The best AI apps to practice speaking Japanese

What you need to practice speaking Japanese

Japanese is the big one. In our ranking of 67 languages it’s the hardest for English speakers, at 10,097 effort points. That’s more than three times what Spanish takes.

But look at where the work is. Almost a third of it is writing: three scripts, and about two thousand kanji in everyday use. Speaking is a lot closer than reading. So you need a few things a Spanish learner doesn’t.

• Furigana, until you don’t need itYou can’t sound out a kanji you haven’t met, and most have more than one reading. Furigana writes the reading in small hiragana above it: 先生 is せんせい, sensei. You want it while you talk, and a switch to turn it off later.
• Three scripts in one sentenceHiragana, katakana and kanji, all mixed: 私はコーヒーが好きです, I like coffee. Kana take a few weeks. Kanji take years, so you want them to come with their reading.
• Particlesは, が, に, で, を: tiny words that say who does what, and where. Everyone mixes them up at first, so you want them fixed while you talk.
• Polite and casual JapaneseYou say です and ます to people you don’t know, and drop them with friends. You learn the difference fastest by hearing both, over and over.
• Pitch you can hearJapanese has pitch accent: 雨 (rain) and 飴 (candy) are both ame, said with a different pitch. The quickest fix: say your sentence, then hear a native speaker say the same one.
• Lots of Japanese you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words and kanji come from input: videos, podcasts and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeA language this hard takes hours of talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working. With Japanese that matters even more: apart from loanwords like コーヒー, almost no word looks like anything you know, so you need to meet each one many times.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Japanese. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch Japanese YouTube videos and podcasts, and read stories written at your level, with furigana above the kanji. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itRecognizing a word isn’t the same as saying it, with the right particle, without thinking. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every word, and every kanjiYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many different kanji are in the words you understand.

Brand new to Japanese? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn kana and the basics with Duolingo, Speak or Pimsleur, which all teach Japanese from zero, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Japanese

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. Your teacher writes furigana above the kanji, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

A card for every word you tap

Tap any word, in a conversation, a video or a story, and you get its card: the reading, what it means, what kind of word it is, and an example in Japanese, romaji and English. Tap play to hear it.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Japanese teachers

Five teachers: Aiko from Kyoto, Daichi from Fukuoka, Kenji from Tokyo, Yumi from Osaka, and Xiaoma from New York, the YouTuber behind Xiaomanyc and one of our co-founders. Pick the one you like.

• 
  Aiko Tanaka

  Kyoto · Japanese
• 
  Daichi Mori

  Fukuoka · Japanese
• 
  Kenji Sato

  Tokyo · Japanese
• 
  Xiaoma

  New York City · American

  Xiaomanyc
• 
  Yumi Nakamura

  Osaka · Japanese

Input: Japanese to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words and kanji come from lots of Japanese you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now, both with furigana above the kanji. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to a Japanese YouTube video, or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with: furigana above the kanji, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan we transcribe it for you, within a monthly allowance.
• Suggested for youWatch suggests Japanese videos by topic, from channels made for learners to podcasts and the news, each with the share of words you’d understand.
• Stories written for youRead writes Japanese texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher. There’s today’s news, too.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Japanese word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. Japanese has no spaces, so it cuts the text into words first. Then it checks every word against your list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people start Japanese on Duolingo. Good! So here’s how the two compare for speaking, with every Duolingo fact from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Langua · Teacher AI vs Speak · Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Praktika · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPADutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedRussianWith the stress marked above every wordTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending