Tools · what each one is for
There is no best app to learn Japanese — there are four jobs and four different answers
Kana drilling, kanji repetition, grammar reasoning and speaking are four unrelated jobs, and the app that is excellent at one is usually poor at the next. Here is which tool to hire for which job, with what each seller publishes and what it does not.
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The four jobs, and why one app cannot hold them
The question "what is the best app to learn Japanese" has no answer because Japanese asks for four unrelated kinds of practice, and software is genuinely good at only the first two. Drilling kana and reviewing kanji are memory jobs that a phone does superbly. Working out why a particle changed the meaning is a reasoning job that wants prose and a person. Producing a sentence under time pressure is a nerve job that wants somebody sitting opposite you.
So hire per job. Below, each job in the order it arrives on the self-study route through Japanese, with the tools that actually cover it and what their own pages say. Some links here are paid placements and are marked as such; the free answers, which pay us nothing, are named first wherever they win.
Job one: getting kana into your eyes
For kana, the free answer wins and nothing else is close. A chart, a pen and ten minutes a day for a fortnight will finish hiragana and katakana, and NHK WORLD-JAPAN publishes free lessons and downloadable kana charts whose own framing is the clearest short statement of the problem: "Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic symbols, each representing one syllable while Kanji is ideogram, each stand for certain meaning."
A gamified app helps here mainly by making you show up daily, which is a real contribution and not a small one. Duolingo lists a Japanese course and its free tier costs nothing, which makes it the cheapest possible test of whether this whole project holds your attention. It has no affiliate programme and pays this site nothing, and it would still be the recommendation at this stage.
What to avoid at this stage is any product that lets you keep reading romanised Japanese. Comfortable romanisation is the single most expensive convenience in the first month: it teaches vowel lengths wrong and trains your eye on letters you will never see again.
Job two: kanji, every day, for years
Kanji is a spaced-repetition job, and the two honest answers are a free one and a paid one. Anki is a flashcard program whose desktop application is free and open source; its own download page says AnkiDroid for Android "is free and developed by contributors", while AnkiMobile is the paid official iOS app and its price is set on the App Store rather than published on the project's own site.
The paid alternative is a curated kanji course that decides the order for you, which is worth money to people who stall on building their own decks. WaniKani, from Tofugu, is the best known; its own front page advertises "2,000 kanji. 6,000 vocabulary words. In just over a year." and offers a free trial, and it does not publish its subscription prices in the page source, so no figure for it appears here. That headline is the seller's claim about its own course, not a measured outcome, and the "in just over a year" part assumes you never miss a day of reviews.
Whichever you pick, the rule that matters is the same: kanji learned inside two or three words sticks; kanji learned as a character with an English gloss does not, because most characters carry more than one reading and the word decides which one you use.
Job three: grammar you can reason about
Grammar is where tapping apps are weakest, and the fix is usually a book or a teacher rather than another subscription. Multiple-choice exercises can be passed by recognising the shape of the right answer, and Japanese particles are exactly the kind of distinction that survives a hundred correct taps without ever becoming a rule you can apply to a new sentence.
Of the paid app-style products, the structured course sellers are the ones that treat grammar as something to explain rather than something to drill.
Rocket Languages publishes the numbers everybody else hides
Rocket Japanese is the only product in this lane whose prices and course size you can read without starting a checkout, which is why it appears here at all. Its Japanese pricing page, read on 24 September 2026, lists $149.95 for Level 1, $299.90 for Levels 1 and 2, and $449.85 for all three levels, as one-time payments with lifetime access and a 60-day refund window, with 175, 314 and 451 hours of lesson time respectively.
It also publishes its own ceiling, which is rarer still. Rocket's ordering FAQ states that Rocket Japanese "aligns with levels N5 and N4 of the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test", with Level 1 covering N5 and Levels 2 and 3 together covering N4. Weigh the top tier against that sentence rather than against the hours: $449.85 buys a thorough beginner-to-lower-intermediate course, which is a reasonable thing to buy and not what the price suggests to somebody who has not read what the JLPT levels actually mean.
Paid placement: if you buy after following this link, we are paid a share. Price and terms are whatever the seller shows you at checkout, not whatever this page said on the day it was written — read them there. Nothing was ranked higher for paying, and the free routes we recommend pay us nothing at all.
Rosetta Stone, if being given no English suits you
Rosetta Stone teaches without translation, and for Japanese that is a genuine fork in the road rather than a style preference. Its Japanese page says the all-access subscription includes "all 25 of our languages" and that a free first lesson is available; its prices are not rendered in the page before checkout, so this site prints none.
