The best app to learn Japanese depends on the writing system
Japanese splits every learner's time three ways: speaking, two phonetic scripts you can learn in a fortnight, and two thousand kanji you cannot. An app that is excellent at one of these is usually silent on the others, so the honest question is not which app is best but which gap you are filling this month.
We make Vocabloot, one of the five below. We have been direct about what it does not do, and for a complete beginner we recommend starting elsewhere.
Five Japanese apps, and who each suits
Duolingo
- Best for
- Building the habit and learning kana
- Price
- Free with ads, around $7 a month without
- What it does well
- The kana lessons are genuinely good, and the course now leans on hiragana early instead of letting you coast on romaji. Enough repetition to make the first few hundred words stick.
- Where it falls short
- Kanji coverage is shallow and unordered, and the sentences stay textbook-polite. You can finish a long streak still unable to read a menu.
LingoDeer
- Best for
- Grammar explained properly from zero
- Price
- Around $15 a month, less on longer plans
- What it does well
- Built for Asian languages rather than adapted from European ones. Particles, verb conjugation and the polite-to-plain distinction are actually explained, which is where self-taught Japanese collapses.
- Where it falls short
- Paid only, and the course ends around upper-beginner. The audio is studio-clean and slower than any Japanese person speaks.
WaniKani
- Best for
- Kanji, systematically
- Price
- Around $9 a month or a one-off lifetime price
- What it does well
- The only tool on this list with a real answer to kanji: two thousand characters and six thousand words in a fixed order with mnemonics and spaced repetition. People finish it able to read.
- Where it falls short
- Kanji and vocabulary only. No grammar, no speaking, no choice over order, and the early levels are deliberately slow. It is a second app, never the first.
Anki
- Best for
- Vocabulary retention at scale
- Price
- Free, except $25 once on iPhone
- What it does well
- Best in class for retention, and the shared Japanese decks are among Anki's strongest, many with native audio and sentence cards.
- Where it falls short
- No teaching at all. Deck quality varies wildly, and grinding cards before you can parse a sentence teaches you words you cannot yet use.
Vocabloot ours
- Best for
- Someone past kana who wants vocabulary from their own life
- Price
- Free during early access
- What it does well
- Point the camera at anything and it gives you the Japanese word with its reading, pronunciation and an example sentence. Learning 冷蔵庫 while looking at your own fridge beats meeting it in a list, and the reading is attached from the start.
- Where it falls short
- No grammar teaching, so it will not explain particles or conjugation, and it will not walk you through kanji in a considered order the way WaniKani does. Use it for vocabulary alongside something else, and expect early-access rough edges.
Romaji is the crutch to drop first
Every app that lets you type and read in Latin letters is quietly costing you months. Japanese written in romaji does not exist anywhere you will actually go, and the sounds you infer from English spelling are wrong often enough to matter.
Learn hiragana and katakana in the first two weeks, then set every app to hide romaji. Duolingo and LingoDeer both allow it; do it immediately.
Kanji is different. Nobody learns two thousand characters in a fortnight, and no general-purpose app schedules them properly. If reading matters to you, add a dedicated tool and accept it as a separate, slower track.
The honest recommendation
Starting from zero: LingoDeer if you can pay, Duolingo if you cannot. Either way, kana first and romaji off.
Six months in and hitting the kanji wall: WaniKani, and accept that it is a year-long commitment worth making if you want to read.
Comfortable with kana and basic grammar but short of words: Anki or Vocabloot. Pick Vocabloot if you would rather learn the words for what is around you than work through a frequency deck.
Everyone: real Japanese audio early, even if you understand almost none of it. Textbook politeness and street Japanese diverge fast, and only listening closes that gap.
Try the camera approach
Snap anything and learn the word for it, with pronunciation and an example sentence.
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