreciated. 🙏

My original review was negative because new kanji was being used in quiz questions before they were introduced (like the first set of kanji). I thought there was a flaw with the tutor system. The dev’s contacted me. As written in the manual, when a new kanji is presented, there are no penalties for clicking the hint button to read all about it the first time. It’s an ingenious system that pushes us to acknowledge unknown kanji. Also, when new kanji is in combination with known kanji, the meaning/pronunciation can be partially or fully deciphered which is a good mental exercise. The app definitely doesn’t hold your hand like duolingo, but that’s likely for the better for those serious about becoming fluent.

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to import lists

:(

Great for familiarizing yourself with kanji as a whole. It provides a complete experience in a free package.

I've tried so many apps & this BY FAR is the best one. This one has actually made me memorize the kanji by using comparison photos instead of by shape & it's beyond helpful. I sent this to my entire friend group learning japanese, & it's amazing. it's also a lot of fun using, that i get excited using it everyday, which in turn, helps me get better!

I love this app. I’ve been using it for years. The Developer is very kind and answers emails quickly. Thank you for creating this! <3

Some kana characters are similar enough to be confusing. My Japanese wife says no problem because the direction of the strokes are different. Yes, but you can’t see that with computer characters But here is the great thing. This app also has a writing application that helps tou learn both stroke direction and spatial orientation ( the square shows 4 quadrants. ). Wow super helpful to me !

I have a LOT of Japanese kanji and grammar learning apps, have paid for other more expensive ones, and for some reason THIS one is my favorite. It challenges me enough with all the vocabulary yet it also steers me in the right direction memorizing the onyomi and kunyomi - I added more squares to make it a little more difficult to find the answers, and I find myself pronouncing all the selections before I choose them. I’m still figuring out how to make a selective list or deck that goes through the exact ones I’m struggling with. I want to drill them a lot harder instead of continuously moving along. I suspect that is what the lists are but I still get new stuff thrown in even when I select them. I’m sure it is me. It’s a really great app. Complement it with heavier writing apps to get used to writing them correctly. Or, use a genkouyoshi notebook to literally practice by hand as you move along in the tests. PLEASE keep updating and enhancing this app. It’s amazing. Thank you.

As a beginner I really enjoy learning all the new characters on this app but the speaker does not work at the moment, this, wether if the UI settings are on Kyono or female or male voice. There's no sounds. I tried to send an email via the app for feedback and help but it says the email cannot be found. Is there something I am missing ?

This is an amazing app that has helped me immensely with my studies. It’s very close to 5 stars but there are two glaring problems that hold it back. The first being the limited number of custom lists you can make. I want to be able to make lists for every chapter of my Japanese books so I can go back and study them individually if I need to, but this app limits you to only being able to create 7. Therefore I often have to erase my older lists that I still want to fill in new kanji chapters. The other issue is that, as far as I can tell, you cant hide the English translations of kanji during writing practice. It gets too easy to start relying on the English translation to write instead of learning the on and kun. Yes there is a separate section for learning those but it would be so much better to be able to learn them while you’re also learning to write. All in all an absolutely amazing app. My teacher actually saw me using it in class and wrote down the name so should could start suggesting it to other students.

Out of all the kanji apps I have used, this one has to be the best. The layout is super intuitive, I can set my own pace, and practice my writing with any of the characters whenever. The UI doesn’t feel cluttered and makes a world of difference for me in how easy it feels to just go and learn/review the characters. Lovely app.

Thank you for providing a free learning system!! It’s amazing that there’s no ads and the way you present the words makes it easy to memorize!

It’s a really good app! Thanks so much to the creators/developers of this app! If you would like to learn how to read/write/speak Japanese, this is a good app!

A very very throurough and entirely FREE app with a ton of kanji, writing tests, reading and meaning tests, it offers spaced repetition and even has listening practice with sentences. It's very useful for learning new characters and words, going beyond just practicing. It's also very customizable so you can tailor tests precisely according to your needs if you want to practice just a particular aspect. Edit: On top of it all the dev is super amazing and actually addresses feedback. On my original review I had commented about a pet peeve in regards to the stabilization feature and they swifly implemented granular options for it. I really appreciate it!

Hello, I'm a huge fan of your app, and it has vastly improved my Japanese language study as I'm able to practice from anywhere. This is certainly the best way to learn how to read kanji! Thanks a lot! By any chance, would it be possible to add an external dictionary app integration? The default dictionary is great, but if I want to look it up in Shirabe Jisho, it takes some time to copy and paste it. A one click solution would be great. I know you already have shortcuts for web based dictionaries and the ios internal dictionary, but it doesn't currently support any offline dictionary apps. Also, I know it would likely be it's own entire project, but have you considered doing a grammar program as well? Kanji knowledge is great, but I'd love to use your app for the grammar side of things as well. Do you have any plans for this? Thanks again for this awesome and useful app!

