NihonKotoba: Kanji & Kana

An app that watches you write. Trace a kanji and every stroke is checked — order, direction, count — it tells you which one went wrong. Kana and N5 free, offline.

Most kanji apps show you the stroke order. This one watches you write it.

Draw a character with your finger or an Apple Pencil and the app compares your strokes with the real geometry of that character, one by one. Wrong order, a stroke drawn backwards, one stroke too many — it tells you which stroke, and what happened. Not a tick and a cross.

WHAT IS INSIDE

• 2,230 kanji, JLPT N5 to N1 — meanings, readings, radical, components • Hiragana and katakana in full, including the small ゃ・ゅ・ょ combinations • The 214 classical radicals, each with the kanji built on it • 6,702 animated stroke diagrams • 11,556 example words and 6,132 real sentences, with furigana

WRITING, AND BEING CORRECTED

Every character you write is read twice: by the geometry of its strokes and by the text recognition built into iOS. Either one is enough to be counted right, so your handwriting does not have to be beautiful — but when the stroke order is wrong, you hear about it.

Write in ruled cells, on one large canvas with a fingertip, or on a full writing sheet. With an Apple Pencil, a palm resting on the screen is ignored.

EXERCISES

• Copy a word or a sentence as it stands • Kana to kanji: you are given the reading, you write the characters • Fill the gap: the sentence is there, one kanji is missing • Dictation: you hear a word or a sentence and write it — replay as often as you like • Write a whole syllabary in order, from memory • Write the readings of a card without turning it over — that is how a kanji becomes mastered

SENTENCES

Real sentences from the Tatoeba project, adapted to your level: kanji you have not reached yet are rewritten in kana, and the full form stays one tap away. The app can also write new ones on the device with Apple Intelligence, or with a Japanese model you download once and run offline. With your own Anthropic API key, Claude can write them instead — that is the only feature that uses the network.

READING ALOUD

Japanese voices that run on the device (VOICEVOX), or the voices built into iOS. Any word, any sentence, any card.

SIXTEEN LANGUAGES

English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovenian, Swedish, Romanian, Arabic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese. Choose a main language and a second one: the interface, the meanings, the glosses and the translations all follow.

WHAT IT COSTS

Both syllabaries, the 214 radicals and the whole N5 level are free, exercises included. One purchase — no subscription — opens N4, N3, N2 and N1. No account, no advertising, no analytics, no tracking. Nothing you write leaves the phone.

WHAT IT IS NOT

It is not a spaced-repetition scheduler: it does not decide what you revise today. It is a place to write, to read, and to check yourself honestly.

Beyond English and French, sentence translations are machine-made and marked with a symbol, and kanji meanings come from open dictionaries. They are good; a native proofreading pass is still to come.