Learn Japanese! - Kanji 4+

This app is brilliant for my reading as well as my recall for kanji characters. Essentially, it teaches you a kanji character and some common associated words with that character. I only just recently bought the whole pack (unlocks every level) and I can already tell it will be well worth it in the long run even though I’m only halfway through the Level 2 (N4).

The small gripe I have is with the review of past kanji I’ve learnt because sometimes the app will freeze when I’m in the middle of the review, forcing me to restart the app. I haven’t seen it happen with the normal learning levels, although it may be because each of those are shorter than the review. Another thing is when I’m trying to draw a stroke with a tiny bend at the end (eg. 町), it sometimes doesn’t recognise it (?) and it would register my stroke as wrong. On the bright side, it reinforces the character in my mind because it forces you to redo it. I hope the review issue gets fixed in future but it isn’t really a huge issue, at least to me. It’s still a great app for kanji learning (for someone who’s lazy to do flashcards, like me)!

This app is fantastic. I’ve just started learning kanji, and there is nothing I would want to change about this app.

It takes you through each character in excellently thought-through steps: first you write with green and red dots guiding you. Then you trace on the character, but without the dots telling you which lines to write first. Then you have a blank screen and write the whole character, in the correct way, from memory (but with the option of asking for a hint if you can’t remember).

There is also the option of choosing certain characters, and just practising those characters. This is good if there are just one or two characters in a lesson that you find hard, and want to spend extra time focusing solely on those characters.

The only problem I found was that sometimes after writing a character, the screen seems to stick, and doesn’t give me the option of moving forward. But if you just tap the screen once to make an extra white dot on the screen, it fixes the problem and you can move forward.

Highly recommend this app. I’ve learnt about 30 kanji in a day. It is very enjoyable so it’s hard not to want to keep moving on to the next lesson.

Been using for years and it has been great. There are a handful of problem kanji that it struggles to recognise the handwriting with which make it rather frustrating. I would recommend adding a way of skipping a kanji during a session and also a way of marking a kanji as green in the index to get over the recognition problem. There is also a bug where if you report a kanji as "too hard" or "I know it but I made a mistake", then it will keep progressing the session even if you make mistakes. A final note, the closer to the end of N1 that you get, the less handwriting practices there are. This is a little disappointing as the detailed N1 kanji could really benefit from the memory reinforcement that handwriting gives.

To conclude, It may sound like a negative rating but thats not my intention. I've put a lot of hours into this app and believe it is hands down the best kanji grinding app out there. The points above are recommendations because I would love for this app to reach more japanese learners.