I had been learning Japanese on my own for several years. This app has been very helpful in allowing me to actually read along and try to decipher the conversation as it goes. I listen once, and try to pick out what I recognize, then I read along and see what else I can figure out. The ability to click on words that I haven’t learned yet, allows me to figure out the rest, based on context. I really enjoy this app, and the test at the end gives me confidence that I have actually understood what I read. Great, simple stories at the beginning? And they appear to get more difficult as you progress, which is great. I also like that you can slow it down, to try to catch more of the listening, before needing to move on to the reading and vocab discovery. This is a great tool for any level. Reading and listening are super important, and the furigana above the Kanji allows you to familiarize yourself with those characters as well great app!

I don’t write reviews. This may be my first ever. This app is perfect for me so far. It’s bite sized and great for personalized, controlled, and engaging learning. You can work on reading and listening at your own learning pace! There’s also kanji and vocab learning tools. It pretty much works on everything except writing and speaking. But input (as opposed to output) is most important for learning, especially early on. I know n5 grammar and vocab, and can read and write hiragana/katakana, so it’s a perfect next step for me. Best part of all is that all of the learning is actually in context (in this case, situated in stories with visuals) and teaches culture at the same time. Learning is often out of context (flash cards, textbooks, route memory work, classroom, etc). Culture and context are two of the most important ingredients for learning language correctly and it actually sticking in your memory. In summary, this app is great for input (listening/reading) and learning in context!!

Yesterday I started actually using this app and I feel like it’s really going to help improve my reading skills when it comes to Japanese. It’s very helpful in the sense that it explains every word in the story if you tap on them, and there’s a feature to bookmark the words you don’t know. From what I see, there are no adds but you do have to wait 12 hours to unlock a key which are used to unlock new stories. It’ll definitely improve your reading skills. Its good for anyone just starting out, however Im sure it can also be great for more advanced learners, seeing as they have levels all the way from: starter to expert. Overall, this is a very good app for anyone just starting Japanese, or anyone who just wants to get some reading practice in.

I would pay to subscribe immediately (and I really want to!!), but there are two critical dealbreakers. First is the large font size isn’t nearly large enough. This is an accessibility issue and I’m sad the system text sizes don’t simply apply. All throughout the app there is tiny text that’s very hard to see for me, even with reading glasses on. I suspect there are some technical limitations here, but at the very least give us way more options. This alone makes the app super difficult for me. Second, real, native iPad support is woefully lacking and demonstrative of the understandably tiny team working on this app. Nothing scales well, leaving tons of empty space, for one, but most frustrating of all is that landscape mode and true window scaling isn’t supported. On iPadOS 26 in windowed mode the app will still run and not usually force me to rotate, thankfully, but there are still tons of issues with this, including distracting elements surrounding the app because I can’t just scale it to the full landscape window, lots of wasted space, forced rotation to portrait in full window mode, the tiny on-screen keyboard (leading to lots of typos), and anytime a system prompt occurs it forces landscape when rotation is locked to that setting (meaning the prompt is rotated 90 degrees but the rest of the app isn’t). Also, even if I wanted to use another app side-by-side (like to take notes or generate my own flash cards, etc.), there isn’t proper scaleable support for Split View or Slide Over. iPads are now natively landscape devices and all cases, and even most stands, are designed for this purpose. Long gone are the days when people use iPads in portrait mode as a default, even for reading apps. iPad is my primary platform for learning Japanese. I absolutely do not want to spend the majority of my time reading and learning one of the world’s most difficult languages on a tiny iPhone when I have a perfectly good, useful iPad sitting next to it. It’s hard to take any app seriously that doesn’t take iPad seriously as well.