Leave a Review Learn Japanese Kanji
Please take down charges
Now let me tell you, learning Kana for has never gotten easier for me with this app. However, there are a few things I’d like to touch on to make this app a little better for those of us who don't want to pay ducking 200$ for an app when we might as well go to an actual school with that money. Some of these things are:
Review time: Allow people to actually be able to look at the kana and not have a “cooldown” on that. That's stupid and desperate and you know it for a fact. You shouldn't have to have a cooldown for anything just to look at something. That's bull.
Money gouge: I said this in the beginning. 200$ for life?? Ain't no way am I paying 200 for anything. Every few seconds it will ask me “You can learn 3.6x faster” I don't care. I’m learning just fine. Faster doesn't mean better. But I will say that not holding back information from us is amazing.
Other than that this is amazing. Everything makes sense, I completely understand the customization and such, and I love it. If anything at least makes “points” for keeping up a streak or answering a certain amount of questions.Show lessblue adorabat
Good App, Almost Great
I have the Kana and Benkyō apps. They are good and I have learned a lot. In both apps I have gone through all the kana. When using the quiz of the lowest Streak, I am only tested on the Hiragana, NO Katakana ever. All of the Hiragana have a streak of over 50, but the katakana only have 20 or less. They never appear in the lowest streak quizzes. The only way to advance in Katakana is to select the kana to test on. Sometimes I only have a few minutes to do something so I want to take a quick quiz on the 25 lowest score or streak items but they do not show, only the hiragana which I am strong in. I am writing this here because I can only reach the developer through Instagram or Twitter which I don’t subscribe to.Show lessKnightEye007
Charged for trial
The app is actually pretty decent, but I signed up for the trial and discovered a couple days later that I had immediately been charged for an entire year’s subscription. Looking at other reviews, it seems like this is a bug that many others have experienced, and there’s no straightforward way to contact customer support and/or app devs.
Update: I was able to request a refund, so I changed my rating accordingly. It’s a bit tedious, but the refund was approved within a few days. You need to go to iPhone settings > Apple ID > Media and Purchases > Purchase History > Benkyō > Report A Problem > Request a refund > select relevant reason, And then submit a request.Show lessHtetley07
Moneygrab
This app looks good, and I think it has some potential. However, i have some major issues that make this app worse than making my own physical flash cards.
Adding cards in this app is so confusing. You can’t add cards for Kanji, only vocab. When you do add vocab, you have to decide whether you want to add the “understanding” version of the card, or the “speaking” version of the card. Those labels dont even make sense, as they just mean english to japanese and japanese to english, respectively.
The “Flex SRS” system that this app uses to time your flashcards is completely broken. It’s supposed to tell you when you have new cards to review, but it just says “you have no SRS flashcards to review right now” indefinitely.
When you do find out how to review the cards, there are zero analytics on how you are doing. No feedback at all.
I’ve had issues with cards just not existing, which in a world of extremely easy to use REST APIs, is unacceptable.
I had an issue with billing, and their channel of customer service (which is just their twitter, which is fine for the most part) completely ignored me. That’s the nail in the coffin for me.Show lessWumboneer
Everything You Could Ask For
I’ve spent a while trying to teach myself Japanese, but as someone who likes to get into the nitty gritty aspects of things, a lot of my options felt like they were just a few inches short of what I needed.
The likes of Duolingo and Lingodeer spend a lot of time trying to get you to run before you know how to walk and, in my opinion, often feel like they unintentionally make learning japanese more challenging as a result.
Benkyo does a lot more to help break down those building blocks, letting you choose what to study and helping hone your weak spots. They have a library hiragana, katakana, kanji, and vocabulary, all sorted by reading level, with tools designed to help you automatically review what you choose to put in your flash card pool. They also have sections that let you practice your writing, which is really helpful for kanji especially.
The only thing it’s missing is grammar, but the Sensei app has that covered. Admittedly, I wouldn’t mind a more thorough way to review it, but it does more than enough on its own.
The only thing I wish it had that is a way to intuitively look at your pool of flexSRS flashcards after you’ve added them. I’ve had to re-search a lot of my flash cards to put them in my lists.
Either way, it’s well worth your time if you want to learn Japanese. It’s designed to be used in tandem with other courses, but it’ll do a LOT of the heavy lifting for your studies.Show lessSnakeAssassins
Missing kun-yomi readings
The app is easy to navigate. But important readings are missing from the Kanji study cards. For example:魚さかな、重おも If you already have knowledge of kanji, you can catch these omissions, but if you start out studying kanji you might miss the most common readings and studying the vocab will become confusing. If the system would allow you to make a note or add the missing reading to your deck, you could work around this flaw. But it doesn’t. So you have to trust the developer to be accurate.…Show lesszapfdings
Developer Response
Thanks. This was fixed (some readings are not displaying). Notes taking will be added soon!Useful and User-friendly SRS Study Tool
My Japanese studies began one year ago! I studied Chinese in university, and used Pleco for its SRS capability to study. I saw myself using this app much in the same way! The difference between the two is that Pleco is a dictionary with a SRS component, while Benkyo’s main component is a proprietary SRS system with a customizable quiz component.
A con is that the flashcards cannot be customized like in Pleco, but the ones provided with Benkyo PRO like the JLPT vocab are adequate.
A pro for me is the statistics and flascards due graphic feature, which Pleco doesn’t have in graphic form, or give you information on cards due till they’re due. Benkyo has helped me memorize hiragana and katakana. I had studied Kanji in the past and Benkyo helped to retain what I knew and learn the Japanese twist on Kanji.
My reccomendation to learners, would be to use multiple ways and methods to study Japanese, use a dictionary in tandem with Benkyo, and use Benkyo’s proprietary FlexSRS and statistics graphic as a benchmark for your Japanese learning.
がんばってください👍
ありがとうロマイン😊Show lessAOtters
すごい
What sold me was the extra content you can download. You’re not just limited to the JLPT Kanji. Thank you for making a great app with a clean interface. I’ll be exploring the AI aspect more in depth, too.
If we could add a way to move on to the next Kanji from the screen where it has us show the brush strokes without having to leave the screen and select the next option, that’s something I would like to see.Show lessMalina Nash
Great app! Especially since most of its free!
This app is a great app! I have been trying to learn japanese for a while and i’ve been hunting for some apps that will help me properly learn and have no cost. This app has helped me a lot, and overall is a great app for it being mostly free. Although.. one feature that would be amazing is for a review quiz to practice the vocabulary, kanji, etc.. for the ones that you get wrong or pass. But don’t get me wrong at all, for the amount of features in this app and being free; this whole app is awesome! 9.5/10 would definitely recommend:DShow lessミア :)
It would be great if we could add/edit cards
I like the app, but I’m reluctant to purchase it after the trial. The main reason being lack of functionality when it comes to adding or at least editing flash cards. I wanted to add the Japanese word for “check” (at a restaurant, 会計) to my list, but the existing entry is not saved with this meaning. I can neither create my own entry, nor add the meaning “check” to the existing one. It’s hard to gauge whether this will become more of an issue down the line so I’ll probably hold off on a subscription/purchase. On a side note, I wanted to contact the developer and ask about this, but the only way of reaching them is a Twitter account, which I don’t have/want. A business email would be nice.
Update: apparently I canceled the free trial too late. Willing to give the app another go, I now found out that there’s no device syncing feature (says it’s coming in the FAQ), so all lists I created on my iPhone are not showing up on my iPad. This, in combination with the other issues, I find very frustrating.Show lessMarkus1023
