Best App to Learn Japanese: A Per-Skill Comparison

There is no single best app to learn Japanese, and any article that names one is selling something. Japanese is six skills, not one — kana, kanji, vocabulary, grammar, listening and speaking — and no app is good at more than two of them. The learners who progress fastest are not using the best app; they use two or three apps covering different rows of that list.

This site is itself an app, so treat that claim with suspicion — then notice it is the same claim the honest reviewers make. Prices below were observed in September 2026.

The per-skill map

Note that several of these are complements, not rivals: Anki and WaniKani both do kanji and vocabulary, but different halves of it.

Kana: where free is genuinely enough

Kana — hiragana (ひらがな, hiragana, the rounded alphabet used for grammar) and katakana (カタカナ, katakana, the angular one used for loanwords) — is a two-week problem with roughly a hundred shapes, and the one stage where paid tools are unnecessary.

Renshuu is the most useful free option. Its developer, Michael Hominick, calls it "a two-person company," and its free tier is not a trial: "The free version is unlimited: there's no timer before you are forced to pay!" That is unusual enough to be worth quoting. It covers kana, and it also carries learning paths for most major textbooks, the JLPT and Kanji Kentei, plus "over 10,000 user-made lessons" and 160,000 example sentences.

Renshuu's USD pricing could not be confirmed — the site is login-gated and community figures conflict by more than 80% — so no number is printed here. That its free tier exists and is not time-limited is verifiable, and that is enough to start.

Duolingo also teaches kana, pleasantly, but at its pace rather than yours; for a two-week alphabet a self-testing drill beats a course.

Kanji: WaniKani, and what it does not do

WaniKani is made by Tofugu LLC, the company behind Tofugu's review site — worth stating plainly, because it matters when you read a WaniKani recommendation anywhere, including on Tofugu.

Its homepage claim is specific: "2,000 kanji. 6,000 vocabulary words. In just over a year." Hold that next to the 2,136 jōyō kanji, the government's list for ordinary literacy: the app aims at the full working set, not a sample.

Structurally it has exactly three item types, and knowing them tells you what you are buying:

That is a reading-recognition system: you will see 漢字 (kanji, "Chinese characters") and produce its reading, never write it by hand. Reviews often say WaniKani has "no grammar, no speaking, no handwriting" — accurate as a description of those item types, but not an official company statement.

Pricing: $9.00 per month, $89.00 per year, or $299.00 lifetime, all USD, and the first three levels are free — WaniKani's own wording is "free until you reach Level 4," roughly 100 kanji and 200 vocabulary words. You can test the method before paying. A winter sale on the lifetime tier exists, but no discount percentage is published, so do not plan around one.

WaniKani is a daily-review commitment at a pace the app sets; miss a week and the queue punishes you. For control over volume, see the next tool.

Vocabulary: Anki, the general-purpose one

Anki is not a Japanese course and contains no Japanese. It is spaced-repetition software — a scheduling engine — and everything it shows you comes from decks you or someone else import. That is the reason to use it and the reason to skip it, depending on whether you want to choose what you learn.

Its pricing is the simplest here: free on every platform except iOS. Desktop versions, AnkiWeb sync and AnkiDroid for Android are all free. AnkiMobile for iOS is $24.99, one-time, no in-app purchases — it funds the project — and the app's US App Store seller is now Anki Software LLC. The free web version also works in a phone browser, less comfortably.

For Japanese, Kaishi 1.5k is a verified shared deck on GitHub and AnkiWeb, requiring Anki 2.1.50 or newer. "Core 2k/6k" and "Tango N5" decks are widely recommended, but I could not verify canonical pages for them, so treat any copy you download as an unknown quantity.

One more point: a pop-up dictionary can build Anki cards automatically. The free browser extension Yomitan creates cards from words you hover over on a real page, rather than from a list someone else chose — the strongest free vocabulary workflow available, covered in the dictionary tools guide. A deck is only as good as its daily load, though: twenty new cards a day is a commitment, two hundred is a habit you will quit.

Grammar: Bunpro, and what changed at Duolingo in 2026

Bunpro drills grammar rather than explaining it, and is honest about that. Its format is cloze deletion — a sentence with a blank to fill — so it tests retrieval under pressure, which a textbook chapter cannot do for you. Tofugu calls it "a spaced repetition software designed for studying Japanese grammar and vocabulary" — exactly right.

The pricing is generous: a browsing-only free tier, plus a 30-day full free trial with no credit card. After that, $5.00 per month, $50.00 per year, or $150.00 lifetime, with vocabulary and reading included at no extra cost. The app lists "over 900 grammar points," "25 JLPT practice tests" and "100k+ hand-written example sentences." A 20% winter sale exists but was not active on 15 September 2026, and the yearly figure is injected by JavaScript, so the HTML shows nothing — $50/year is confirmed by Bunpro's own FAQ. Do not expect Bunpro to teach grammar from zero: drills assume something upstream has explained the pattern, whether a textbook or a site like the particles guide.

Then there is Duolingo, whose grammar reputation is now out of date in both directions. Its own 2020 blog post is candid about the design: "Duolingo uses a combination of implicit and explicit instruction! In regular lessons, we teach grammar implicitly." Explicit explanation arrived as "Smart Tips," which pop up after a mistake — a repair mechanism, not a lesson. But on 1 January 2026 Duolingo published "Duolingo Now Offers Grammar Explanations for Free," making Explain My Answer free for all learners, Japanese explicitly covered. If you have read that "Duolingo doesn't explain grammar," that was true for years and stopped being true at the start of 2026 — the app's strongest recent change, and its least reported.

