The Best Apps to Learn Japanese, and the Two That Cannot Teach It

FE By Fawnio Editorial Team, Family safety and learning-tech reviewers at Fawnio.
Company documentation review · Updated July 23, 2026

Why Japanese is a different shopping trip

With Spanish or French, almost every app can teach you, so the choice is about style. Japanese narrows the field hard, for two reasons.

First, the writing. Japanese uses three systems at once: hiragana and katakana, the two 46-character phonetic alphabets collectively called kana, and kanji, the thousands of characters borrowed from Chinese. You can speak simple Japanese knowing only kana, but you cannot read anything real without kanji, and kanji is a long memorisation project rather than a set of lessons. An app that keeps you in romaji, the Roman-letter spelling, can make month one feel fast and leave you unable to read a menu in month six.

Second, half the usual apps opt out. Two of the biggest names in language learning simply do not offer Japanese, and plenty of comparison articles never mention it. Getting that fact straight is the first money-saver on this page.

The sequence that works for Japanese: learn kana free, add a human as soon as you can form simple sentences, and if reading is a goal, run a kanji spaced-repetition tool underneath the whole time. Everything below is sorted into that order rather than by which company we can earn from.

Duolingo, the free way into kana

Duolingo states that everyone can access its courses without spending anything, with ads for free users and paid tiers, Super and Max, that add an ad-free experience and AI features. For Japanese specifically, its own explanation of the course is the useful part: it teaches the 46 hiragana and 46 katakana characters, and rather than making you memorise every kanji up front, it introduces kanji gradually inside whole words as you progress, once you have a command of the two kana systems.

Why it is first: getting the two kana alphabets down is the genuine beginner milestone, and a free app you will open daily is the right tool for it. The gamified character practice for tracing and reading kana is well suited to that stage.

Where it stops, honestly: it cannot hear your pronunciation and correct it, it cannot hold an unscripted conversation, and because it introduces kanji slowly within words, it is not a system for building the several hundred to two thousand kanji that real reading needs. Use it to reach the point where a beginner conversation is possible, then add a teacher, and add a kanji tool if you want to read.

We do not publish a Super or Max price here. Prices in this category vary by region and purchase channel and the pricing page did not return a readable figure when we checked on July 23, 2026. Check the number shown in your own app. There is no commercial relationship between Fawnio and Duolingo and no link to it here.

italki, the cheapest way to actually speak Japanese

A marketplace where you book one-to-one video lessons with individual Japanese teachers who set their own prices, with no subscription and no schedule imposed on you. italki lists native Japanese teachers, splits them into professional teachers, who must upload documents showing training and teaching experience, and community tutors, who provide conversation practice, and it has tutors who specialise in the JLPT, the standard Japanese proficiency exam. Its published price bands are 10 to 120 dollars per lesson for professional teachers and 5 to 120 dollars for community tutors.

For Japanese this is the highest-value step on the page, because the things an app cannot do, correcting your pronunciation and pitch, telling you whether you are actually reading a kanji or just guessing it, and holding a real conversation, are exactly what a native tutor does, and conversation practice with a community tutor starts at 5 dollars a lesson.

The trade-off is the money mechanic, and we say it on every italki page: you buy italki Credits rather than lessons, the payment terms state that no refunds are given for credits purchased, credits expire after twelve months of account inactivity, and lesson packages must be used within six months. Top up for the lessons you have scheduled. There is a real protection worth knowing: the satisfaction guarantee covers trial lessons, twice, claimed within 48 hours.

Our italki review covers the tiers and the guarantee in detail, how much italki costs turns the ranges into monthly budgets, and italki vs Preply compares it with the other big tutor marketplace.

Browse Japanese teachers on italki

Mondly, if English is not your first language

A self-study app that teaches Japanese, among 41 languages, and whose genuine differentiator is that it teaches from your own native language rather than routing every lesson through English. If your household speaks Turkish, Polish, Spanish or Portuguese, that removes a translation step that quietly slows Japanese down. Mondly's own Japanese pages describe short daily lessons, conversation exercises and a chatbot for spoken practice. The free tier covers daily lessons, challenges and vocabulary review; Premium adds conversation practice, pronunciation lessons, grammar guides, conjugation tables, kids content and augmented-reality lessons.