I finally beat this game* this morning so I wanted to review it from that perspective. I have to say a few things at the outset: 1) *I finished the kanji tutor anyway; the app has more content but the kanji tutor has taught me all 2136 joyo kanji. I will be doing the geography and proper names next for sure. 2) I made the decision pretty early on to turn off the writing portion of the tutor. I had it on the most lax/forgiving settings and have skinny fingers to boot but it kept telling me my strokes were wrong somehow or another even for kanji that I’ve known for years. And to be clear, I believe in proper stroke order & direction and was told in university Japanese class that my handwriting was pretty, so this shouldn’t be a me problem. 3) The app’s creator recommends doing four sessions of about 80 flash cards per session per day. I did not follow this recommendation because I wasn’t sure I could reliably get myself to use the app four times per day. Instead I use it twice per day and do closer to 200 flash cards per session. This is probably less effective for memorization but it was a habit I could establish and keep. 4) I kept the multiple choice format at 9 options (3x3 grid) the entire time. You can make it go up to 25 (a 5x5 grid), and that might make it harder, but I believe it will also increase the rate of false negatives, which is one of my only gripes with the app. Speaking of false negatives: you will get multiple types of questions in this app during the kanji portion. There are kanji to reading, reading to kanji, kanji to meaning keyword, meaning keyword to kanji, kanji to English vocabulary, vocabulary to kanji, etc. However, within the reading to kanji & kanji to reading questions a frustrating oversight exists. In order to be sufficiently strict (good thing) the app wants you to be clear on which are the on & kun readings (still a good thing). This means e.g. when it asks you for the reading of a kanji it wants you to tell it ALL of the on readings, or ALL of the kun readings (still a good thing). But then sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it asks for a single reading. And it doesn’t tell you which kind of question it’s giving you; you either see a reading and pick a kanji or see a kanji and pick a reading or list of readings. This would be fine if not for the fact that the list of wrong answers can include kanji whose readings overlap partially with the correct answer’s reading. Especially if you’re going kind of fast, you see a kanji, you see one of its readings in the choices, you press it, and oops—you’re wrong, because this time it wanted all of that kanji’s on readings, and the button you pressed (which is one of its on readings) is also a reading for another kanji, so it thinks you have the two confused. This isn’t an every single day occurrence, but you’ll hate it when it happens, I guarantee. The SRS algorithm is pretty decent: the more you get something wrong the more it asks you about it. The number of consecutive times you have to get something right before it believes you know it is too few in my personal opinion, but it still does have you review everything that you “know” at certain time intervals, so the worst that will happen to an item you don’t actually know is you’ll get it wrong during review and get to see it more times for a while to help solidify it. Patience and consistency are the keys. One other thing that’s not my favorite is that while the kanji lookup pages have tons of useful information, some of them (especially later in the N1 set) are pretty incomplete. I loved seeing big lists of vocabulary words in the early kanji, and I understand if some kanji are just so obscure that there’s maybe only one word that uses said kanji which would be relevant to someone trying to learn Japanese. But sadly, some of the kanji this app teaches you have zero vocabulary words and some even have zero listed readings. As an example the kanji 栃 is taught in this app. You are not given a reading for it, let alone any vocabulary words. However it’s part of the name of a place: 栃木 (Tochigi, therefore it is read tochi in this word). I looked up the kanji on my dear and glorious leader Jisho dot org. It’s not the only kanji in this app where there’s no reading & no vocab but should be. However don’t let this give you the impression that there isn’t a ton of vocabulary taught to you in this app. The dev’s info says 8000, and they were rounding down. Just in the kanji tutor there’s about 8500 vocabulary words. This app is no slouch in that regard, it’s just not complete either. It’s only a handful of kanji there’s not a single vocabulary word for out of 2136. Many kanji have lists of 10-20 vocabulary words. I looked on the Internet for apps that will be able to teach me more than 8000 and I couldn’t find one, especially not a free one. There’s a whole lot of N5 pandering out there b/c devs know a lot of people won’t stick with it, but there’s not a lot of advanced/comprehensive Japanese vocabulary in apps. This app has probably as much as any other save for some people’s custom Anki decks. One tiny issue I had was that although you can use either the JLPT N5-1 levels or Japanese school year organization systems to have the tutor teach you your 2136 kanji, there’s around 150 kanji that aren’t classified under any JLPT level, so after almost a year of using the JLPT organization scheme I had to switch to school year to get the tutor to teach me the last batch. You might as well save yourself some time and just go by school year from the very beginning. (Note the dev is not lying when they say you don’t lose your progress switching between the two, you’re just gonna have to use school year to eventually get them all so you might as well start with it.)

