They are all bad
The perfect app for studying Japanese will never exist and that’s a fact. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You see, most apps are made with a specific goal, learning Kanji, Kana, vocab or just to learn Grammar. Most apps are perfect for what they are intended to be used for.
However, there will never be an app which could take you from complete beginner to a fluent native level. That will just be impossible as it would require a very large amount of work, resources and different tactics to keep people engaged long enough to be using the app until that kind of a level.
Japanese is hard
Because of the complexity of the Japanese language, it basically gets brain breaking to find a one size fits all kind of approach for learning this language. Only the writing system makes it impossible to come up with good tactics to learn this language. You could add Hiragana next to all Kanji, but at what point do you stop showing that information?
Also many language learning apps are made by inputting variables and the courses get automatically made through that. Works great for most languages, however, for Japanese as the sentence order is kind of strange compared to English, the writing system consists out of 3 writing systems, and we haven’t even talked about all the exceptions in the way words are written or pronounced!
Automation is key
Companies can not afford to put programmers and language specialists to hand tailor every single lesson of a course till perfection, they want a cookie cut approach in which they only need to use a translator every now and then to translate new words and sentences, where after they can press a button which generates the new courses.
Never happening
The sad truth is that unless companies step away from this cookie cutter approach, we won’t be seeing any change. The problem is not necessarily these companies, but also the people as many people are just fine with these apps. The amount of people complaining to have better apps is small as most people just use these for a limited period and than or give up, or move on to better resources without ever questioning how their previous app could have been better.
Change coming?
Maybe. I’ve been trying to create better ways to learn Japanese, but not in the normal study app form that you see nowadays. Mainly because competing with those giants which spend thousands of dollars a week advertising their stuff becomes plainly impossible.
My idea of a good way to study a language is in an interactive way by playing games. Forcing people to learn and use the language without them realizing it. This all sounds good and well, but I have no proof that I can actually achieve this and it may look like dog poop when I finally work on it. But having looked into different ways of how Japanese could be educated to learners, I’ve found many great alternatives compared to the cookie cutter approach.
So let’s stay positive that some companies will actually try and put their money in creating these resources instead of just advertising.
