What is Reddit's opinion of Hiragana - Learn Japanese?

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For learning the kana, I used the following for Hiragana and it's sister program for katakana.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.legendarya.helloandroid

I know you said ipad, maybe these apps are available on Apple.

If you have an android you should look at this:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.legendarya.helloandroid

and

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.legendarya.katakana

These helped me a lot.

I'm not the best person to comment, since a) I haven't practiced my 日本語 in forever, and b) my handwriting is shit, even in English. However, my thoughts:

Your の is a bit off. I try to think of it as the red circle with a line through it, as used in signs that prohibit something, like 'no smoking'. Keep that in mind, and you should get the balance right.

I'm bored, and I'm going to type a bunch more that's not really about your handwriting, but it might be helpful to you anyways.

If you have a pen-enabled tablet or computer, you should try that. I use my Galaxy Note for practice (well, I did, before I turned into a lazy procrastinating bastard). I made up some quick kana practice sheets for myself, put the PDF on my tablet, and this lets me practice whenever and wherever, without wasting a bunch of paper.

I also did up some fairly nice-looking kanji practice sheets. They've got a spot up at the top for the word (seven characters, so you can have the kanji followed by okurigana if necessary), a spot to write the meaning and check off what kind of word (い-adjective, な-adjective, noun, etc), and then a bunch of spots to write the various conjugations/inflections of the word, both for polite and plain versions, and finally a spot for the て-form. Obviously, not all of these will be relevant for all words.

The problem with these is that they're very tedious to make (the semi-filled-in ones, I mean). I had to use LibreOffice to type in the characters for the word, and do this over and over, duplicating the page each time, since it's one page per word. Before I got lazy and stopped practicing, I was planning to write a program to do it. There's a database (the JMdict project) that's used in English/Japanese dictionaries like jisho.org and takoboto.jp. The idea was to type in a word, and the program would fetch the relevant information (meaning, etc) from the database, populate the fields in the worksheet, and convert the page(s) to PDF for printing or use on my tablet. Maybe I will be inspired to work on it again, but I'm almost as out of practice with coding as I am with Japanese.

Some suggestions for you:

Download this font if you haven't already. It's got the kanji (and kana, but you're pretty good there) with little tiny numbers to indicate the stroke orders. You'll probably need to use it at a larger font size in order to make the notations visible, but it's an incredibly useful tool. I would use this font when filling in the initial kanji word in my worksheets.

If you don't have a tablet, or even if you do, grab a Boogie Board. The Jot 8.5 model is the one I have. The 'copy your drawing to your phone' features are rubbish- it's basically an app on your phone where you take a picture of your drawing- but the Jot 8.5 is fairly solid on its own. It's light, thin (about 5mm), and best of all, it's cheap (you'll probably pay about $30 for it). Think of it like a reusable piece of paper, except that you cannot erase just part of it; the erase button clears the whole screen. I actually think this is a good thing for practice, because it forces you to get it right, or start over. :)

If you're on Android, a few apps that I've found helpful are these:

This hiragana one and this katakana one. Both of these are multiple choice 'pick the kana/roumaji' ones, but they also have a 'draw the kana' mode too. They work great on phones, as the interface is really simple and tappable areas are big, so you can use them on the metro, waiting in line at the supermarket, or driving your car. I'm kidding about this last one. Don't do this. Just don't. :)

For basic vocabulary and sentence structure, I like Human Japanese. I think it might be available for iOS as well, but I'm not sure. I've ponied up for the paid version, but they have a free 'lite' version if you want to try before you buy. They have an intermediate version too, but I've not mastered the basic one yet.

For kanji practice, I use Yomikata Z. The last time I used it (which, to be fair, was probably before the most recent update), it had some glitchy keyboard behavior, particularly with an external keyboard. I think it was because the developer was using his own way of handling the input, so as to allow people without a Japanese IME installed to use the app, and this caused problems with system-level IMEs. However, when using the handwriting recognition on my Samsung tablets, particularly my Note 10.1, it didn't have any problems. Thus, when I used the mode where I'd write the appropriate kana for a kanji in question, I'd get both kana handwriting practice and kanji memorization practice at the same time. The developer has a built-in 'contact me' feature, and responded to me fairly promptly when I contacted him about the keyboard issues, so this is a good thing too.

A flashcard app is also a good idea, but not mandatory. If you use one, it's best to make the cards yourself, instead of downloading a deck that someone else made. Making the cards yourself aids with your recall. I basically stopped using my flashcard app once I started using Human Japanese and Yomikata Z regularly.

An app that's not built as a practice tool for Japanese that's still helpful for me is Squid. It's actually a note-taking app. It allows you to change the page background to various line/grid patterns, or import PDFs, and mark them up in the program. This is what I use when I practice my worksheets on my tablet. Some of the features (I think PDF is one of them) are paid features, and I think they've changed their purchase model; when I installed the app, it was still called 'Papyrus', and the features I bought were one-time unlocks. I think at least some of the features are based off of a subscription model now. Still, you can try it and see if it works for you. If not, and you still want to do writing practice on a tablet, you can just use a PDF viewer, as many allow you to mark up the PDFs. You might not have as much flexibility doing it, though.

If you'd like me to tidy up some blank kana/kanji worksheets, let me know, and I can do that, and put them up on Dropbox or something.