One line on that page is worth quoting precisely because it is the sort of thing to discount: "With just 15–20 minutes a day, you can start holding basic conversations in a few months." That is Rosetta Stone's marketing claim about its own product, unaudited by anybody, and it sits beside the Foreign Service Institute's published figure of 88 weeks and 2,200 class hours of full-time classroom training for its own students of Japanese. Take the free lesson and decide from the lesson.
Paid placement: if you buy after following this link, we are paid a share. Price and terms are whatever the seller shows you at checkout, not whatever this page said on the day it was written — read them there. Nothing was ranked higher for paying, and the free routes we recommend pay us nothing at all.
Job four: speaking, which no app does
Speaking practice needs a person who replies unpredictably, and there is no software answer to that yet worth paying for. What there is instead is an hourly marketplace, and it is cheaper than most people expect before they look.
Pimsleur gets your mouth moving before your eyes are ready
Pimsleur is audio-first and its value is that you can do it while walking or driving, which is time that would otherwise produce nothing. Its Japanese course page lists Levels 1 to 5 and states that the course "teaches a polite level of Japanese appropriate for most situations in Japan" — a useful disclosure, because register is where beginners go wrong and most products never mention it.
Its prices are not printed on its own pricing page before checkout, so no figure appears here; what the page did show on 24 September 2026 was a "save up to 40%" banner, which is a sale and should be read as one. Pimsleur is not a reading course and does not pretend to be, so it covers one job well and leaves the other three to something else.
Paid placement: if you buy after following this link, we are paid a share. Price and terms are whatever the seller shows you at checkout, not whatever this page said on the day it was written — read them there. Nothing was ranked higher for paying, and the free routes we recommend pay us nothing at all.
italki is where a real person corrects you
italki is a marketplace of individual teachers, and it is the only thing on this page that can tell you why your sentence sounded strange. On 24 September 2026 its Japanese teacher listing showed 1,225 teachers available; teachers set their own rates, and trial lessons on the first page of that listing ranged from $5 to $32.
Book one earlier than feels reasonable. Most self-studiers delay this for a year and then discover that recognising a sentence and producing one are different skills that have to be trained separately.
Paid placement: if you buy after following this link, we are paid a share. Price and terms are whatever the seller shows you at checkout, not whatever this page said on the day it was written — read them there. Nothing was ranked higher for paying, and the free routes we recommend pay us nothing at all.
Preply does the same job with a different roster
Preply is the other large tutor marketplace, and for this purpose the difference is which teachers happen to be on it. Rates are set by the teachers rather than the platform, and its referral programme pays on a student's first lesson purchase rather than on anything recurring.
The selection criterion is not the platform. It is whether a particular teacher's profile sounds like somebody you would be willing to be wrong in front of.
Paid placement: if you buy after following this link, we are paid a share. Price and terms are whatever the seller shows you at checkout, not whatever this page said on the day it was written — read them there. Nothing was ranked higher for paying, and the free routes we recommend pay us nothing at all.
What the apps are not telling you about Japanese specifically
Two things get glossed over in every catalogue. The first is that a course covering "Japanese" almost always means the polite spoken register plus kana, which is the right place to start and nowhere near the whole language. The second is that the JLPT, the yardstick these products cite when they want to sound rigorous, has not published a vocabulary, kanji or grammar list since the test was revised in 2010 — its own FAQ explains that it "decided that publishing 'Test Content Specifications' containing a list of vocabulary, kanji and grammar items was not necessarily appropriate".
That matters here because it means any product claiming to teach "all the N4 kanji" is working from somebody's reconstruction, not from an official list. Rocket's phrasing — that its course "aligns with" N5 and N4 — is the honest form of the claim, and it is worth preferring sellers who phrase it that way.
How to spend nothing, and when to stop
The free stack covers three of the four jobs to a respectable standard: a kana chart and NHK WORLD-JAPAN's free lessons for job one, Anki's free desktop software for job two, a grammar reference for job three. None of it pays this site anything.
Spend money at exactly two moments. The first is when you have stalled twice on the same square and need somebody else's sequencing — that is what a structured course is for. The second is when you can read a paragraph but cannot say a sentence, which is when an hour of a teacher's time does more than another year of tapping.
Source: Rocket Languages’ own Japanese pricing page, read 24 September 2026, one-time payment column. A six-month payment plan is offered; its instalment figure is not printed on that page, so it is not quoted here. The “reaches” line is Rocket’s own published claim about which JLPT levels its course covers, not a test result of ours.