Testing isn’t actually seeing about the knowledge gained, it’s testing your reaction time and saying you do t know something if you do t react fast enough.

I have yet to see any tangible way to set this app to learn kanji in a simple straightforward way Kanji App may not do radicals, or on/kun plus multiple vocab, but you at least know what youre doing in each lesson. How in the world is this “start simple” when clicking on anything drops you into a random spot among 2k kanji. Update: Even clicking “kanji tutor” isnt really enough how the whole thing is implemented. Put together a document for people to read that will let them know how to use different settings, etc.

After my 50th time of buying an app, and realizing you have to pay for a subscription to actually use it usefully, it’s truly awesome that this app is free. It took me a while to get used to the layout of the app. However, when I did, it has been immensely useful. I am appreciative of the time and effort put into this app! 10/10!

I’m just getting back to studying Japanese and this has been great for refreshing my memory, especially when it comes to writing. Something I’ve never really seen but would love for the developer to consider would be some sort of genkouyoushi mode. It’s great that you can change the settings for iPad to move the writing area to one side and not be making big, giant strokes. I’d love for the option of maybe 6-10 smaller boxes to show up so I can practice writing in a more natural size (like if you were writing a note for someone) and still get the feedback on stroke order/angles. I will admit that I’m not a fan of the stroke animation when you write. It’s weirdly unsettling, but you kinda get used to it after awhile.

This has made learning much easier. Thank you for making it

The kanji lessons make no sense. It shows you what ‘one’ is, then gives you a multiple choice page where at the top it says ‘one’ and then all the choices are all different words with the ‘one’ kanji included, none of which make any sense.

I’ve been using this app for a few months and I love it. It’s excellent for those barely beginning and needing to learn the alphabet. It tells you which characters you are struggling with and which you are good at. It’s got katakana, hiragana and kanji. It helps you with reading and writing. I can keep going on about how much I love this app, and how good it is, but I think you get the point.

Its

this app is great for learning the symbols but when it comes to the writing portion it is wayyy to strict!! i had put the tolerance for single stroke on easy but it doesn’t matter at all. if i don’t get the stroke in the exact spot it wants me to i get it wrong. i know how to write a lot of them, i was just going to use this app for practice and review, but it makes it impossible to use

This is TRULY an amazing app. I have been through so much, downloading and deleting apps because I wasn’t able to afford the paid features. Annoying apps that destroy the experience with ads. I had low hope, expecting this to be another disappointment, but then I was shocked with how good this was! Thank you so much, developer, for making this app.. or 有難うございます!

Hello! I really love kanji teacher. Thank you so much for offering this to all of us! I had a question about the writing practice specifically. Currently, I have to choose which kanji I want to use for the practice. So I choose the jplt level which is great and then I pick one of the colored bars (new, good, ok, fail) and it seems like they each come up only once per practice session. I was wondering if you'd consider a weighted random system where every individual kanji gets a new score added every time you try it. The score depends on how well you reproduced it and that weighted score then gets somewhat randomized so any kanji could come up any time but the ones you fail come up more than most. Just a suggestion 😊. -Derik

- Very useful for learning reading/writing kana and kanji, with great graphs to see your progress, and plenty of useful options. - However, many test questions are too easy to "cheat" on. If the prompt is "hashiru", and only one answer ends in "-ru", then I know for certain what to pick, making the question worthless. I think this would be somewhat easy to fix by trying to add fake answers that read similarly to the prompt, ie "miru" or "wakaru", both also being (kanji)-ru, which would then require actual knowledge to answer correctly. - Another issue, the writing grading is a bit too strict, Auto-correcting every stroke after you make it. This means you never draw an entire kana/kanji from memory - it's holding your hand and tripping you up, causing you to constantly re-adjust instead of writing naturally. I would really like to see an option to wait to correct/grade strokes until the kanji is finished, so that the kanji I draw are "mine" and not just wholly-magnetized to perfection each time. - One more feature I'd like to see in more places is showing/hiding the stroke order, Like in the "draw" section of the dictionairy. During testing, I like to draw the kanji a couple extra times after passing, but it's too easy with the stroke order still there, and somewhat cumbersome to click into the dictionairy, then "practice", just to get the option to show/hide stroke order. Enabling this during a test would then mark that question a fail in certain cases. - Cheers! Hope to see more work on the app and that you can overcome Apple's ever-evolving app requirements...

This is the best free app I have ever used!! It is so helpful for learning, there are no strings attached or extra purchases, and there are so many practice questions, sentences, etc. !!

when you first open it it doesn't look too appealing but it's my favorite app to learn japanese, i tried duolingo and rosetta stone but i like this one because it feels more serious and not just for visiting another country.

