Kanji Garden Japanese

Easy to use

An Ingenious Tool for Learning Kanji This is the first review I’ve ever written, and it’s all because of the extraordinary dedication and detail put into Kanji Garden. I felt the least I could do is spend a little time writing something positive about it. I even subscribed after the trial! Many reviews have already highlighted the app’s strengths, so I’ll try to add something different. I keep discovering new content as I learn. As mentioned, the kanji are structured to build on each other, which is extremely helpful. Initially, I thought the example sentences were too advanced, but then I realized you can press on almost anything for more information. This feature made the app invaluable to me. The vocabulary, example sentences, and the unique learning method make each kanji a lesson in and of themselves that prepares you for the next. If you’re serious about learning Japanese Kanji, this app and its innovative style are definitely worth having as tools in your arsenal. Highly recommended!

Third party pay service doesn’t facilitate the cancellation of subscriptions and the only way to do so is to contact the developer that doesn’t respond to emails.

I used to love this app, but now it won’t even load for me. It gets stuck on a loading screen whenever I open it, so it’s basically useless now. Can’t even contact the developer through the app store, because it just routes me back to the broken app. Sad!

Charging $120 for an app that hasn’t been updated in 3 years and has very solvable problems. This is no more than someone’s passive income stream.

To preface, I’m an ultra-beginner so I have no idea how well this app scales for learning more complex characters/strings. But that said… I’ve tried a few Kanji apps as well as several Anki kanji decks and none of them stick for me. This shouldn’t be as revolutionary as it is, but this app is actually transparent about the different readings a character has (even within the on’yomi/kun’yomi series) instead of making you memorize the differences by brute force and guesswork. For me, this extra effort into teaching me how kanji work is part of what makes them stick. I agree with others that it would be nice to have an option to “continue reviewing” past its set schedule for you. I’d also like to have the reviews get harder by asking for typed input after a certain proficiency threshold is reached (right now, you have to manually toggle for all kanji you’re learning whether you want multiple choice or typed answer input). Other than that, it’s been really helpful to get me actually learning kanji and I’m going to pay for the full version once my free trial continues.

This is a good app, which with a few tweaks could be a great app. But it seems it’s no longer being actively developed. Some of the words given to practice are archaeic and no longer used. It would be great to be able to remove them from the list. Focusing on words and pronunciations that are rarely used is not efficient. Similarly, there are some common words that don’t seem to come up for practice, so it would also be great to be able to add new words for practice. Another useful addition would be to be able to specify kanji that YOU confuse a certain kanji with. That way the app could give you both definitions when guessing the meaning to make things harder and make you think more about the differences between the two kanji.

I enjoyed my time with it but, as others have pointed out, this is actually more of a “free-to-start” service than a fully free experience. You’re only given a month of unlimited access before you have to upgrade to keep your momentum going. Otherwise the number of daily reviews is more limited (and I think you go from being able to study 5 kanji at a time to just 2 without upgrading.) Definitely did not know this when I started using it, and it’s currently not mentioned on the App Store page.

Great way to learn kanji!

This is such a good app for a pleasant approach and way to learn kanji! I enjoy the fact that the name of the app isn’t meaningless because I was shocked to find out that you can actually grow kanji character as if they’re plants, for some reason I find it cute. But it’s a great and fun way to learn kanji!! Definitely recommend.