What is new

The romaji switch used to do almost nothing, and where it did work the spelling trailed off to one side. Romaji is now lined up under each word, wherever the app shows a reading, and it has three levels. Keep it on single words, extend it to whole sentences while you are starting out, or turn it off once kana comes easily. It stays away from the kana drills, speaking and translation, because guessing the sound there is the exercise.

Four sizes in Settings, and the row shows you real Japanese with furigana at the size you are picking, so you can judge it before you commit. Everything grows together, spacing included, and a phone still gets the phone layout.

You have a profile at your handle now, with your level, streak, words and rank. Who can open it is yours to set, down to nobody at all, and Settings shows you exactly what a stranger would see before you decide.

Your display name, your picture, your email and your country all edit in place now. The picture is picked from an account you have already linked, so there is nothing to upload. A new address only takes over once you open the link we send to it, which means a typo costs you a minute rather than your account. Country is the one worth doing today, because the country leaderboard stayed out of reach whenever the guess made at signup was wrong.

Settings has a motion control with three positions. Leave it on your device setting, or force the app calm even where the device does not ask for it, or keep everything animated even where it does. It reaches the JavaScript animations too, not only the CSS ones, so a quiet setting is genuinely quiet.

A notifications page, with a switch for each kind. Juku notifications were the odd case: they could genuinely be turned off in the database and there was no way to ask for it, so requests to switch them off looked like they worked and did nothing. Now they work. Account, security and payment notices stay on, and the page says so rather than hiding them.

Choose who may send you a friend request, whether people can find you by handle, and whether you appear on the leaderboards at all. Each one is enforced on the server, not just remembered. Leaving the leaderboard takes you out of the ranking entirely rather than showing you as hidden, which the setting explains before you choose.

One long scroll became a page each for your account, study, look, sound, privacy, plan and data, so the thing you came for is one tap away instead of somewhere in the middle. The search box across the top finds any control by name, including the ones that used to be unfindable.

Sound, volume, contrast, furigana, reading mode and how you answer grammar questions all follow your account now. Sign in on a new phone and it is already quiet, already high contrast, already set the way you left it. The device you are on still wins if the two ever disagree, so nothing changes under you mid-session.

There is a speech speed in Settings, from half pace to half again as fast, and it applies everywhere a word is read aloud. Press Hear it to try a full sentence at the speed you picked before you commit to it. Slowing it down no longer drops the voice into a lower pitch, which it used to.

The light and dark picker in Settings stored your choice and left the screen alone, and the button in the top bar changed the screen and forgot your choice. Both go through the same place now, so they agree with each other and your theme comes with you to your next device.

Study pace offers Gentle, Standard and Intense, and each one tells you how many new words a day it means rather than making you guess. All three are free. If you want the scheduler numbers themselves, Plus opens them.

A vocabulary question used to show one meaning per option, so four answers could read magazine, postcard, clock, letter and leave you working out which word each one stood for. Each option now carries the rest of its own meanings underneath, up to a short limit so the list stays quick to read. The limit is the same for every option, wrong ones included, so the longest answer is never a hint. You will see it in word discovery, the daily pack, meaning unlocks, word practice and Vocab Showdown.

Once you know how tracks work, being told again on every visit is just something to scroll past. Settings now has a copy density control with three levels. Standard is the app exactly as it was. Lean drops the sentences that explain a mechanism you already understand. Guided keeps everything and lets the walkthroughs run on their own. Whatever you pick, the copy that tells you what a button is about to do stays where it is, because that is the sentence you need most on the day you are moving fast.

A question that shows a single word could not tell you which reading it meant, and 生 on its own has seven. The reading now sits above the word wherever one appears without a sentence around it: quiz options, flashcards, word discovery, the daily pack, drills, Conquest, grammar choices, lesson vocabulary and Versus. Grammar and Versus were showing bare kanji for a different reason, which is fixed too. The switch in Settings still decides whether readings are shown, held back until you point at them, or hidden.

The plans page used to go blank whenever payments were switched off, so anyone following an upgrade link landed on a single line of apology. It now lists all four plans whatever the shop is doing: how far up the JLPT ladder each one reaches, which limits it lifts, and a table setting every difference side by side. It also says which plan you are on, and it tells you plainly whether buying is closed or something is simply broken. Prices sit on top of all that once purchasing opens.

Plans are about half price while the product is still in beta. The reason is plain: the N5 curriculum is finished, N4 is not yet, and it would not be honest to charge full price for a catalog that is still being written. Whatever you pay during the beta stays your renewal price afterwards, for as long as your pass stays active. There is also a one-payment lifetime pass, limited to a hundred people, which keeps every JLPT level open for good.

There are four plans now instead of three. The new one, Plus, opens the whole of N5 without asking you to pay for N4 first, which is backwards if N5 is the level you are actually studying. It lifts the passage caps, the collection ceiling and the daily review limit, and it opens the speaking studio and the review statistics. Premium still adds N4 on top, and the old Unlimited is now called Ultimate, because it was never truly without limits and a name should not claim otherwise.

