10 Minute Japanese 4+

Just need a little something more

As far as I know, this app is pretty good at exposing you to new vocabulary and what it would actually look and sound like in Japanese. I do wish we could get a little more like the part of speech, how it fits into a sentence, and the like, but I also understand that this is a rapid study on the concepts you choose. I did make the mistake of choosing all the concepts up front, so it feels like a lot of random words and phrases all at once. Overall, it’s been a nice addition to the other practice I do, and it’s helped to cement some associations with some of the kanji which makes them so much easier to remember. I would recommend it, just pace yourself.

Not good for Japanese at all

It is a bad application even if it were free, and it is definitely not worth the money. This flash-card method of learning is okay for Indo-European languages and other languages that are spelled phonetically—I say okay because in the 7-day trial no grammar has been covered, and because it presents you with the written language in the earliest stages of learning the language, which is a bad practice in general. But it is terrible for Japanese. First of all, it relies on your device’s built-in text-to-speech for audio—this is bad because one character can be read at least two ways depending on context, and the given pronunciation of the character could be wrong for the context and also not match up with the romanization (体 is romanized as “karada” on the card but my phone’s TTS says “tai”). Second, it relies on your device’s voice recognition for pronunciation exercise. Japanese has a myriad of homophones, and when I say 章 [shou], my phone will transcribe your speech as 笑 [shou] and register it as incorrect; I’ve run into 5 such words so far. I give it two stars instead of one because it can be redeemed: if grammar exercise is added, support for homophones is added, if Tokyo-dialect native-speaker audio examples are added, and if connecting pronunciation with meaning is introduced for every word before showing how it is written.

Phản Hồi Từ Nhà Phát Triển ,

Hello. Thank you for your detailed feedback on using our app. We appreciate you taking the time to share your insights into the learning process with us. We will continue to work on improving our app for our users!

Decent SRS, poor pronunciation grading

Mostly fine if you want to learn new vocabulary with SRS. The big problem it has is that there are multiple ways to write a certain word or phrase, and often the app will hear what you said correctly, but incorrectly write a different phrase that is pronounced the same or similarly pronounced. This means it considers your word choice to be incorrect even though you are saying the same thing in the same way as the example. For example the app may present you with a phrase written with the appropriate kanji to speak. When the phrase is spoken into the app, the voice recognition decides to write what you said in hiragana without converting any of it to the proper kanji. So even though you said the correct thing, the hiragana is not the same exact text as the kanji and so it fails you for being “incorrect”.

Phản Hồi Từ Nhà Phát Triển ,

Good afternoon, thank you for your feedback. We are very sorry that you had a negative experience with our application, but we appreciate your detailed description of your user experience.
If you have ideas to improve the application, you can write to us - support@mobilecleverapps.com