In the past I’ve mostly done Anki for Chinese and Japanese but am looking for something else since I’ve fallen off Anki.
For Chinese I really need a service that I can read and OCR words to easily identify in a dictionary. I’m at a high intermediate or low advanced level but looking up words is annoying.
For Japanese I just need input for an intermediate level.
- Clozemaster?
- Italki?
Listing services I’ve found
- Clozemaster (but has a bad model now)
- tutor with something like italki
- Anki
- busuu
- librelingo
Imo, once you’re at about the intermediate/upper intermediate, the best thing to do is probably try to find content you can consume. Anki and the like are incredibly useful, but the goal with those is to help you reach the point of decoding real messages in context.
It’s hard because everything is difficult to understand. But I think reading is pretty approachable. In Spanish, I found a book of short horror stories aimed at probably 3-5 grade level, and it was pretty fun to read through, along with a couple other youth-targeted books.
For Japanese, I highly recommend starting with the free children’s books at https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/ - they might be too easy, but they probably won’t be too tough. They extend down to a nicely low level and have fun, cute illustrated stories. Satori Reader is a great app that has a bunch of short stories that you can read or listen to (paid sub, but you can read enough on free). There’s also the NHK easy news page to try and read (or listen to).
For listening, there are of course a lot of great audio resources through Youtube or podcast feeds. I’ll give one example for Japanese that I found especially approachable: these comprehensible input playlists from いろいろな日本語: Beginner, Intermediate.
But if you do want apps in particular, I think Renshuu and jpdb are pretty good. Both have Anki-ish spaced-repetition-system stuff as core components. Renshuu has lessons and games to checkout. jpdb integrates its SRS with a database of various media to help target your learning. There’s also bunpro for grammar (paid sub for features though).
For something not Japanese specific, I think Memrise seems pretty cool lately. Now seems to have more videos and other content in there. I don’t use it as much though, since it wants to play a lot of ads.