# Joshi: Japanese Particles — Grammar drills for the JLPT > Interactive drills to master Japanese particle usage and improve sentence fluency. (iPhone/iPad app by Jakub Dwojak.) - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/joshi-japanese-particles/id6803144744 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`) - Developer: [Jakub Dwojak](https://appshunter.io/developer/6801993670) - Category: Education, Reference - Price: Free with in-app purchases - Age rating: 4+ - Requires: iOS 18.0 · 4 MB - Languages: American English, Polish - Released: 2026-08-24 - Data updated: 2026-09-15 - Monetization: free with in-app purchases - User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/joshi-japanese-particles/id6803144744/reviews.md ## What is Joshi? Japanese particles are not a list to memorise. Each one changes what the sentence is about. You can know that に marks a destination and で marks where an action happens, and still hesitate every time. Understanding a rule and reaching for it without thinking are two different skills, and only the second one gets you through a sentence. HOW IT WORKS A natural Japanese sentence with one particle missing. Four options. Tap one. 学校＿勉強します。 に で を へ Then, immediately: the sentence with the particle in place, what that particle is doing there, and – if you picked a particle people genuinely confuse it with – why that one does not fit here. WHAT YOU PRACTICE Twelve particles across thirty-eight distinct uses. は, が and を and the roles they play in a sentence. に and で and the line between where something is and where something happens. へ, と, も, の, から, まで and や. Then the same particles doing less obvious work: を with a route you walk along, を with a place you leave, に with the purpose of going somewhere, で with a cause, と closing a quotation, の turning a whole clause into a noun. THE PART THAT IS DIFFERENT Most apps can tell you that に is at 61%. That number does not tell you what to do. Joshi tracks confusion pairs – two uses that get mistaken for each other – as a thing in their own right. So instead of "practice more に", it can say に ↔ で needs work, and then serve you the sentences where one is right and the other is tempting. Weak pairs are their own practice mode. WHY THE WRONG ANSWERS ARE FAIR A wrong option has to be genuinely wrong in that sentence. A particle that would produce correct Japanese with a different meaning is not a distractor – it is a second answer, and a question with two answers teaches you something untrue. That rule cost this app a confusion pair and a number of otherwise good sentences, and it is the reason you can trust the red cross when you see one. READINGS AND HINTS Furigana over the kanji, so an unfamiliar word never turns a particle question into a vocabulary question. The English translation sits hidden behind a tap by default, because with it visible you match the particle to the English and practice something else without noticing. Both are settings: never, always, or on tap. Every sentence can also be heard. A speaker button reads it in Japanese, using the reading the catalog knows rather than a guess at the kanji. No network needed. PROGRESS THAT MEANS SOMETHING Mastery is capped by how much evidence there is, so three lucky taps do not read as mastered. Five levels, twelve particles and thirteen confusion pairs each get their own bar. Nothing here counts questions answered. No coins, no gems, no energy, no streak you can lose by taking a day off. FREE AND PAID Levels 1 and 2 are free in full – は, が, を, に, で and へ, which is most of the particles in an ordinary sentence. One purchase, once, opens levels 3 to 5, weak-pair practice and the whole question pool. No subscription. PRIVACY No account. No adverts. No analytics. No network requests at all beyond the purchase itself. Everything you do stays on your device, and you can export it whenever you like. ## Key features - Interactive sentence drills - Immediate feedback and explanations - Practice with 12 particles and 38 uses - Focus on common confusion pairs - Furigana for kanji support - Optional English translations - Offline audio readings ## Pricing and in-app purchases Base price: Free. **One-time purchases** | Purchase | Price | Type | | --- | --- | --- | | Joshi Premium | $2.99 | one-time | ## Frequently asked questions about Joshi ### How does Joshi teach Japanese particles? Joshi uses interactive sentence drills where you select the correct particle. It provides immediate feedback, explaining why your choice is right or wrong, and highlights common confusion pairs to help you internalize usage. ### What particles does Joshi cover? Joshi covers twelve particles including は, が, を, に, で, へ, と, も, の, から, まで, and や, across thirty-eight distinct uses. This includes both common and less obvious applications of these particles. ### Is Joshi suitable for beginners? Yes, Joshi is designed to help learners move from understanding rules to intuitive application. It offers furigana support for kanji and optional English translations, making it accessible for those new to Japanese. ### Does Joshi have ads? No, Joshi does not contain advertisements. The app is free to download and use with optional in-app purchases to unlock all content. ### How does Joshi track progress? Progress in Joshi is measured by mastery based on evidence, not just the number of questions answered. It features