Good luck. You might just have motivated me to start practicing again. :)

[edit:] I'm a fucking idiot! I forgot to recommend Tae Kim's guide. It's more about grammar and sentence structure than about handwriting, and there's enough information there to make it a pretty heavy resource (in other words, don't expect to get through it quickly; I've barely touched it myself), but it's one of the best resources out there.

[edit #2:] I also forgot to mention that, if you like takoboto.jp, they have an Android app, but unfortunately for the Apple people, no iOS app.

Oh man, I've got a whole slew of apps that I use on my phone for learning Japanese.

For general leaning I use Human Japanese

For reenforcement I use Duolingo

For writing practice I use apps by "Legendarya/Imaginactiva" Hiragana-Learn Japanese and Katakana-Learn Japanese as well as an app called Write It! by Jernung.

I also use Cram to study the vocabulary from Human Japanese with a set of flashcards that I created myself for each lesson. Let me know if you want a copy of what I have so far.

I have a few other apps that I use, but these have been the most useful so far.

Edit: Added Write It! to the list of writing practice apps.

I'm a few days late to this, but here are a few suggestions, mostly apps (I have a droid/use Google Play, so YMMV):

-To start, I'd highly recommend learning at least the Katakana/Hiragana. I learned using 'Hiragana - Learn Japanese' and 'Katakana - Learn Japanese apps', both by Legendarya. Neither have descriptive titles, but they should be one of the first results when you search the Play store. They're free. This is the Hiragana one. Both apps have a flash card interface as well as a very good touch-screen finger-drawing section to learn how to write the characters. Very strict on stroke order.

-In this vein, the app Obenkyo is very good as well.

-Human Japanese. This app is incredible. To date, it's the only app I've ever actually bought and paid full price for. There's a trial version of it, but you'll probably quickly want to buy the whole thing. There's a beginner and an intermediate app. HJ is textbook-style, but not dry and always compares ideas and grammar back to the way English functions. It's fun, brisk, and teaches you a lot. Each chapter has Review quizzes and Vocabulary quizzes. The early chapters also teach you Hiragana/Katakana and has a matching game. Seriously, I love this app.

-Memrise. Flashcard-style memory tool. I thoroughly recommend the app versus the web interface for Japanese, as the website is finicky about romanji typing.

-There are other apps/websites like Tae Kim, Kanji Sempai, EasyKanji, etc. A good thing to do is to search the free apps and check out some of the higher rated ones.

-Also, if you're willing to throw down a little money, japanesepod101.com is a pretty great resource. Their podcast is great. You could do their free trial and download as much of the podcast as you can to check it out. Further, some of the expensive programs are good, too, but there's so much free/cheap information out there, you probably won't need them.

Hope this helps!

Anki - download some decks aimed towards something a little more specific than "2000 Kanji" so you can focus your learning more.

Hiragana Learn/Katakana Learn - gives you the romanji then you 'write' it, you have to do it in correct stroke order too. Very very useful.

Dr.Moku - fantastic for mnemonic memory learning, think of the abstract squiggle ア as an image in your own language, in this case the American landmass. Really good for really memorizing things.

In my case I went and got some study apps. The first two helped me a great deal, but they are far from perfect so I would forego these, and use Kanji Study (#3) instead.

• Hiragana
• Katakana

• Kanji and both others

• I also watched a buttload of anime to absorb common phrases, words, and -isms. Lots of travel shows/vlogs to learn about places, foods, and things.

• Pimsleur's Japanese audio course to learn the verbal language.

• Planning a trip later this year so I had better learn something or I'm going to be totally lost and overwhelmed.

So far: the pimsleur audio course is fantastic and only takes a half an hour a day. I do it while I walk to and from work.

Inside of a week you can learn each hiragana and katakana with quiz apps- and as long as you keep up with it every other day or two after that to keep it in your head, it will stay.

I learned them, played Japanese games on my phone, could translate the menus and look things up with Google translate, stopped for 2 months land lost 40% of it :\ currently starting over.

I started by learning Hiragana and Katakana with the linked android apps. For a while I was using the JASensei app, then I bought Genki 1 and Practice Makes Perfect: Japanese Grammar. I use Anki to build my vocabulary by making my own "words in the wild" deck, as well as following along with a Genki 1 and 2 vocab shared deck.

I found this app very useful: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.legendarya.helloandroid

Try Katakana learn and Hiragana learn. They're both lightweight free apps for your phone that teach you everything, available on Google Play. They're a sort of quiz game, but you can also learn to draw them using those. They're what finally got me into Japanese a year ago, easiest way to remember. You're going to be reading a lot of both and remember them better anyway.

I also recommend Obenkyo (you can draw kana there too and it has Kanji) and Kanji Study. Both of these have kanji for all JLPT levels, but you can practice drawing them at your own pace in the second one (Obenkyo only has a quiz), and it also has radicals.

This sub actually has very detailed resources on the sidebar that you can use.

I recommend you follow the course at your school and spend some time doing research on the same subjects in your spare time. There's plenty of free information on sites like japanese.about.com and a ton of videos on youtube.

If you already know all the hiragana then you don't needed this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.legendarya.helloandroid

But there is a similar app for katakana and a phrase book by the same people. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.legendarya.katakana

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nugalis.japanesephrasebook

But these are only on android.

I have no clue what I'm doing but I got mango languages recently.