Japanese Learning Apps (2026): What Six Tools Cost and Teach

The short answer. Japanese learning apps come in two species: course apps that walk you through the language lesson by lesson, and review apps whose entire job is deciding when you next see something you already met. Every figure below comes from each vendor's own pricing and help pages, opened and read on September 17, 2026: Bunpro's full grammar suite runs $5 a month, Anki is free on every platform except a $24.99 one-time iOS purchase, WaniKani hands you Levels 1–3 free and charges from Level 4. And no, Babbel does not have Japanese; its languages page lists thirteen, and Japanese is not among them. A self-learner's sane opening: Duolingo or Renshuu to start, WaniKani on the kanji problem, Bunpro on grammar, Anki once you want to own the machinery. Disclosure: I build Piccard, a capture-and-review tool in this same market, so it gets measured with the same ruler at the end.

1. Duolingo: the default starting point

The Japanese course is free to study from the first hiragana to the last lesson, and it is the only app on this list my non-learner relatives have heard of. Paid tiers exist above the free course — Super and Max — and Duolingo's help center lists Super's subscription features as "unlimited hearts, no ads, mistakes review." What I could not do is quote you a price: no single figure is published consistently on Duolingo's own pages, and the number you see depends on platform, region, and whatever promotion is running. So none is printed here.

On method, Duolingo's own blog describes the character exercises:

> "We've gamified Japanese characters in new exercises that allow you to practice tracing, spelling, and reading hiragana, katakana, and kanji." — Duolingo Blog

That same article lays out the sequencing: hiragana first, katakana early, kanji deliberately spread out so beginners are not buried. Fit: your first month, free, on any device you own. Know before you commit: grammar explanations stay thin, and the daily streak is engineered to be the product. Duolingo builds the habit; it has never been the whole diet.

2. WaniKani: kanji on rails

WaniKani teaches kanji and vocabulary in a fixed order, with mnemonics and an SRS that decides when each item returns. The homepage promise is blunt: "2,000 kanji. 6,000 vocabulary words. In just over a year." The free portion is generous and precisely bounded:

> "WaniKani is free until you reach Level 4." — WaniKani Knowledge

By WaniKani's own arithmetic, Levels 1–3 cover roughly 100 kanji and 200 vocabulary words. Past that gate: $9 a month, $89 a year, or $299 once for lifetime, tax excluded, per the premium membership page. Fit: anyone whose wall is kanji, which is eventually everyone. Know before you commit: the order is fixed and the review schedule is not negotiable, so cramming before a test is structurally impossible; and the radical mnemonics use WaniKani's own invented names, a small dialect you learn alongside the kanji.

3. Bunpro: grammar you type, not tap

Bunpro is a grammar SRS: each point comes with a write-up and example sentences, and you answer by typing the correct form into a sentence with a blank. The current plans, as their pricing page lists them: a free tier marked "Free Forever," $5 a month, or $150 once for lifetime. New accounts get more than a taste:

> "All new accounts get a 30-day free trial of Bunpro Premium. No credit card required!" — Bunpro

The paid feature list runs to write-ups for 900+ grammar items and over 10,000 example sentences with native audio, plus WaniKani integration that hides furigana above your WaniKani level. Fit: the learner who finished a beginner course and still cannot explain the difference between は and が at gunpoint. Know before you commit: you will need a Japanese keyboard on day one; and Bunpro is a grammar spine, expecting your vocabulary to come from somewhere else.

4. Renshuu: the whole toolbox in one app

Renshuu covers kanji, vocabulary, grammar, and listening in a single (free-to-start) app, with prebuilt schedules that follow real textbooks (the homepage demo walks a student from Genki 1 through Tobira to job-specific kanji). Its signature trick is level-awareness:

> "Renshuu can instantly adjust what and how you see Japanese to match your knowledge level, down to each, individual kanji." — renshuu.org

Mark a kanji as known and its furigana stops appearing in your sentences across the whole app. There is a pro upgrade, sold as a monthly subscription or a lifetime membership; the prices are visible only inside a logged-in account, and I could not verify them from outside, so I print none. Fit: the person who wants one app and is willing to learn its deep settings menus. Know before you commit: that depth is real — Renshuu has more toggles than the rest of this list combined, and the first week is a configuration project.