five levels, thirteen confusion pairs, and tracks mastery for each particle and confusion pair individually. ### What is the pricing for Joshi? The first two levels of Joshi, covering core particles like は, が, を, に, で, and へ, are free. A one-time purchase unlocks levels 3-5, weak-pair practice, and the full question pool, with no subscription required. ### Can I use Joshi offline? Yes, Joshi can be used offline. The app does not require a network connection for its core functionality, including listening to audio readings of sentences. ### What makes Joshi's practice different? Joshi focuses on 'confusion pairs' – specific uses of particles that are frequently mistaken for each other. It creates dedicated practice modes for these weak pairs, which is a unique approach to mastering tricky grammar points. ## Version history (last 5 releases) ### 1.2.0 — 2026-09-14 You confirm the answer with a button, not with a tap Tapping a tile now selects the particle and does nothing else; the answer goes in only when you press “Check” at the bottom of the screen. Until now a slipped finger counted as a mistake, and with four choices a slip is indistinguishable from not knowing – and it pushed your mastery of the role down just the same. A selection can be changed, and tapping the same tile again clears it. Response time is now measured up to the moment you press “Check”, so averages from this release do not compare with earlier ones. You can see where the gap is and what went into it In the sentence with a gap, the gap itself is picked out in your accent color – with longer sentences you no longer have to hunt for it. On the check screen the particle that filled it is picked out instead, so you can see at once what changed from the sentence you read a second earlier. The same highlight appears in the “worth another look” list after a session. With the system setting “Differentiate Without Color” turned on, an underline is added. Verbs that come in pairs now have their own role 電気が消えました and 電気を消しました are two different verbs, not two forms of one – and only with pairs like these does the particle genuinely change the sentence rather than its shading. Until now they sat mixed in with sentences like 雨が降る, where を cannot go at all, which made the exercise easier than it looked. They now have a role of their own, with its own explanation, on the first level and free. Cards on the result screen are visible in light mode again A card drawn on the light background was practically white on white, held together by the hairline of its border alone. This affected the screen after an answer and the statistics; the question screen was fixed earlier. In dark mode the difference was invisible, so the fault survived several releases. The Today screen is noticeably quicker Your progress and today's numbers were being worked out again on every reference while the screen was drawing – dozens of times instead of once. They are now worked out once and kept, and a sentence with readings is no longer rebuilt every time its label is measured. Reports reach an address on our own domain “Report a bug” and “Suggest a feature” used to open a message to a forwarding address. From this release they write to joshi@jd-japanese.pl. If you wrote before and got no reply, this is why. ### 1.1.6 — 2026-09-10 “Your Japanese” now shows ten apps The section listed six rows because six apps were all this one knew by name. Four more have come out since – Keigo, Onomatope, Kifuku and Shindan – and they stand at the end, in the order they were released. Nothing above them moved. Four more cards in “More Japanese Practice” Keigo, Onomatope, Kifuku and Shindan each get a card with its own icon and one sentence about what it does. Every one of them opens that app's page in the App Store directly – checked before this release – rather than a search that may or may not find it. Progress from the four new apps was there all along The section looks for the progress of apps it knows by name, and it knew six. The other four had been writing their files into the shared container the whole time and nothing was reading them, so practice done over there simply never showed up here. It shows up now, and none of it has to be done again. ### 1.1.5 — 2026-09-08 The reminder comes back every day, and so does the number on the icon Only one reminder was ever waiting in the queue. It went off in the evening, put the number on the app icon — and after that there was nothing left to go off, so the next day brought neither a reminder nor a number. Reaching the goal made it worse: clearing the queue for today cleared tomorrow along with it, so a day of practice switched the reminders off until you next opened the app. A week of them stands in the queue now, one for each day, each carrying the count that will be true that evening. The session bar is full on the last question The bar counted the questions you had closed, not the one in front of you: it stood empty while you answered the first question and stopped a step short at the last, showing six of seven with the seventh on screen. It counts the question you are looking at now, so the first one starts it and the last one fills it. VoiceOver says what a role row will do Level rows and the sister-app cards learned this in the last release; the rows that matter most did not. A role on a level, a role in the particle list, a weak role and a