I love Renshuu, but I would love to have another app to practice as well. Especially since some of the games are too hard for me as a beginner. Does anyone have any recommendations? :)
If you are still learning hiragana/katakana or want to review them I would reccomend you 'Write Japanese'. But if you want some vocab too I would say 'Japanese LinDuo' !!
Duolingo is good for learning characters. As far as everything else, I think Renshuu does better. By the time I started using Renshuu I already knew Hiragana and Katakana and quite a lot of Kanji (probably somewhere from 100-300 or something) so I can't really compare Renshuu's early lessons to Duolingo's.
MochiKanji is paid except for some trial stuff (I never paid so I'm locked to the trial stuff), it seemed decent as well though the app definitely didn't run as well as Renshuu.
While I'm not a big fan of it, Anki is another one a lot of people use. It's just never clicked with me, but it might be worth trying for you.
If you're ready for Kanji, the "Kanji Study" app I definitely recommend. A lot is locked behind a paywall, but there's still quite a bit for free and it works quite well.
Coban gives you bite sized lists of Kanji, Kana, Vocab etc. I like to do one of each a day and it doesn't take long. You can also take mini practice quizzes to see what you're good at and what you need practice with.
Iago is an app that uses a visual novel and game format to try to teach Japanese naturally. I know it's on IOS and I'm pretty sure they just added it to Android.
Tip: Don't use Duolingo. Not good for learning Japanese.
That really isn't the case with duolingo, everything has its own benefits like duolingo may be good for sentence making but doesn't teach that proper grammar and like renshuu doesn't give speaking practices but proper grammar. I have been using duolingo and I can say it is helpful.
Michael, the original poster was looking for games. Easy mini-games like renshuu has had on a temporary basis in the past. Are any of those events coming up in the near future?
Yea, definitely. I've just been busy - it's been *a year*. But I'd like to do another stamp rally soon, maybe alongside the kao-coin contest in October.
What I'd really like to do is get some new games developed (mini-games, mind you) - most of them are simple enough that if there were some developers that wanted to, given a base set of data, write up a little javascript game, I could probably include it in there.
Satori Reader and Yomu Yomu have a lot of short stories categorized by reading level, with the ability to click words for quick lookup. Most of their content is paywalled, but there's a fair amount of free material.
Not exactly an app but you mentioned games. If you're looking for a game, I've been playing Wagotabi on Steam, which just released. It's a Japanese learning game that is a bit like Pokemon with spaced repetition, meant to be played in short bursts across days and weeks. You collect words, kanji and grammar concepts, complete quests and battle with your Japanese skills (there is a kanjidex).
I'm about 7 hours in and have been having a great time with it. I'd probably recommend Wagotabi to past me when I was around 400-500 terms, but even at 1600 terms it's been awesome to be able to play a game I can understand, and use the Japanese I have learned to communicate with NPCs and problem solve.
Recently, I use a Udemy's course to supplement my N3 grammar studies. Some courses have no English subtitle at all which forces me to listen and understand the concepts in Japanese.
Kanji Teacher is a great app for IOS learners. It has games, custom quizzes, kanji chart, anki-style SRS system. I would recommend to use it alongside Renshuu or any other tools out there.