Listening: Satori Reader

Satori Reader is a graded-reading library with human-recorded audio on every story — you read a passage, hear it, then read it again with the sound in your head. There is no lifetime tier, the main thing to know before subscribing.

Pricing: a free tier covering selected episodes, and Pro at $9 per month or $89 per year, which also includes Human Japanese Universal at no extra cost — a full beginner course in its own right, and the reason the subscription is better value than the price suggests. For what to listen to in what order, including free options, see the listening practice guide.

Speaking: no app clears this bar

The speaking row has no app in it for a reason. Speaking needs a listener who can tell you that you said something understandable but wrong, and consumer apps do not do that. Voice recognition can check whether it heard the right words; it cannot tell you that your pitch accent made 箸 (hashi, "chopsticks") sound like 橋 (hashi, "bridge").

So this is where money should go. italki's own blog says the "Japanese tutor cost ranges from $10 to $80+ per hour," with online lessons typically $15–$50/hr; a read of its live Japanese-teacher listing returned twenty teachers at $12–$44, clustering $15–$25. Preply's listing showed $19–$42/hr, clustering $25–$35, and Wyzant charges students a 9% service fee on top — their own example is a $50/hr tutor costing $54.50/hr.

One caution: the widely repeated split "community tutors $4–$20, professional teachers $15–$50" appears only in secondary aggregators, so use a blended range. How to make those hours count is in the speaking practice guide.

Duolingo, honestly

Duolingo deserves its own section: it is the app most readers try first, and coverage of it is poor in both directions.

Duolingo publishes no price list anywhere. Its subscribe, Super and Max pages serve JavaScript shells with no price in the HTML, and third-party trackers report figures that conflict badly: Super at $12.99 versus $9.99 monthly, annual figures of $83.99, $95.99 and $59.99, Max around $29.99/month. None of those is from Duolingo, so none is printed here as fact. Caution is doubly warranted: in a report dated 14 September 2026, Max was not offered at all on new signups — only Super, Super Family and a new cheaper Super Lite that keeps some ads — with Video Call and "explain my mistake" folded into plain Super. On the Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Luis von Ahn said: "Another possibility, truthfully, is that we may actually sunset Max." A confident "Duolingo Max price" section may describe a tier you cannot buy.

Its kanji exercises are reading practice, and Duolingo says so. Their own blog (6 September 2023) describes three interactive chart tabs where you "practice tracing, spelling, and reading," then states the point: "Even though this may feel like writing practice, these exercises are actually helping you learn to read by teaching you to recognize the shape of each character!" The acknowledged design reason is load: "We spread out kanji to avoid overloading learners." If handwriting is your goal, Duolingo is not teaching it, by design and on the record.

The research is mixed, and both halves matter. A 2026 study by Nora Abuellil (Journal of the Japanese Language Association of Korea 88:5–25, DOI 10.14817/jlak.2026.88.5) followed 29 foreign professionals in Japan with no kanji background over 13 weeks. Gamification sustained engagement, and the study found the app lacked sufficient grammatical explanations and information on kanji etymology and radicals. On the other side, Jiang, Rollinson, Plonsky, Gustafson and Pajak (2021, Foreign Language Annals 54(4):974–1002, DOI 10.1111/flan.12600) is the study usually cited in Duolingo's favour — and it tested Spanish and French, measured reading and listening only, tested no speaking, and did not test Japanese. The oft-quoted "five units equals four semesters of college" framing is Duolingo's own public relations, not a finding of that paper.

One last correction: several articles cite a Tofugu review of Duolingo. There isn't one — Tofugu's review index covers Bunpro, Anki, JapanesePod101, Genki and Satori Reader, but not Duolingo.

Where Duolingo genuinely fits: as a habit-builder in the first month, when the real risk is doing nothing at all. Use it for the daily reflex, then add a kanji system and a grammar drill.

Dictionary tools are a separate job

Looking words up is its own skill with its own free tools: Jisho.org, Takoboto, Shirabe Jisho, and the pop-up extensions, where Yomitan succeeded Yomichan. All of it is in the Japanese dictionary guide.

Common mistakes for English speakers

Downloading eight apps. Every app has its own review queue, and eight queues is the same as none. Two or three, covering different skills.

Paying before using the free tier. WaniKani is free to Level 4, Bunpro gives a 30-day full trial with no card, Satori Reader has a free tier, Anki is free on desktop, and Renshuu's free tier is unlimited — so almost all of this can be tested for a month at no cost.

Assuming an SRS app is teaching you. Anki, WaniKani and Bunpro are all memory systems. None explains a grammar point the way a chapter does, and none notices that you have never spoken a sentence aloud.

Believing a competitor's review of a competitor. Several of the loudest "Duolingo is useless" pages are published by companies selling the alternative. The prices above are checkable; the verdicts are not.

Summary

No app covers more than two of the six skills, so the working setup is a small stack, not a winner. Renshuu for free kana and textbook-linked paths; WaniKani ($9/month, $89/year, $299 lifetime, made by Tofugu, free to Level 4) or Anki (free except $24.99 once on iOS) for kanji and vocabulary; Bunpro ($5/month, $50/year, $150 lifetime, 30-day trial) for grammar drilling, now that Duolingo's Explain My Answer is free too; Satori Reader ($9/month, $89/year) for reading with audio; and a human tutor at $15–$35/hr for speaking. Duolingo publishes no price list, so distrust any article that prints one confidently.

The gap this site fills is the one that stacking advice leaves open: turning what you have learned into something you can produce on demand. Every practice sentence shows the Japanese with its kana reading, and you type it in romaji word by word — so grammar you have only recognised in a textbook has to come out of your hands. If the characters are still slow, start with the kana table; if a reading will not come, the romaji converter will spell it out; then open a practice session as the daily production layer under whichever apps you chose.