Published August 4, 2026. Updated September 6, 2026

Is there a good Anki alternative for Japanese?

Short version: Anki is the more powerful tool, and on most platforms it is free. It runs FSRS, the same modern scheduling algorithm, it handles any card type you can imagine, and its shared-deck library and desktop add-ons let you build a Japanese study system that fits you exactly. If you are willing to spend an evening setting it up, use Anki. Nothing in this article is going to beat it on capability.

The reason people search for an alternative is almost never the algorithm. It is the evening. Choosing between a dozen Japanese decks, deciding whether to disable one of the card templates, figuring out which add-ons you need, and then discovering three weeks later that the deck you picked has example sentences aimed at people who already read Japanese. Moji - Learn Japanese Daily for iPhone is built for the version of you who never got past that step. It is one curated catalog of 8,237 words, ordered by frequency, with FSRS-6 already running at its defaults. The trade is real and it goes both ways: you give up infinite configurability, and you get to start studying in about ninety seconds.

What Anki actually asks of you

Anki ships with no content. That is by design, and it is why it works for medical students, law students, and Japanese learners equally well. But it means the first thing you do is go shopping. For Japanese the current community recommendation is Kaishi 1.5k, a modern beginner deck built to fix the problems people hit with the older Core decks. It is genuinely good. It is also a decision you have to research before you can make it, and it covers 1,500 words, so at some point you will be shopping again.

Then there is tuning. Anki gives you per-deck daily limits for new cards and reviews, custom card templates, four grading buttons, and a scheduler with an FSRS toggle in deck options. FSRS has been available since Anki 23.10 on desktop, AnkiMobile, and AnkiWeb, and its default desired retention is 90%. To get the personalized version of it you click Optimize, which needs a real review history to work with. Anki’s manual notes that fewer than a few hundred reviews is one of the common reasons FSRS underperforms. So the algorithm gets good after you have used it for a while, which is fine, but it is another thing to remember to do.

And the add-ons, the thing Anki power users rightly love, run on the desktop version. If you are an iPhone-first learner, the most powerful part of Anki is on a machine you are not carrying.

What Moji decides for you

Every one of those decisions is made in advance, and the specific choices are the product.

The catalog is 8,237 words, all of them with a curated example sentence and English meaning. Meanings are trimmed to about three friendly glosses of 30 characters or less, with the dictionary parenthetical noise stripped out, so a card reads like something a person wrote rather than a JMdict row. 5,880 entries carry a hand-edited mnemonic, 7,741 carry pitch-accent annotation, and 6,444 carry a usage note, written only where there was a true non-obvious fact worth knowing and deliberately left empty otherwise.

The order is frequency-derived from JPDB data and then hand-edited, which matters more than it sounds. Core particles are pulled forward on purpose: は enters around position 63, が around 89, か around 109, を around 129, each one introduced with example sentences chosen to show where the particle sits in a sentence. Most decks bury particles among nouns because frequency lists alone do not know that a particle is only learnable in context. That reasoning is written up in full at /why-word-order-matters.

Example sentences across the early study order obey a difficulty budget, at most one word you have not been taught yet (the exact rule). This is the thing shared decks most often get wrong, because sentences get pulled from a corpus rather than written against the study order.

Mnemonics are built from real kanji components, not invented stories (the full method). 好き (すき, “liking, fond of”) is 女 (woman) plus 子 (child): a woman holding her child, something dearly liked. When a component’s popular gloss is simply false, it gets flagged rather than used, and kana-only words get a plain factual note instead of a forced story.

Anki vs Moji at a glance

Both run FSRS. The difference is who tunes it.

It would be dishonest to sell FSRS as a differentiator, so here is the precise claim: Moji implements the official FSRS-6 formulas with all 21 parameters, w0 through w20, at a 90% target retention, and there is no screen where you can change any of it. Anki can do everything in that sentence and more, once you turn it on.

