Contact Japanese Learning Support

If you’re coming into this app looking to learn Japanese for the first time, I can tell you there are some serious problems with the way they’re presenting the info. For one thing, the foreign words are written in hiragana when they should be written in katakana (e.g. “salad” should be written as サラダ but they’ve written it as さらだ which is not correct). Changing the writing style to “Kana & Kanji” didn’t seem to correct this. Why teach katakana if you’re not going to use it for the words in the rest of the app? A bigger problem is that they don’t include the accented versions of the characters when you’re learning the alphabet. For example, you learn that は means “ha” but you’ll never learn that ば and ぱ mean “ba” and “pa” and these accented characters are a SIGNIFICANT part of the language, which you’ll plainly see if you look at the rest of the vocabulary in the app. It doesn’t make any sense that they’d completely omit them up front and expect you to know them later on. The presentation is slick and fun to use so they deserve a lot of credit for that but for they price you’re paying you’d expect something a lot more complete.

There are sections where the broken up pieces of the word are in romanized lettering. This isn’t as helpful as ordering the hiragana/katakana together because that’s what a learner will generally be seeing once s/he has weaned off the training wheels of romanization. Not to mention sometimes when the words are broken up they’re not even broken up by the syllables academics would use to romanize each syllable of kana. It’s a great starting place for vocabulary but this would assist the app in growing stronger. (As far as I know, this is only from one play-through. If this changes further on into the learning levels, please disregard my suggestion.)

I decided to come back to using Drops so I can learn new words. I set it back up & find that my progress has been reset. Then again, I suppose some review won't hurt. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there is now a type of question where you draw a character from the hiragana/katakana/kanji(?) letters. The only problem I have with this new type of question is that it's a bit finicky. Most of the 5 minutes that I had to learn these characters/words have been wasted by the app thinking I did poorly in the writing questions. There was also some lag (not frame rate issues), but I guess I can blame Apple for that.