Pastel Daily Kana Quiz (Hiragana & Katakana Test‪)‬ 4+

I definitely recommend this app for beginners who are trying to learn the first steps of the Japanese language, especially for those who are looking for free apps to practice with. App is simple and easy to understand. I love that I can control my quizzes. In the settings menu, I can select the line of new characters I’d like to practice on or practice just with the characters I have most difficulty remembering. App also provides a chart of Hiragana and Katakana characters as a reference. The only down fall most people would probably dislike is the 60sec time limit with each character during the quizzes. Sometimes I wish there was an option for a longer time limit but that’s where purchasing upgrades of this app traps you. In a way, the limited time limit is helpful because it challenges your memory. In that case, I give it 5 stars. Overall, it’s a great app. Moving forward, I might just purchase the full version in the future.

This is a beautiful app. It focuses on learning hiragana and katakana. It avoids fluff and is well designed. I would use this exclusively and have no problem paying to unlock the rest of the features if it weren’t for one thing. Each character is only displayed for two to three seconds. Once that time is up, the character is gone. You can’t study where you went wrong, which is a problem for many similar characters. Consider these three characters: われね. You have no hope of learning them when they just flash for a couple seconds. If this app gave the ability to extend the time that each character is shown it would make all the difference. For beginners it would be nice to disable it entirely, only moving on once you’ve made a choice. Unfortunately with the app how it is, I can only see this being helpful for people who know these characters fairly well. I’m also discouraged to see other reviews mentioning the same problem and yet the app hasn’t been updated in 7 months. I hope the developer takes note and fixes this. I will then gladly pay for the upgrade.

This is the best hiragana/katakana drill app that I practiced with so far! It FORCES you to stop second guessing your knowledge and you have to move speedily. It helps you to stop translating the characters in your native language and to just know them when you hear or see them. It has the full list of the characters where people can also study the characters before drilling themselves...the drill is NOT where you “study” the characters...it’s where you test whether or not you DO know them. That’s why some people are probably complaining; they want to use the testing area as the study section. It’s totally for beginners if you use it correctly; I’m a beginner too. I nearly avoided this app because of some of the complaining reviewers...but I guess everyone’s learning style is different. I WILL finally learn katakana using this app. Yay!