Created: 08/03/2022 - Last updated: 29/08/2025
When learning a new language, tools are essential. In the case of Japanese, because of the writing systems, there are many specific tools and resources that are very practical, and I'll try to gather them here.
For Japanese immersion resources, check out this article.
In general, it's always recommended to play the sounds when using apps, and to use textbooks with audio provided, in order to actively train pronunciation, as well as listening skills.
Some videos on Japanese pronunciation:
One of the first things you'll be asked to learn in Japanese are the two basic syllabaries: Hiragana and Katakana. These countain 46 symbols each (plus combinations), and are quite easy to learn, but some tools can speed up your process.
These are two free mobile apps that really helped me to learn the syllabaries, it only took about 2 hours in total and I was good to go! They just display one sign at a time, and ask you to choose which sound it represents, with four answers to choose from. As I progressed, I hid the options with my hand so I could rely less on the ones proposed. The variants and combination kana are also available to learn, and the kana is read out loud when you get the correct answer, which helps with memorizing the proper sound!
This free app is very useful to learn how to write kanas! A friend recommended it to me and I decided to use it when I started doing handwritten exercises and realized that although I could read kanas, there's quite a few that I didn't remember enough to write properly. I really like this app because it's simple, and it feels very satisfying to trace the characters on the screen!
Tofugu has two pages which associate kana shapes with funny things like animals and such. Checking it out did help me memorize a few of them better, for instance ク (ku) whick looks like a cook (ku-uk)'s hat!
It seems that Renshuu includes a kana course, but I already knew them when I started using this app, so I wasn't able to test it for myself.
Out of the Japanese textbooks I've tried, Genki is my favorite! It has a good balance of clear grammar, vocabulary, talking and writing exercises, reading and listening practice, and everything feels useful from the get go. It also has regular "Cultural Notes" which I find interesting and useful. Because Genki is so widely used, you can find lessons following Genki's teaching in many vocabulary apps - I personally use Renshuu's "Genki | Words", "Genki | Kanji" and "Genki | Grammar" premade decks. There are also quite a few Anki decks available (eg. Genki Lesson X, Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese, Genki 2nd edition), but I personally ended up making my own, as I wasn't satisfied with any of them (especially because they only quizz one way, making us guess the English meaning of Japanese words, and never the other way around).
I'll talk more about the Renshuu app in the Vocabulary & Kanjis sections below, but it's worth mentionning that this is what I use to review the grammar I've learn in the Genki textbooks. They have quick but useful exercises, and only use vocabulary you're familiar with - and it's free!
Bunpro is a web application created to learn Japanese grammar rules. What's great about it is that it was made specifically for Japanese, so it doesn't feel like something made for another language trying to adapt to Japanese (as many learning apps are). It has a SRS system, which means it works like flashcards and makes you review them when you most need it for optimal learning. There's a free version for one month, and I liked it, except at the time I didn't have enough vocabulary to use it properly - so I would recommend learning quite a bit of vocab before taking the free trial.
Cure Dolly makes short videos (usually less than 10 minutes) to explain Japanese grammar in very simplified - yet very efficient - ways. The main problem of this channel is that a lot of people complain about its audio quality, but I've heard there are transcripts online to get past this if it's too bothering.
I tried Japanese for Dummies, but disliked it because it was very theoretical, without any exercise, so it was easy to immediately forget what I was reading. Also, the edition I got had quite a lot of typos, unfortunately.
I also tried the Japanese Assimil book, but it had the opposite problem: only hands-on exercises and almost no grammar explanation, so even when I managed to do the exercises, I didn't learn much from it.
I've heard good things about Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese (which exist as a website, book and app) but I haven't tried it myself.
I use Renshuu both to learn kanjis and vocabulary, and I've been very happy with it! It's very customizable so you might have to play with the settings a bit to make it work for you. You can choose what you want to learn (kanjis, onyomi and kunyomi, radicals, etc.) and skip what you don't. You can choose at what frequency you should be taught new words - and for instance, I like the cute gamification, but if that's not your thing, you can turn it off! Some people are overwhelmed by Renshuu and don't manage to take the time to tailor it to their needs (which is fair), but if that's your case, maybe this Renshuu guide on Reddit might help you! Renshuu works with "schedules" (basically decks), some of which are based on popular textbooks - I personally use the Genki 1 textbook decks for vocabulary, kanjis and grammar. There are great community mnemonics and also a powerful dictionnary, both of which I often rely on to help me learn. The free version of Renshuu is very good and doesn't have any ads, and the paid version is cheap and more of a bonus that people usually buy just to support the project. I really love Renshuu and I'm so grateful of how much it's been helping me learning vocabulary and kanjis!
I also use Anki for vocabulary. It's a simple but powerful SRS flashcard app where you can either create your own decks or download some that other users have shared online. I personally started using it with the JLPT Tango N5 decks (see below) before creating my own deck to put any words or sentence from Genki 1 that wasn't already in my Renshuu deck, and it works well for me. Anki is completely free, and easy to use.
This book seems very popular to learn a bunch of basic vocabulary. I've tried it and its Anki deck for a while and I have mixed feelings about it. The first 75 words are quite useful: greetings, introducing yourself, family, etc. Then the vocabulary becomes less relevant (30 countries, many numerical things) and more complex (various verbs), both of which are near impossible for me to learn by pure memorization - I need exercises to learn how to conjugate the verbs, and to use the various numerical systems. So after a while I dropped it, and I'm not sure I would recommend it as most of the useful vocabulary is also taught in textbooks like Genki.
A fun video to learn Japanese counters with tuna from the Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo tv show!
