Kana LS Touch 4+

Fantastic learning tool

This is a fantastic learning tool. I would enthusiastically recommend it to any student of Japanese. This also goes for its companion, Kanji LS.

I do have a few issues with it, though. Firstly, it has crashed on me a few times. I'm not sure what the cause is. Considering how frequently I use it, the amount of crashes is rare enough not to bother me too much.

Secondly, the user interface could use some tweaking. My biggest gripe is how the top "bar" of the screen you draw your kana on eats up valuable screen real estate. I often start drawing a downward stroke, but it doesn't appear because I was too close to that top bar. Worse, the "solve" button is in the upper right corner on that bar. If I get to close to it when drawing my "ten ten", I prematurely trigger the solution screen for that kana. I really wish the controls in the top bar could be moved to the bottom bar where I think this wouldn't be as much of an issue.

Switching test modes is awkward and selecting ranges of kana to study is also a bit tedious (you have to type in the kana numbers).

Despite these issues, I absolutely love this app. It was worth every penny.

Great app!

I’ve only had this app for a little bit, but I am already learning a lot.

I appreciate how when you look at the individual “symbols” they include commonly used words they are in and their romaji.

A nice feature would be though would be symbols searcher, where if you draw a “sign” and it will show the sign and the romaji and whatever.

A well-designed and -implemented app

I am enjoying my initial experience having just drilled my 1st ten characters. There is a bit of a learning curve in understanding all the functionalities available. It's not entirely clear within the app what certain settings are for, however to the developer's credit there is excellent documentation at the provided link in the info section. Overall it provides a powerful approach to learning the Japanese characters.

A few things I'd appreciate:
- mixed test mode where it varies the question formats to stimulate learning in different ways and to keep things fresh
- intelligent adding of characters to practice then test sessions as one's test results improve (as it stands one must manually set which characters to work on)

Developer Response ,

Please try the 先生 mode. Here the App automatically choses the characters based on your learning progress.