I’ve tried half the kanji apps in the App Store and almost every single one has these hidden fees, required memberships, or cutoff points. Ive already gone through about 200 kanji on this app and it shows no sign of cutting me off any time soon, THANK GOD. It also emphasizes the importance of knowing both onyomi and kunyomi which is something that my Japanese classes never solidified. I’m actually able to sound out words I’ve never seen before just because I now know all possible readings, I’ve NEVER been able to do that and I took 6 years of Japanese classes. This app is a godsend

I legitimately don’t understand how or why this is free and I honestly wish there was a contribute function somewhere in the app. It’s professionally designed, functions perfectly, looks beautiful, and is INCREDIBLY detailed and in depth. Again, why is this free. Thank you whoever developed this godsend of a kanji teacher app, you are so very appreciated

I’ve been using this app for a while now and it’s been super helpful with my studies! It really keeps me motivated to learn Japanese. The thing that has helped me the most to learn kanji is how this app shows you the different radicals incorporated in the kanji character and gives you various examples of words using the kanji. When I see a kanji I don’t know when reading, I just draw it on the app’s paper option and it shows up! Really one of the best apps out there for learning Kanji!

This is an amazing app. It teaches hiragana, katakana, and kanji. It also forces you to memorize the stroke order, which is good discipline. I already knew hiragana when I first started using this app, and I learned something anyway when I went through the hiragana section! My only complaints with this app is that it won’t forgive you for drawing a character in a slightly different place than it wants you to, and it doesn’t pay attention to relative size.

This app works is great!

This app offers everything you need to learn Kanji

Teaches me Kanji so well, it is an absolute godsend. I can’t thank the developers enough for this wonderful app.

I have tested dozens of japanese learning apps... this, Kanji Box, and Imiwa are the three I use most often. The only thing I would like to see someday is an expansion of the characters available in the app... I really prefer this app to kanji box for writing practice... but some of the complex characters I’m studying are just not available here.

I’ve been searching for a small app that would teach a lot of vocabulary for kanji and kana. I was expecting the worse when I downloaded the app, but I’m actually pleasantly surprised! It’s a neat way to quickly learn a big amount of Japanese vocabulary. 100% recommend if you just came from learning kana and extremely basic kanji. The UI looks scary for only 3 minutes and afterwards you’d find out that it’s very easy to navigate through the app.

This app is brilliant. It is a great adjunct to becoming fluent. Thank you, Christian! Bravo!

I studied Japanese in College, but kanji was always my weakest point. I wish I had this app back then. It would have made life so much easier!

Amazing, I love this app. Extremely helpful. Thank you for making such a great tool.

This app is super good and I 𝘓𝘖𝘝𝘌 it but 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘦𝘱𝘱𝘶𝘬𝘶??? Please put the definition next to some words that people might not know. Thank you!

This app is a so helpful for practicing hiragana/katakana and learning or looking up kanji. Not only does it allow you to see the definition and particles of a kanji as well as draw in the brush strokes with your finger, but also gives several examples in sentences. There are even hints that describe the kanji as a picture which really helps me remember them. Truly one of the greatest kanji learning apps on ios.

The only words to sum up this app are: “Absolutely perfect “

I can’t express how much I appreciate and praise this app. Not only does it teach you Kana but also Kanji. 𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐚𝐛𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐳𝐢𝐧𝐠. he fact that it show easy memorizing methods (drawings) to remember Kana and sayings for Kanji makes learning so much easier. You can also look up how to write each Kana/Kanji in the search option. This helps when you happen to forget things. Speaking about writing, this app helps you write the characters! I searched 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 for an app that does this. Not only that, it has hints that help you remember how to write each Kana and Kanji. It also has a paper feature (for those of you whom haven’t tried the app it’s basically a notepad that judges your hand writing) it helps a lot when you don’t know stroke orders. Although I have a bit of criticism for this feature, I wish it told you what you did wrong (like in the tests) instead of just highlighting it in red. It also has a game feature which is okay. It’s really great and effective but there’s not much to do. I’d like a game update one that adds more and different games. Maybe a writing one for Kana or one to help for sentences. Another bit of criticism, you learn all the letters (Hiragana & Katakana) and words but not how to wright sentences. Note: you do learn how to translate sentences just not how to write them. Then again if you were to add that I’d be to good to not pay for. By the way did I mention that this app is totally 𝐅𝐑𝐄𝐄. You don’t have to pay at all it’s amazing!!! The developers are absolutely amazing people for making this. Take this review as my absolute gratitude and praise for this app. I couldn’t recommend you to download this app more. 𝟏𝟎/𝟏𝟎 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐝!!! このアプリを開発していただきありがとうございます

I had been trying to learn japanese on my own during the summer and pulling my hair at my inability to write kanji. I tried a lot of apps and this one is, in my opinion, the best one! Although, at first, it’s not very user friendly. You have to find your way around all of the options and settings. However, once you get the hang of it, it’s very helpful!