Ringotan

Useful, has many features, but lacks in design at the moment

Enjoying practicing hiragana with this so far. Really helps to learn to write instead of just read

This is awesome when used in conjunction with Kodansha’s Learner’s Kanji dictionary! (Better than the widely-used RTK - Remember the Kanji)

Ich habe zwar mit Tofugo Hiragana und Katakana lesen gelernt, aber nicht schreiben. Auch Kanji lerne ich mit WaniKani, aber auch hier nicht schreiben. Die App ist klasse! Man lernt die in der Grundschule: erst nachspuren, dann mit Punkten, zu Schluss ohne Hilfe. Macht man mal Fehler kommen kleine Hilfen zurück. Mir gefällt, dass die Ideallinie immer erscheint. So kann man sich Stück für Stück dieser annähern und es schleichen sich keine falschen Formen ein. Super Ergänzung zu meinen anderen Materialien.

Endlich gibt es diese tolle App auch für iOS! Obwohl sie sich noch in der Beta-Phase befindet, bietet die App eine sehr gute Leistung beim Lernen japanischer Kanji.

While still in beta for now, this is on a good way of becoming an excellent app. Very useful indeed!

I was grateful to find an app that would test my writing ability, as writing practice helps me learn/review, but I wanted something app-based. I’m using it paired with WaniKani and the Minna no Nihongo textbook series.

It has some interesting features but some design choices that made it unusable for me. The worst being a lack of support for dark mode and settings for people with less than great vision. Poor contrast in some places, forced white space in much of the UI. Does not respect increasing font size, etc. For me this was enough to delete the app, if it hurts my eyes to use then it’s no good for me. Other things that bugged me were things like only able to select one learning resource. I know I am not the only one using textbooks and online resources such as Wanikani and jpbd.io. Also, no way I could see to create and save my own learning list, I could select a lot of kanji from the jplt list for a custom study but I could not find a way to save it. On the really big plus side, no ads. If the UI had been designed better to support Apple’s in place mechanisms for vision impaired I could have perhaps dealt with the lack of customizability. If your eyes are great and you don’t a flexible and customizable learning plan then give this app a test run, it might very well work for you. If you are a more advanced learner using multiple resources I think you will also find this app too restrictive. Being free and without ads it’s worth giving it a try. Still searching for a well designed kanji writing practice app.

This app is very useful for getting in spaced repetition for learning Kanji. There is only one thing I would change that would make all the difference. After you get far enough in, the phonetic hint for the kanji is not enough. For example the kanji for 写真　has two characters that both give the “SHA shin” hint but each kanji’s first strokes start in different places. And there are several Kanji that are like that. Even if you know both in your mind if you start in the wrong place it will count it as wrong. If there was a way to hint that it is one character or the other this app would be 5 stars without question.

Using this with my 2 classroom textbooks and Wanikani is really great! It’s frustrating to have so many different arrangements of kanji (in each book), but Ringotan makes it easy to study exactly what you want. I find that writing out the kanji is an important step to learn them, beyond just reading flash cards. Thanks for this!