MARU: Learn Japanese Hiragana 4+

This is a fantastic app that enables you to learn how to identify the different Japanese symbols by sound and sight. I like the feature of being punished with ads as it provides incentive to identify the symbols correctly and the app creator (hopefully) gets a little something in return!

What this app won’t do: teach you how to write in Japanese. Personally, I have found it’s improved my recognition of the symbols based on sound and sight but if I was to be asked to write the symbols based on the sound alone, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Perhaps a feature could be added where it plays the sound to you and you input, using your keyboard, the corresponding symbol(s) into a text box and it then tells you if you correctly identified the symbol or not - if wrong, it can show you the correct answer and then move on.

Overall, great app, but is limited in some regards! I recommend using it to get started

I think this is an overall great app for learning Hirigana and Katakana as it's very repetitive which helps with ingraining the letters into my memory. It's also so cool to listen and repeat the phonetic sounds so I sound more natural. They also give a lot of different easy Vocab to learn and it's fun to test to see if I've learnt the words and the meaning. However I would say that if you have just started learning Japanese then it will be difficult for you in the drill part when it shows you a word and asks you to find the correct characters or romaji word for it. I think they should start bringing in words more towards the end when nearly all the Hirigana characters have been learnt.

A very simple app that does one thing quite well. I like the native speaker audio, and once you know the kana you can enable testing on the vocab meanings. I also like the idea of ads only coming up after 5 mistakes.

One thing I think needs improving is the algorithm for presenting the kana… as you work your way through them you can end up “stuck” waiting for one or two of them to come up and complete the row (so you can move on). In some cases I had to wait for ages for this. There are also some issues with text size; on my iPhone I have text set “larger text” enabled and in some cases the romaji was too big to fit on the screen. An option to try kana in different fonts would also be good, since this can affect recognition a lot, and the very rounded font used here isn’t very typical.