Japanese Language App for Beginners, the Best that You will Find Out There

An interesting topic came into my head recently, you see, I have been studying the Japanese language for years now and it came into my head the methods and tools that I had used over the years of my said study. Today, I already have a Japanese Language Proficiency Test level N2(JPLT N2) certificate, I got that certificate a year ago after passing the exam for the said certificate. To tell you guys more about my experience, the key to being successful into studying this language or any subject is simply interest. Without interest any language class, application, teacher or textbook will do nothing to you.

As a student of the language, I studied the whole thing in my own. As in no language classes, no teachers, no online programs no going to Japan sort of thing, just pure simple hard work.

Okay, I know my language experience was something because I get that reaction all the time once people knew that I studied everything just over the net without taking any programs or whatsoever but this post isn't really about me, its about the two best applications that I used over the course of my adventure in the language.

Let me present to you guys, Obenkyo and Kanji Study.

These two applications were the two applications that I relied to from the start up until now. I don't really use them that much anymore nowadays like I used to but I can tell that this applications can help a lot of learners out there if they really wanted to learn about Japanese.

The interface of the two is quite simple, there is no much to tell about their interfaces but I do believe with the developers doing so is understandable, the purpose of these two applications are for learning and not for entertainment. Putting much more effort on the functions and content is way much more important than the interface.

Obenkyo vs. Kanji Study, both have significance in their own. For readiness and as a whole for the total starter, Obenkyo is a must to have. It has everything that you will be needing from the core basics such as Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. What pushes Obenkyo more for the starters than Kanji Study is Tae Kim's grammar text book that is contained in the Obenkyo application.

Tae Kim is an author of an online book about basic Japanese that you can download in PDF for free. Is it safe to say that in the free text book category, Tae Kim's book is the best bet. Of course I can tell, I did all my study in the language for free.

Obenkyo has flash card programs in it. A flash card program is a game where someone has to distinguish a particular Japanese Character(Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana) based upon the choices.

There are other games that focuses in mastering the stroke orders of every character and games for mastering vocabulary.

I think the flashes of Obenkyo for the Japanese characters and for the vocabularies are useful,convenient and somewhat reliable for the sake of memorization and neutralizing the informations in an individual's head. Playing with this flashes from time to time would be really helpful for building that Kanji foundation that every learner needs in learning the language itself.

What I see that is somewhat troublesome in Obenkyo is it's Japanse character drawing game. Look at above, I properly drew the Japanese character for "fish" but the application marked it wrong with a symbol of a question mark telling me that it cannot distinguish what did I just drew. I really felt frustrated when I was dealing with this drawing game of Obenkyo when I was still starting in my study because no matter what I do the program kept on telling me that what I drew was wrong. Later on I just realized that the game itself was faulty and wasn't reliable.

But even so, with the other contents and functions Obenkyo have I will still recommend it. Anyway, mastering the strokes is more efficient in paper so I suggest to do the writing drills in paper instead.

And on the top of all that function in Obenkyo, Obenkyo itself is a free application that you can downlaod in mayn application websites. It is free unlike Kanji Study.

Maybe with all those functions that I mentioned about Obenkyo you might had expected more for Kanji Study since it is not a free application unlike Obenkyo. Actually, there isn't much in difference between the two.

Kanji Study is an application that is more focused into mastering the Japanese characters. It also has those character flashes that I also mentioned in Obenkyo but flashes only for the Japanese characters, no vocabulary. The stroke mastering game is better than Obenkyo's, Kanji Study's drawing game isn't perfect but is far better, it is not as disastrous as Obenkyo's so I think I can recommend that game of Kanji Study's too.

This application is for the more advanced learner that is already involved in thousands of Kanji that he or she is mastering.

What I liked about Kanji Study is the sample sentences and the name usages for each Kanji character, I am telling you, these samples are really useful once you already broke through that first 1000 characters, from there onwards this study thing will start making you into a lunatic. Just look at what happened to me...

Kanji Study has activity records too that keeps track of your study schedule. The function is more of an organizer that you can set if you target, lets say 10 minutes a day of study.

As I mentioned above Kanji Study isn't free but you will be able to find a hacked version over the net that is not hard to find. So just look for an unlocked version and you're ready to go.

Well that is all for this review. I think that is more than enough to say about these two applications. To those who are studying or are still planning to, good luck to you guys. Ganbatte!

Everything in this post are mine except for the rights on the said applications and patents, the photos have been captured from my phone and the words I used are all mine