weak pair each read their name and their percentage in one breath and stopped there — so a row that starts a session sounded exactly like a row that reports a number. Every one of them says now where a tap leads. Reduce Motion turns the animations off Readings appearing above kanji, a translation sliding into place and a section folding away all moved regardless of what the system had been asked for. Reduce Motion in accessibility settings now stops all four: everything still opens and closes, it simply stops moving. Two first-level sentences used grammar from three levels up Both asked about が, and both did it with ~てくれる, the giving-and-receiving form this app introduces much later. One of them read “the person next door helped me”, where the “me” came from a word a beginner has no way to find in the Japanese sentence. Both sentences say the same thing now without that form, and the particle being asked about is the same as before. ### 1.1.4 — 2026-09-07 The same question does not come back the same day One session never repeated a question, but the next one knew nothing about the last: three sessions in an evening drew three times from the same pool, and the same sentence could come up in all three. Sessions now remember what the day already asked and put those questions at the back of the queue. They come back only when nothing unseen is left, so a long day of practice still gets full-length sessions — it just stops asking twice. The role introduction no longer gives away the next question Meeting a role for the first time opens with three of its sentences shown complete, particle in place. The question right after drew from the whole role, so it often asked one of those three — four times out of five for the smallest role, one in three for the largest. That measures what you read a minute ago, not whether you know the role. Those three sentences go to the back of the queue now. They still come back, they are good sentences — just not first. Pronunciation plays with the ringer switch off, and no longer cuts your music Tapping the speaker on a muted phone played nothing at all, and there was no way to tell that the switch on the side of the phone was the reason. It plays now. The other half of the same fix: the first tap used to silence whatever was playing in the background and never brought it back. One question marked correct Japanese as wrong In 「この階でエレベーター＿降ります」 the variant で was offered as a wrong answer, but エレベーターで降ります is ordinary Japanese for going down by elevator — so anyone who picked it got a red mark for a correct sentence. That variant is gone. The catalog rule it broke is the one this app rests on: a particle that makes a correct sentence with a different meaning is not a wrong answer, it is a second one. が: one role, and it now says out loud that it covers two things The role held two different kinds of sentence — someone alive doing something (犬が走る, the dog runs) and something simply happening on its own (雨が降る, it is raining) — and its old name, “who does it, or what it happens to”, described the second kind as something being done to. Rain falling, flowers blooming and a meeting starting are not things anything is done to. The role is called “who acts, or what just happens” now, and its explanation shows both kinds side by side. A role description pointed at a role two levels away The explanation of が ended with “inside a clause that describes a noun が is needed too — that has its own role here, right after this one”. It does not stand right after: it sits two levels further on, at the connections level. A beginner on the first level looked for it and did not find it. The sentence says where that role actually is now. VoiceOver says what a row will do, not only what it says Rows merged into one element read their name, their percentage and their lock in one breath and stopped there — the lock is a shape, and read aloud it did not say that a tap opens the purchase options. Level rows and the sister-app cards in Settings say where a tap leads now. ### 1.1.3 — 2026-09-06 が inside a description has its own role now One role was teaching three different things at once. Ten of its twenty-five sentences had が inside a clause that describes a noun — 田中さんが作った料理 — and that is not a shade of the same thing: は cannot stand there at all, and putting it there does not change the tone, it breaks the sentence. Those ten now have their own role, at the connections level. The study day starts at the hour you picked — on every day of the year On the night the clocks change, the boundary moved from four in the morning to five. One day a year, quietly. ## More apps by Jakub Dwojak - [Kaname: Japanese Grammar](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/kaname-japanese-grammar/id6801993668) - [Katsuyokei: Conjugation](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/katsuyokei-conjugation/id6802813564) - [Kazoekata — Japanese Counters](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/kazoekata-japanese-counters/id6803676309) - [Bunmyaku: Japanese Reading](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/bunmyaku-japanese-reading/id6804188062) - [Kuzushi — Casual Japanese](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/kuzushi-casual-japanese/id6805788146) All apps by Jakub Dwojak: https://appshunter.io/developer/6801993670 --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-15.*