Pretty Good – Japanese by Living Language Review

Before purchasing this, please keep in mind that it is to accompany the textbooks as a portable review source. You could use it as a stand alone tool if you wanted, but I don't think that's a brilliant idea considering there is no writing practice with the kanas or kanji in the app and part of learning a language is learning how to write it. With that being said, I genuinely enjoy this app and I use it a lot ? I was pleasantly surprised to see that all the grammar notes from the book were imputed into the app including the portions about kana. The games from the company website are also placed in it so that you can practice the skills and words learned from the lesson. There's a few other cute things such as stickers, but those two availabilities really step up the experience from just shifting through flash cards to actually reviewing and absorbing information (unlike Genki's $6 apps ?). However, this program isn't perfect either. If you're looking for experience with applying kana or even kanji, I'm sorry to say but you won't find that here. The app reviews the kana chart and allows you to optionally read kana in the grammar reviews and vocab, but during the activities the app provides, you won't get experience typing it or even reading the vocab in hiragana alone making the course seem very romaji heavy. A lot of romaji doesn't necessarily "wound me" because I personally learned the kanas prior to starting the Living Language Program, but I wish there was a kana only option for the games to just continue to adapt and get used to reading it since the Japanese don't write in romaji. I would also really appreciate it if the program even blinked at kanji. I know kanji is "advanced" but Japanese requires a bare minimum of 2,000 kanji memorized to do anything. The sooner you start learning them all, the better. In summary, this really is a wonderful product and by far one of the best I've seen offered on the App Store for Japanese even when it's not partnered with the textbooks (Mirai Japanese also being really awesome). I just wish it wasn't as English reliant as it currently seems to be.
Review by All_HailHailey on Japanese by Living Language.