You can't say anything in Japanese until you know what things are called. WordStick teaches you the words — real, everyday Japanese, about ten new ones a session — and locks them in the scientifically proven way: you hear a word, and you pull it back out of your own memory, out loud.
Tap play, think for a beat, say it out loud. That's the whole trick.
Grammar rules, streaks, cartoon owls — none of it matters if you don't know what anything is called. Every language starts the same way: you need words. That's the one job this app does, properly.
The 1,700 most-used everyday Japanese words — water, coffee, left, right, cheap, tomorrow, help. The vocabulary that actually carries daily life, not trivia to keep a game going.
Each session mixes a handful of brand-new words in with the ones you've already met. Show up most days and that's hundreds of words within weeks — real, countable progress.
The app quietly brings each word back right before you'd forget it. What you learn in week one is still there in week six. That's the whole point — words you keep, not words you met once.
Words alone won't make you fluent — nothing will in three months. But they're the one thing every path into Japanese runs through, and they're the part almost everyone quits before finishing.
Most apps show you a word and ask if you recognised it. Recognising feels like learning; it isn't. WordStick makes you do the hard, useful thing instead: it says the cue, goes quiet, and you have to pull the word out of your own memory and say it out loud. That act of retrieving a word — instead of re-reading it — is one of the best-proven effects in all of memory science. WordStick is built on it, end to end.
No reading, no typing, no staring at a screen. WordStick speaks a word, waits while you think, then says the answer and moves on — all by itself. Phone in your pocket, earbuds in: it works while you drive, walk the dog, or do the dishes. You start from absolute zero — everything is spoken out loud, and the app teaches you the Japanese alphabet as you go. Stop mid-session whenever life happens; it continues where you left off, tomorrow.
Most learning apps punish you for having a life. Miss a few days and you come back to hundreds of overdue flashcards. As one learning writer put it: “You return to find hundreds of overdue reviews. The app feels like a debt, not a tool. You close it and don't come back.” WordStick never shows you a pile. No counts building up, no red badges, no backlog to dread. The clever scheduling still happens — you just never have to look at it. Come back whenever you come back; it simply continues.
Free to try right now, while WordStick is in early access.
Yes — that's exactly who this is for. Everything is spoken out loud, so you can learn words before you can read anything. The app teaches you the Japanese alphabet as you go, in small steps.
Yes, for the core practice. It speaks, pauses, reveals the answer, and continues on its own. Glance at the screen whenever you want the spelling or a hint — it never requires it.
No — nothing you say is ever recorded or kept. Speech is handled by your phone's own voice services, and answering by voice is optional anyway: tapping or typing works exactly the same. Details in our privacy policy.
Nothing bad. There's no pile to catch up on and no red numbers waiting. A streak exists, if you switch it on. Nothing else is watching. You open the app, it picks up, you continue.
It runs in the browser — best on Android with Chrome today, fine on most modern phones. Voice answering is only a convenience, never a test — if the mic misses you, tap or type instead.
Yes — Language Transfer is genuinely free and genuinely good, especially for how the language fits together. WordStick's job is different: building your word stock and making it stick. Right now WordStick is free too — try both.
The pricing above goes live with a 7-day free trial, announced clearly beforehand. Everything you've learned stays on your device either way.