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Published August 8, 2026. Updated September 6, 2026

The best iPhone app to learn Japanese, ranked

The best iPhone app to learn Japanese depends on which part of Japanese you are trying to fix. For the daily vocabulary and kanji deck, which is the slot most people mean when they ask, the pick is Moji - Learn Japanese Daily for iPhone: 8,237 curated words scheduled by FSRS-6, home-screen and lock-screen widgets that keep your due count visible, writing practice that checks each stroke, and conversation practice that runs on the phone itself.

But no single app covers vocabulary, grammar, reading and listening well, and the learners who stick with it run a small stack: one app for words and kanji, one for grammar, and reading or listening on the side. So this page ranks six apps by the job each one does best, says what each costs on iPhone, and ends with the two-app combination that actually holds up.

RankAppBest forPrice on iPhone
1Moji - Learn Japanese DailyDaily vocabulary and kanji, built for iPhoneFree comprehension path; Premium $8.99/month or $49.99/year
2BunproGrammar, N5 to N1Free reference; $5/month or $150 lifetime after a 30-day trial
3Anki (AnkiMobile)Building and syncing your own cards$24.99 one-time
4WaniKaniA kanji-first level ladderFree through level 3; $9/month, $89/year, $299 lifetime
5RenshuuFree breadth across every skillFree core; Pro from $3.99/month
6DuolingoKeeping a daily habit aliveFree with ads; optional paid tiers

1. Moji - Learn Japanese Daily: best iPhone app for daily vocabulary and kanji

Moji is a study system, not a dictionary: one curated order through 8,237 words, each with an example sentence and English meaning, 5,880 kanji entries with hand-edited mnemonics, and 7,741 with pitch-accent marks. The order is frequency-derived and then hand-edited so the core particles arrive early, with examples chosen to show where each one sits in a sentence. Scheduling is official FSRS-6 with a 90% retention target and two swipes per card, left for again, right for good. There is no daily review cap.

It is the only app on this list built for iPhone from the start, and three things follow from that. The Word Flow and Today widgets put your due count, streak and lifetime learned count on the home screen and lock screen, and tapping one opens the session directly. Kana and kanji writing practice checks stroke order and direction against KanjiVG stroke data, with a haptic tick per accepted stroke. And the Practice tab runs free-form chat and role-play scenarios on Apple’s on-device model, so nothing leaves the phone. That last feature needs iOS 26 and an iPhone with Apple Intelligence turned on; the rest of the app runs on iOS 18 and later.

The free tier is the whole comprehension path: flashcards with mnemonics and example sentences, kana writing, vocabulary and kana quizzes, and the Daily Mix. Moji Premium, $8.99 per month or $49.99 per year, adds the focused practice modes: listening, cloze, weak words, kanji writing and the full quiz library.

Skip it if you need Android, a shared account across devices, or a grammar syllabus. It is iPhone-only, English-interface, and it is not the similarly named “Moji - Learn Japanese & Kanji” from another developer.

2. Bunpro: best app for Japanese grammar on iPhone

Bunpro applies spaced repetition to grammar points rather than words, with cloze-style reviews that make you produce the pattern instead of just recognizing it. It covers over 900 grammar items organized by JLPT level from N5 to N1, with example sentences and graded reading passages, and it has a proper iPhone app alongside the website. New accounts get a 30-day trial of the paid tier, after which it is $5 per month or $150 lifetime, and the grammar reference pages stay free.

If you can read the words but sentences still fall apart, Bunpro will move you faster than more vocabulary. It is the standard second app next to a vocabulary deck, and it is the one pairing this page recommends without reservation.

Skip it if grammar is not your bottleneck yet. Early on, a few hundred words and the particles do more than a grammar syllabus, and Bunpro is easy to add later.

3. Anki: best if you want to build your own cards

Anki is free on desktop and Android; on iPhone, AnkiMobile is a one-time $24.99 purchase, and that purchase funds everything else. You can build exactly the cards you want, mine words from a show you are watching, install a community deck such as Kaishi 1.5k, and sync across every device. It also offers FSRS, the same family of scheduler Moji uses, as an opt-in setting you enable in deck options and re-optimize periodically. The difference between the two is setup and curation, not the algorithm.

Skip it if choosing a deck is what stops you from studying. Community deck quality ranges from excellent to unusable, and the example sentences and mnemonics are whatever the deck author wrote. The full tradeoff is in the Anki alternative comparison.

4. WaniKani: best for a kanji-first ladder

WaniKani teaches roughly 2,000 kanji and 6,000 vocabulary words through a strict radicals to kanji to vocabulary progression across 60 levels, with a mnemonic written for every item in one consistent radical vocabulary. Levels 1 to 3 are free, then it is $9 per month, $89 per year, or $299 for a lifetime account. It is a website first; there is no official WaniKani app on the App Store, so on iPhone you use it in Safari or through a community-made client.

Choose it if kanji is the thing that scares you and you want it handled by someone else’s fixed curriculum. Skip it if you want to learn words in the order you will meet them: the level ladder teaches whichever words use this level’s kanji, not the most frequent ones. Details in the WaniKani comparison.

5. Renshuu: best free all-in-one Japanese app

Renshuu covers vocabulary, kanji, grammar, listening and sentences in one place, with a community and a reference side that Moji deliberately does not have. The core study system is free with no ads and no timer paywall; Renshuu Pro is positioned as extras and support, listed on the US App Store at $3.99 and $6.99 per month, $49.99 and $59.99 per year, and $109.99 and $129.99 lifetime. It runs on iPhone, Android and the web.

Choose it if you would rather have breadth in one app, for free, than depth in one slot of a stack, or if you need Android. Skip it if you want a decided path rather than a system you configure. The head-to-head is at Renshuu vs Moji.

6. Duolingo: best for keeping the habit alive, weakest for depth

Duolingo’s Japanese course teaches hiragana first, katakana early, kanji later inside whole words, and by Duolingo’s own account covers the vocabulary and grammar needed for JLPT N5 by completion, roughly CEFR A1. The streak, leagues and characters are the best habit machine on this list, and it is free with ads plus optional paid tiers.

Choose it if gamification is what makes studying tolerable, and keep it as a warm-up. Skip it as your only app once you are past the first few months: N5 is the floor of the JLPT, and Duolingo does not go much further. What to use after Duolingo covers the switch.

Which iPhone app should you actually install?

Pick by the problem, not by the ranking:

What an iPhone-native app can do that a website cannot

“Native” gets used to mean “polished,” which is not very useful. The concrete version: some things an app can only do if it is written against iOS rather than shipped as a website in a shell, and three of them change how a Japanese habit works on a phone. A widget puts your review queue on a surface you unlock dozens of times a day, with the due count climbing on its own between app opens. An on-device model runs a conversation with no server in the loop. Touch input plus stroke data turns handwriting into something that can tell you a stroke went the wrong direction, instead of just showing the answer. All three attack the same failure, the gap between sessions, where habits die.

How this ranking was made

We build Moji, so weigh that as you read. The apps are ranked by fit for the job most people mean by “learn Japanese on my phone,” which is a daily vocabulary and kanji deck, and every entry names the case where a competitor wins. Prices are from each vendor’s own pricing page or App Store listing, linked below, and were checked in September 2026.

If the vocabulary and kanji lane is the one you want filled and you are on an iPhone, Moji is free to start, and the free tier is the whole comprehension path rather than a trial: Moji is on the App Store. More about the project and who builds it on the about page.

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