Two honest limits. The conversation feature is scripted practice rather than an open-ended tutor, so treat it as speaking drills, not a substitute for a person. And the refund position is regional: Mondly's terms state that amounts are non-refundable unless stated otherwise and grant a 14-day cooling-off right only to subscribers in the UK and EU. On the US App Store the listing showed 4.7 out of 5 from 33,000 ratings, while Trustpilot showed 2.6 out of 5 from 779 reviews, both checked July 23, 2026, with the low scores driven by billing rather than teaching. Our Mondly review works through all of it.

See what Mondly Premium includes

The two that do not teach Japanese

This matters enough to state on its own, because both come up constantly and both are dead ends for Japanese.

• Babbel teaches around a dozen languages, almost all European, and Japanese is not one of them. Babbel is a well-regarded structured course for European languages; it is simply not a Japanese product.
• Lingoda, the live-class school we cover elsewhere, teaches six languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Business English. It has no Japanese classes. For a scheduled-class format in Japanese you would need a different provider; on this page the live-teacher role goes to italki instead.

Neither is a criticism of the product. It is a warning about comparison articles that list them for Japanese without checking. We name both only as benchmarks and link to neither.

For kanji: the specialist tools

Once you can read kana and hold a basic conversation, kanji becomes the thing standing between you and real Japanese, and general apps are not built for it. Two specialists come up for good reason, and we name them as benchmarks with no link.

WaniKani is a spaced-repetition system built only for kanji. It states that it teaches over 2,000 kanji and over 500 radicals, the components it uses to break characters down, on an SRS schedule that spaces each item's reviews according to how well you remember it. It does one job and is designed to do it thoroughly rather than quickly.

LingoDeer was built specifically for Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and its reputation is for explaining grammar, the "why" behind sentence structure, alongside vocabulary and native-speaker audio, which general Western-language apps tend to gloss over for Japanese. It is a reasonable structured self-study option to run alongside a teacher.

We publish no price for WaniKani or LingoDeer. Neither returned a figure we verified, and neither is a Fawnio partner. They are named because a Japanese page that ignored kanji tools would be incomplete.

The options side by side

If the learner is a child

The same sequence holds with one addition: an adult stays in the loop. italki states that most of its users are adults, asks parents to create and manage the account and to communicate with teachers themselves, warns that not all teachers are prepared to teach kids and points to its Kids category filter, and tells parents to supervise lessons. Mondly includes kids content in Premium and, because it teaches from your own language, suits a household where Japanese is a third language. A free kana app suits an older child who wants to start reading along with what they already watch, with the writing system as the first goal rather than conversation.

What we would do

Spend nothing for the first month and learn hiragana and katakana on a free tier until you can read them without thinking. Then book two or three trial lessons with native teachers, one community tutor for conversation and one professional if you want structure or JLPT preparation, and keep the one worth meeting again. If reading Japanese is your goal, start a kanji spaced-repetition tool and run it underneath everything else. And do not spend an afternoon trying to make Babbel or Lingoda teach you Japanese, because neither one does. The full comparison of the three teaching shapes, and the credit and renewal mechanics behind each, is on our language learning hub. Learning Korean next? Our best apps to learn Korean flips this page's logic, because there the alphabet is the easy part and the grammar is the work. Learning Chinese? Our best apps to learn Chinese shares the character challenge but adds tones as the part no app corrects. Learning a Roman-alphabet language instead? Our best apps to learn Italian shows where a live school stops at A2.

Frequently asked questions

How we reach these verdicts, and the sources behind them, is on our methodology page. Duolingo's Japanese character coverage comes from Duolingo's own explanation of the course; italki's price bands, credit rules, JLPT and Kids categories and Mondly's Japanese lessons, free and Premium contents and refund terms were read from each company's own pages and verified July 23, 2026; the WaniKani and LingoDeer descriptions come from those companies' own sites. That Babbel and Lingoda do not offer Japanese was confirmed against Babbel's and Lingoda's own course listings. We publish no price for Duolingo, WaniKani or LingoDeer because none returned a readable public figure we verified. App store and Trustpilot ratings are attributed to their platforms. We earn a commission if you sign up to italki or Mondly through our links; Duolingo, WaniKani, LingoDeer, Babbel and Lingoda are named for comparison only and are not linked.