5. Anki: the standard, free almost everywhere

Anki is the general-purpose flashcard program whose scheduling the rest of this list quietly imitates. The pricing split is unusual and worth stating exactly: desktop is free on Windows, Mac, and Linux; AnkiDroid is free; AnkiWeb sync is free; and the official iOS app, AnkiMobile, is $24.99 as a one-time purchase on the US App Store, with the listing noting that sales fund development of everything else. Modern Anki ships the FSRS scheduler family built in:

> "The same SM2 and FSRS scheduling algorithms that the computer version of Anki uses, which remind you of material as you're about to forget it." — AnkiMobile on the App Store

Fit: anyone who wants to own their cards, their fields, their everything. Know before you commit: Anki ships empty. The content is your job — start with our guide to the best Japanese decks (short version: Kaishi 1.5k first) rather than the older listicles still crowning the Core decks.

Does Babbel have Japanese?

No — Babbel does not offer a Japanese course. Verified on Babbel's own foreign languages page, which states: "Currently, you can learn the following languages: Danish, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish." Thirteen languages, in other words, and no Japanese. The page also notes the first lesson of every course is free to try. If some article or listicle once told you Babbel covers Japanese, the languages page linked above is the thing to trust over it.

The comparison, in one table

The honest slot: Piccard, my own tool

Piccard is not a course app and does not pretend to be one. There is no lesson path and no mascot. It sits at the other end of the pipeline: when Japanese appears in front of you, it turns that moment into cards and schedules the reviews. What it does, precisely:

On YouTube. When a video has a caption track, the extension lists the transcript line by line. Click one line and the candidates come back for that line only: the word, its meaning, an example sentence. No button anywhere converts an entire video; the line is the unit. Videos without a caption track get a notice and nothing further. A confirmed line becomes at most 20 cards.

On any web page. Double-click a Japanese word anywhere and a popup dictionary opens, running on JMdict data; one more click turns the entry into a card. Japanese has a full offline dictionary file — that capability is specific to the languages with files shipped.

From pasted text. The document route takes a chapter, an article, or a raw vocabulary list and returns a ranked field of candidates, each word tagged high, medium, or low for learning value, strongest first, top tier already ticked. The deck takes at most 40 new candidates per confirm, a ceiling hard-coded into the server. List- and chapter-sized pastes come back as one batch of 25 or fewer; only text longer than 120,000 characters splits, across four chunks, toward a ceiling near 100. The propose cache holds for ten minutes. Feed it the same text and it hands back the same batch; a long document surrenders its depth one pasted slice at a time.

From audio and video files. Uploads are transcribed into clickable lines you pick from: point-and-pick segments, never whole-file conversion.

Everything runs on FSRS-6 with nothing configurable: retention locked at 0.9, four buttons from again through easy, no settings screen between you and the review. The point of an SRS is showing you a word just before the forgetting curve takes it — the mechanics of spaced repetition are the one thing all five apps above agree on. The walkthrough for the YouTube half is Save Words from YouTube Subtitles, and if you are starting from zero vocabulary at all, JLPT N5 vocabulary is the sensible first 800 words.

The free tier is 150 energy (about 150 cards), then prepaid top-ups at $5 / $10 / $20; no subscription, and topped-up energy never expires. Tier details are on the pricing page. The extension lives here: Piccard on the Chrome Web Store.

Stacking beats picking

No single tool here covers the whole job, and the setups that work combine species on purpose. A r/LearnJapanese thread titled "Are there any apps that actually teach you Japanese?" keeps collecting the same answer: WaniKani for kanji, Bunpro for grammar, an Anki deck for vocabulary — $14 a month at the monthly rates above, or $0 running WaniKani's free levels with desktop Anki. The cheapest clean start is Duolingo plus WaniKani's free levels, which covers a first semester for nothing. Whatever course you ride, the vocabulary that sticks is the vocabulary you met in something you actually wanted to read or watch. That last piece is the one I built, and it is the one piece no course app ships.

All guides: Piccard Blog.