Any of these apps poor choices for starting out with Japanese?

14 comments

1. Duolingo is great for learning hiragana and katakana. However the main downside is that it teaches phrases without explaining grammar. I used Lingodeer and liked it a lot because it has clear grammar explanations. It’s not exactly cheap but I found it effective. It got me to around N4 level.

2. If you search this subreddit you will find several posts with reviews for each of them. People here generally do not recommend learning with apps and especially Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, and the official Memrise course have received bad reviews here, on account of their lack of proper explanations and other issues. I have seen people give good reviews of Lingodeer, but I have not used it myself, and I do not know Tandem.

   One general thing I want to point out: Apps typically cover only beginner level content (since that is the most profitable market for them to target), so even if you enjoy them, don’t spend too much time with them and know when to move on. They can be a fun way to get started, but a 500 day streak on Duolingo won’t make you fluent.

3. I recommend getting Takoboto Japanese Dictionary. I’m using it and has a pretty guide on kanji with radical explanation and how to draw the kanji. Also good for translations in general. Has vocabulary stuff, hirgana, and katakana as well but it’s not interactive like with duolingo and such.

4. I’ve never used Tandem, Lingodeer is fine, I say drop the rest. Bunpo or Human Japanese and Japanese Kanji Study should be on your radar. ANKI is the most important.

5. Try iknow, unlike bussu and memrise it teach kanji straight away along. It was something i always hated in the beginner apps

6. I really enjoy Pimsleur. It’s a great supplement for practicing listening and speaking. No reading or writing though.

7. Kanji Study by Chase Colburn is great for looking up words and kanji offline, and it’s mostly free (the only paid features are its SRS features and creating custom groups of kanji). Its search function is probably among the best I’ve seen. e.g. specify the amount of kanji in the word, search kanji by radical+stroke count to narrow down searches, enclosing words in latin characters between quotes searches words’ entries). It also has plenty of example phrases and lets you look up names and surnames.

   It’s not without its shortcomings though (e.g. if you want to search multiple kanji by radical, you need to clear the search bar to look up another one, inserting a wildcard before or between multiple kanji to search for words including or ending with certain kanji and searching for phrases (e.g. “get up”) weren’t possible last time I tried).

8. For Japanese Genki I and Tango vocab books were great for me. Please delete Duolingo immediately, it will take you no where.

9. Rosetta Stone is hot garbage

10. Check out Drops app for learning vocabulary. It doesn’t cover aby grammar, but learning vocabulary with it is fun.

11. Tandem is a chatting app, so you can use it whenever to talk with natives.

12. LingoDeer is *excellent*, imo. Duolingo is very underwhelming. I can’t comment on the rest.

    LingoDeer will get you learning vocab and grammar very organically, and it has really excellent notes/explanations. There’s exercises for matching, writing, listening (stories), and speaking. Also has flashcards and you can review lessons as much as you need too (which they recommend). LD and WaniKani (not technically an app, but it has 3rd party apps) have been a huge help for learning. WK will teach you kanji and vocab, and there’s a variety of cool user scripts to extend/mod it with.

    Also there’s app versions of The Kim’s grammar guide. On Android it’s called 文法ガイド / Learning Japanese.

    Also bear in mind that all apps are basically supplements. You won’t learn Japanese solely through them.

13. 文プロ is by far the best app/resource out there period

14. Check out the app YuSpeak. It combines the good aspects of duolingo and lingodeer into one app.