The writing along the learning path has been reworked end to end. It used to change voice partway through a track, opening lines repeated the lesson description word for word, and a single shared instruction turned up in five slightly different wordings across five lessons. Instructions that apply everywhere now live in one place, and what stays inside a lesson is only what that lesson alone can say. A few stray markdown asterisks that had been showing up raw in vocabulary lists are gone too.

If you grade flashcards quickly, the app used to start refusing you partway through, and the message only said you were going too fast. The limit it was enforcing was never the one it meant to. That is fixed, and the budget now covers a whole session rather than one feature at a time. When the app does need you to wait, it says which thing ran out and how long, in your own language, and it no longer confuses a daily allowance that comes back tomorrow with a pause that clears in a second.

Tanuki tore up the old road map and laid track. Every JLPT level is now a real rail network you conquer station by station: ride the Yamanote ring at N5, go underground on the Ginza Line, cross to Osaka, walk the five Edo highways, and finish the whole Shinkansen. Real station names in kanji and kana, real line colours, a departure board that names your next objective, and a stamped ticket after every ride. Your accuracy sets the service class, Local, Rapid, or the Limited Express.

There is now a roadmap page showing what is being built, what is queued, and where TanoshiGo is heading, with everything already shipped listed underneath it. No dates on it, because a date we miss is worse than an honest order. If what you want is not on the list, there is a button to say so.

When you missed a question, the answer you should have given was painted the same green as an answer you got right, so being wrong showed you a confident tick that was not about you. Now what you picked is filled in and what you should have picked is outlined, everywhere: quizzes, lessons, kana, word practice and versus. It reads the same in greyscale and in the two-colour theme.

A wrong answer used to give you a red box and nothing else, so the one moment you most needed the answer was the moment the quiz withheld it. It now points at the right one, and the review list at the end shows what you picked next to what was correct.

Every how-to step in the Help Center and in the printed handbooks now draws a numbered ring around the exact control it is talking about, so you are following an instruction instead of hunting through a picture of forty buttons. On a phone you get the phone layout, including the five slots along the bottom that are your real navigation there. Tsuru redrew the map, because the one we had been showing you was the wide-screen menu that no phone has.

Search results, word pages, the kanji reference and your collection were rebuilt around the Japanese rather than around the boxes it sat in. Every Japanese character is now tagged as Japanese, which stops a device from quietly substituting a Chinese letterform on the one page whose job is showing you the right shape. Levels carry the same green to red ramp everywhere instead of a flat colour on half the surfaces, and speaker buttons that only appeared when you hovered now exist on a phone.

Lesson sections used to be told apart by colour, thirteen of them, in an order that meant nothing: nobody could have said what the violet section had in common with the other violet section. Each section now opens with a curtain carrying its Japanese name, its icon, and where it sits in the lesson. The one thing the shape tells you is the useful one: cloth means this section counts toward finishing the step, paper means it is practice you are invited to do and never blocked by.

The menu used to hide behind a hamburger, which meant two taps to go anywhere and no way to discover what was in here without opening it. There is a bar at the bottom of the screen now, with Home, Learn, your reviews and Play always visible, and everything else one tap behind More. It gets out of the way inside a lesson or a match, so the grade buttons keep the bottom of the screen to themselves. On a computer the top bar was rebuilt too, and it now tells you which section you are in.

Every kanji and kana now renders in a real Japanese typeface instead of whatever your device happened to substitute, which on some machines meant Chinese letterforms. Punctuation sits properly, lines break where a Japanese reader expects, and furigana finally has enough contrast to read on a coloured background. Flashcard faces, draw targets, and kana drills use a textbook face, so the shapes you study are the shapes you are taught to write.

The full folklore cast is here. Kitsune the exacting nine-tailed sensei, Tanuki the lucky reward gremlin, Tengu the proud rival coach, Kappa the gentle perfectionist, Neko the beckoning fortune cat, and Tsuru the serene crane now join Karasu. Every one of them is fully alive, with their own take on every moment in the app. Pick your favourite in Settings.

A scholarly three-legged crow with round glasses now lives in TanoshiGo. Karasu blinks, breathes, celebrates your wins a little too hard, and takes your mistakes personally so you never have to. Pick your companion in Settings, and watch for six more folklore friends joining the cast soon.

Every article got rewritten with the real numbers and the surprises: what a missed day actually costs your streak, exactly what a Sensei can and cannot see about you, and why quitting a Conquest station early cannot save your stars. Search now reads whole articles, so you can find a page by a phrase you half remember, and each one links straight to the screen it describes.

Every feature has a friendly walkthrough, from grammar to tournaments, plus a new plain-language glossary for all those Japanese-learning words.

A friendly Help Center, search, and printable handbooks for students and teachers. Look for the question mark on any screen.

Teachers can open a class, set objective assignments, and cheer students on, and students can join with a code. The app still grades everything from your own progress.