What Moji does differently is the grading step. FSRS-6 supports four grades; Moji exposes two, swipe left for again and swipe right for good. That is a deliberate simplification. Four buttons make you adjudicate the difference between “hard” and “good” on every single card, which is slower and, for most people, not more accurate than an honest binary. There is also no daily review cap (a deliberate removal), so the scheduler serves everything that is actually due. The full reasoning, including where the two-button mapping loses information, is at /fsrs.

What an app can do that a deck cannot

This part is not about spaced repetition at all. Because Moji is one app rather than a card format, it can build practice modes on top of the same catalog: quizzes for vocabulary, listening, cloze, and your weak words; Sentence Build, where you arrange chunks into a correct sentence; kanji and kana writing practice with per-stroke feedback drawn from KanjiVG stroke data; and Daily Mix, a free daily quiz that blends the modes and ends on writing. There is also on-device Japanese conversation practice, which runs locally on the phone with no server involved. And there are home screen and lock screen widgets showing due cards, streak, and lifetime words learned, which is a small thing that turns out to matter for actually opening the app.

None of this is impossible in Anki. Some of it exists as add-ons on desktop. It is just not what you get after installing a deck on your phone.

Price, honestly

Anki is free on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. On iPhone, AnkiMobile is $24.99 as a one-time purchase, which funds development of everything else. If you study on iPhone and plan to use Anki for years, $24.99 once is an excellent deal and you should not let anyone talk you out of it.

Moji’s free tier covers the whole comprehension path: flashcards with mnemonics and example sentences, kana writing practice, vocabulary and kana quizzes, and Daily Mix. Moji Premium is $8.99 a month or $49.99 a year, and it unlocks the focused practice modes: listening, cloze, weak words, kanji writing, and the full quiz library. Over three years Anki on iPhone costs less than Moji does in one. That is the trade being made: you are paying for curation and for someone maintaining the catalog, not for the algorithm.

Choose Anki if

• You already have a working Anki setup and review history. Nothing transfers, and throwing away months of scheduling data to change apps is a bad deal.
• You want to make your own cards, from a textbook, a class, a show you are watching, or sentence mining. Moji cannot do this at all and does not plan to.
• You study on Android, Windows, Linux, or a Mac. Moji is iPhone-only and there is no Android version.
• You want control over card templates, grading, daily limits, or optimized parameters.
• You are learning more than Japanese, or learning Japanese alongside something else that needs flashcards.
• Free matters more than curated. This is a completely reasonable position.

Choose Moji if

• You have downloaded Anki, opened it, felt the shape of the work ahead, and closed it. More than once.
• You want the word list decided by someone who thought about the order, especially in the first few hundred words where beginner effort is easiest to waste.
• You study on your phone, in small pieces, and want the practice to come to you.
• You want mnemonics, pitch accent, and difficulty-appropriate example sentences without auditing whether the deck you downloaded actually has them.
• You are studying toward JLPT levels and want the catalog already sorted by them.

Neither of these lists is a trap. If you read the first one and recognized yourself, install Anki, get Kaishi 1.5k, turn on FSRS, and stop reading comparison articles.

If you read the second one instead, Moji is free to start and the free tier is the entire comprehension path, not a three-day trial. Take the placement test, see where you land, and study the first hundred words before deciding whether any of this was right. The wider field is ranked in the best iPhone app to learn Japanese. Download Moji on the App Store

Sources

• Anki platform availability and pricing: apps.ankiweb.net
• AnkiMobile price ($24.99, one-time purchase): AnkiMobile Flashcards on the App Store
• FSRS availability, deck options toggle, 90% default desired retention, optimizer review-history requirement, daily limits: Anki Manual, Deck Options
• Anki add-ons (desktop): Anki Manual, Add-ons
• Kaishi 1.5k beginner Japanese deck: donkuri/kaishi on GitHub, Kaishi 1.5k on AnkiWeb
• JMdict dictionary data: EDRDG