# Nihongo Ride — Type your way across Japan

> Type your way across Japan (iPhone/iPad app by Yuhe Ye.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/nihongo-ride/id6777469778 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Yuhe Ye](https://appshunter.io/developer/1888084427)
- Category: Education, Reference
- Price: Free
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 17.0 · 14 MB
- Languages: American English
- Released: 2026-06-11
- Data updated: 2026-08-20
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/nihongo-ride/id6777469778/reviews.md

## What is Nihongo Ride?

Nihongo Ride is a calm, focused typing-practice app that actually teaches you Japanese.

Most typing games test speed. Nihongo Ride teaches — kana, vocabulary, and real sentences — while you ride your way across Japan, from Tokyo to Kyoto. Type the correct reading and you move forward. Miss a word and it comes back later, exactly when you need it.

WHY IT'S DIFFERENT
• A built-in mini-IME. Type romaji on your normal keyboard — no system IME, no setup. It accepts every valid spelling (shi or si, tsu or tu, n or nn) and matches your keystrokes to kana in real time.
• Learn, don't just race. Every word shows its kana, an optional romaji hint, and its meaning in English and Chinese.
• Smart review. Words you mistype flow into a spaced-repetition queue (SM-2), so your practice targets your real weak spots.

THREE WAYS TO RIDE
• Journey — an immersive ride across Japan; type to keep moving and unlock famous stops.
• Time Attack — 60 seconds, as many words as you can.
• Practice — a quiet, distraction-free mode for word drills or long passages, with an optional BLIND challenge that hides all romaji hints.

CONTENT
• 7,000+ words across JLPT N5 to N1, with English and Chinese meanings.
• Example sentences and 183 reading passages — from everyday greetings to short literary paragraphs.
• Katakana loanwords supported, with foreign-sound digraphs.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
• Fully offline. No account, no network, no tracking, no ads.
• Your progress stays on your Mac.

Whether you're starting N5 or polishing N1, Nihongo Ride turns daily typing into real Japanese progress. Hop on and ride.


## Version history (last 5 releases)

### 1.23 — 2026-08-17

• After a sentence or dictation ride, the results screen now names the words you were stopped on, with their readings. It could already tell you how many mistakes you made, and when a mistake followed a typing rule it explained the rule -- but when you simply did not know a word, or did not catch it, it never said which word that was. In dictation, which word is the whole answer.
• Fixed a riding streak that disagreed with the dots beside it. A ride that crossed midnight counted for both days in the number but lit only one dot, so a chain you had not broken showed a gap in the middle.
• Weak-words practice and the due verb-form review were handing back short sessions. Words withdrawn from the dictionary took up places in the run and were then dropped, so a session that offered fifteen could give you twelve.
• Passage practice no longer counts time while the app is in the background. Putting the app down mid-passage used to be written into the Ride Log as riding, which stretched how long the ride looked and slowed down its speed.

### 1.22 — 2026-08-15

• Fixed a review count that was too high. If a word had been withdrawn from the dictionary after you studied it, its card kept counting toward the number on the app icon, in the widget and in the reminder -- and could never be cleared, because a card whose word is gone can never come up for review. Those counts now match the words the app will actually give you.
• 64 cards now say which reading of their spelling is the everyday one. Where the app teaches you the less common reading of a kanji -- and the ordinary reading has its own card -- the card says so, instead of leaving you with two cards that look identical.
• Dictation can now follow what you are studying: hear the sentences for a saved word list, or for the words due for review today. It tells you how many sentences it can actually play, which is a smaller number than the list's -- some sentences are left out of dictation because the built-in voice reads a kanji in them differently from the way the app writes it.

### 1.21 — 2026-08-11

• Dictation, a new mode. The sentence is spoken, not shown, and you type what you hear. Replaying is free and unlimited -- this is listening practice, not a memory test -- and the results tell you how many replays a run took, because that is the part a score cannot say.
• Sentence mode can now follow what you are actually studying: practise the sentences for a saved word list, or for the words due for review today. It tells you how many sentences it found instead of quietly padding the run out with unrelated ones.
• Dictation leaves out the sentences where the built-in voice was measured to read a kanji differently from the way the app writes it. Those stay in Sentence mode, where you can see the reading, rather than being played to you and then marked wrong for typing what you heard.

### 1.20 — 2026-08-10

• More example sentences at every level: 6,737 in all, up from 6,458, and every level is now at or above 91% of its words. Nearly all of them can be typed in Sentence mode.
• 28 definitions corrected or extended. Two were teaching you to write incorrect Japanese: てっきり was defined as "surely", but it always means you were sure and turned out to be wrong, and 素直 was defined only as "obedient" where it usually means frank or candid.
• Words that no honest example can teach -- where every natural sentence reads the kanji a different way than the card does -- are now identified and left without one, rather than given a sentence that would train the wrong reading.

### 1.19 — 2026-08-09

• Example sentences at every level. The corpus grows from 3,722 to 6,458 sentences: N2 goes from 34% to 93% of words covered and N1 from 23% to 86%, so Sentence mode and furigana now have material at the levels where they were nearly empty.
• Every new sentence was checked for the thing that matters most in a typing app: that the context forces the reading the card teaches. Sentences that would have you typing the wrong reading of a kanji were rejected rather than shipped -- 21 at N1 alone, including ones whose Japanese was otherwise flawless.
• 20 definitions corrected. Two were describing a different word than the card teaches: 強請る is the word for pestering someone for something, but its English read "to extort".
• Words that could not be given an honest example -- where no natural sentence produces the reading the card teaches -- were left without one rather than given a misleading one.

## More apps by Yuhe Ye

- [CLI Pulse](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/cli-pulse/id6761163709)
- [Stride - Habit Tracker](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/stride-habit-tracker/id6761262334)
- [FlowPilot - Smart Tasks](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/flowpilot-smart-tasks/id6761295166)
- [æstel](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/stel/id6761330709)
- [ColorArchive - Color Tools](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/colorarchive-color-tools/id6761363087)
- [RoastMate AI](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/roastmate-ai/id6769317103)

All apps by Yuhe Ye: https://appshunter.io/developer/1888084427

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*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 2026-08-20.*