Reading kanjis might be the biggest obstacle to learn Japanese: not only are there thousands of those symbols, but they usually have several pronunciations, and you need to learn them all. This section is about reading kanjis, because learning to write them is even harder, and you can ignore it if you want to - most likely you will use a keyboard and latin alphabet or kanas to write anyway. However, note that learning to write kanjis makes them easier to learn in general, and if you still write by hand regularly, you might want to consider it.
I already wrote quite a bit about how much I love Renshuu up there in the vocabulary section. I'll add here how, in my opinion, it compares to WaniKani (see below). First of all, it's free, whereas Wanikani is seriously expensive. Second of all, it has all the good sides of WaniKani - a solid SRS system, good mnemonics, etc - but also so much more: you can learn what you want to focus on (the vocabulary of a given textbook, for instance) instead of following a premade universal course, there are community mnemonics instead of just the ones provided by the app, and there's a great kanji dictionnary which I keep browsing out of curiosity and also because it really helps me learn better.
WaniKani is a good web app, and when I first started to learn Japanese in 2022, I loved it so much that I paid for it - and it's very expensive. The idea is that it teaches first the kanji radicals, and then simple looking kanjis, increasing their difficulty little by little. I loved this approach, but it also meant that a lot of the vocabulary I learnt couldn't really be used as it wasn't necessarily common - it was just simple looking. That's how I ended up learning "one track mind" (一本気) before I learnt how to read the verb "to eat" (食). In my opinion, the only advantage of WaniKani over Renshuu are that it teaches radicals (I really miss that in Renshuu, although I often learn them through the mnemonics anyway), and that it's all configured for you, so you don't have to fiddle with the settings to make it work better... but the down side of this is that it's one size fits all, which might not fit you as well as a properly tailored Renshuu.
Skritter, which I've used to learn simplified Chinese characters (for my Mandarin studies), has some kanji classes as well. In my opinion, Skritter is only useful if you want to learn how to write kanjis, on top of reading them. The app was made with this purpose in mind, so it makes sense that it'd be pretty good at it! But it isn't free, and in my opinion it isn't great at teaching kanjis in general, so I would learn to read them in Renshuu and then come to practice the writing here (although Renshuu also has a writing feature so might as well use that...).
I tried Japanese Kanji Study - 漢字学習, which a lot of people praise, but it didn't work at all for me - it doesn't have any mnemonics integrated (and no way to add your own), doesn't teach radicals, and usually only gave one meaning per word, which altogether made the learning much harder than Renshuu or WaniKani for me.
For those who prefer textbooks over apps or websites, Remembering The Kanji by James W. Heisig comes highly recommended. It teaches radicals with small stories, and then the kanjis using the same stories and tying them together. This is actually quite similar to how WaniKani teaches them, but in an analog way and without an SRS system or audio. I haven't tried it myself, because I need an SRS system to learn properly, but it seems interesting.
Dictionnaries are important in Japanese, not only to translate terms, but also to loop up in what stroke order a character is written.
My favorite one is Jisho - it's straightforward and has very good stroke illustrations (here's an exemple). It's available both as a phone app and as a website.
A translator add-on is practical so you don't have to go through copy/pasting and switching windows every time you need to check the meaning of a kanji.
I used to use Yomichan, but it doesn't exist anymore, so I switched to Yomitan, it's successor. This video tutorial on how to set up Yomichan is also useful for Yomitan, and how to link it to Anki if needed. I personally downloaded the Jitendex and KANJIDIC dictionnaries in Yomitan. Yomitan gives the definition of the word, as well as the hiragana transcription and a recorded pronunciation of it. It's activated by hoovering over a kanji and pressing the shift key.
A friend also advised Rikaikun, but it's on Chrome only, so I've never tested it.
A Japanese digital keyboard is needed to write Japanese on a phone or computer. I write with the latin alphabet and the digital keyboard switches it to hiragana, katakana and kanjis (for instance if I type "cha" it will propose 茶).
Because I use Linux Ubuntu, this article gave me all the info I needed to set up a Japanese keyboard on my computer.
I've used slightly different methods for learning Japanese in the past, but I'll list below what I've used when I restarted learning Japanese in 2025 after many years away from the language (with a level close to zero).
I was already quite comfortable with the Japanese pronunciation (at least the theory of it), but I needed to dust up my kanas, so I used the Hiragana Pro and Katakana Pro apps to review their readings, and Ringotan to learn how to write them.
As a general frame for my learning, I use the Genki textbooks, currently the second edition because that's what I was able to find easily. To support my learning on Genki, I use the Renshuu app to learn the vocabulary and kanjis from the book, and to practice the grammar. I also use Anki where I make my own vocabulary flashcards for anything I encounter that hasn't been taught to me yet in Renshuu... and to learn how my favorite anime characters' names are written! Genki takes its time teaching kanjis, so in addition to the Genki kanjis, I'm also using Renshuu to learn kanjis starting from the lowest level (schedules "Beginner Kanji (N5)", "Pre-Intermediate Kanji (N4)", etc.)
Let's start with the obvious: yes, I watch a lot of anime. I watch them with English subtitles, so I don't learn much, but it still feels really satisfying to recognize a sentence I know! As my level advances, I'll try to start rewatching shows I'm familiar with, this time without subtitles. For some more focused listening practice I watch some TikToks in easy-Japanese. I like that they're very short and have subtitles, it makes it easy to watch them regularly without it feeling like a chore. When on walks with my dogs, I also listen to easy-Japanese podcasts. For reading practice, I rely heavily on the Tadoku Graded Readers, and I'm trying to read Yotsuba as well. Finally to practice writing, I write small sentences in a paper diary (to practice hand-writing characters) two times a week and in my sentence practice page once a week.