Hi everyone! I ended up somewhere in the middle of the first Minna No Nihongo last year and took a big break from Japanese because life just happens. Recently, I have been trying to get back to some “casual” practice while commuting, but the new Duolingo system is really killing me. Is there any one stop and fun app for some casual practice? Will get back to more serious practice soon, but not in the next weeks… Recommendations appreciated!
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The only gamified apps I have heard of that people here don’t overwhelmingly dislike are renshuu and Lingodeer. In fact I have seen several good reviews for them in the past. If I wanted to only do some casual practice and not use Duolingo then I would check out those two.
Mango
Anki but use it casually
Use the online app for free on your browser
Lingodeer is good
I personally recommend Wanikani and JPDB.
I use Duolingo and it definitely has kanji. Pretty much everything that could be is. I’ve heard people complain about this in the past too. Is there a setting or something?
I am exclusively using Kanji Study and Anki to review vocabulary. Duolingo was only beneficial for learning Kana; anything beyond that, I deem a waste of time. I attempted some lessons on Dueling and Linguo Deer, and it took at least 10 times longer to grasp the concepts compared to learning from books. Perhaps there are superior alternatives available, but I personally find these repetitive learning apps to be inefficient.
Highly recommend wanikani
I casually use memrize. It isn’t too bad and has lots of different decks to learn from. My old company gave me lifetime membership as a gift one year.
If you want a better casual practice regime (not for study) with Duolingo just force jump courses to like 20 or so (or much higher, the higher you go the more kanji appears). You will see kanji appear, and for extra practice do not use the tile based input system. Get a JP keyboard (qwerty, kana, kanji) and then input all your answers. With the tiles you get a lot of hints from the tiles so you can automate your brain on it, but when you write/type purely from memory only with the reference available. You have to think a lot more, you can input kanji for the answer so that is how you get the most out of Duolingo. That’s primarily what I use it for, reinforcing things I know and input/typing practice and speed. Having to regularly type out kanji is just a different form of practice and I quite like it for that.
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1048445761
When I learned Japanese in Japan, there were distinct moment where we learned grammar and others where we learned writing. Then there were other moments for memorizing kanji. It would be great to have a comprehensive tool for everything, but eventually, resources specialize into one of these categories.
Duolingo is ok for learning phrases and some grammar and vocab. Looks like they’re headed that route.
Wanikani is a great resource for kanji and has helped me learn a ton.
For both, don’t forget to practice writing out every once and a while!
Bunpo, J-crosswords, WaniKani, MaruMori.io (eventually they will have an app.)
I use 漢字忍者 (kanji ninja) . It’s really only good for practicing kanji you already know, but it’s great for remembering how to write, and stroke order as you hand write the kanji on the screen.
I find wanikani is great for learning kanji and bunpro for grammar. I recently started using kitsun.io for vocab as well. It’s like anki but a better user experience overall.
There is one language learning app made by Kahoot called Drops. Pretty interesting imo
But also you could try KawaiiNihongo or renshuu.
I also find EasyJapanese and Satori Reader pretty useful for more immersive type of study.
And because I love kanji I use Kanji Study
WaniKani is the best for learning Kanji. There is also an app called Kanji Garden
I have liked ‘mochimochi’ [https://mochidemy.com/en/](https://mochidemy.com/en/) (iOS, Android) so far. I won’t go into my complaints, but I do like the range of sentences and words. i like that I need to type in my answers as well as the ‘select from a list’ style of responses. I’m a beginner so I don’t recall how far they go in difficulty.
Japanese Kanji Tree [android only] is another app where you can ‘select from a list’ of answers for a displayed kanji. They have a range from N1 to N5 as well as some specialized lists like names.
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