Yokoso is a free Japanese-learning app for people living real life in Japan. Every learning feature is included: vocabulary and kanji from N5 through N1, 8,959 items in all, spaced repetition, listening practice, real signs and prices, WaniKani import, the Atlas, offline access. No ads. No streaks. No locked lessons. No account required. You can use all of it and never pay anything, and that is not a trial period or a starter tier. That is the app.
This page exists because people keep asking how they can help. There are three real answers, and only one of them involves money. If none of them are right for you today, that is completely fine. Go and enjoy the app. It is yours.
An app like this normally survives one of two ways. It sells your attention, which means ads, and ads mean the app is quietly designed to keep you scrolling rather than to get you fluent and gone. Or it sells your progress back to you, which means the lesson you need next sits behind a paywall, and the people who most need a free Japanese app are exactly the people who hit that wall hardest.
Yokoso does neither. I decided early that the learning would never be the product, and I have not found a version of ads or paywalls that I could ship and still feel fine about. So there is a third way, and you are reading it: some people who use Yokoso choose to pay for it, and their choice covers everyone else.
That is the whole model. It is unglamorous and it works, and it means something worth saying plainly. If you support Yokoso, you are not buying yourself a better app. The app is already the same for everybody. What you are actually doing is buying it for the person who opens it next.
Sometimes that person is a student who genuinely cannot spare three dollars this month. Sometimes it is someone who landed in Japan two weeks ago, cannot read the letter that came in the mailbox, and is not in a position to be evaluating subscriptions. Sometimes it is a learner in a country where three dollars is real money and a monthly fee is simply the end of the conversation. They will never know your name. You will never know theirs. The app just works for them, quietly, because of people like you.
This is free, it takes about a minute, and for an app this small it is worth more than most people assume.
Yokoso has no marketing budget and no growth team. It has one person who also has to write the material, fix the bugs, and answer the email. That means the App Store is not a place where Yokoso can outspend anyone. Reviews are how a small free app becomes findable at all: they feed store search and ranking, and every one of them makes the next search a little more likely to surface it.
There is a second thing reviews do, and it might matter more. Somebody is going to land on the Yokoso listing tomorrow having just moved to a country whose alphabet they cannot read. They are anxious, they are overwhelmed, and they have been burned by three apps already. What convinces a person in that state to try one more thing is not the description. It is another human being saying this one was worth it. You can be that person for a stranger, for free, in sixty seconds.
Honest reviews only, please. If something is broken or missing, saying so in the review is genuinely useful, and I would also love it if you emailed me so I can go fix it.
Write a review on the App StoreReviewing earns you nothing inside the app, by design. See the FAQ below for why.
If you have the room and you want to, you can support Yokoso directly. Here is exactly what that pays for, because you deserve to know before you decide.
Every learning feature stays free. That sentence is the promise the whole app is built on, and supporting does not change it in either direction. Nothing is added to your account that another learner does not have.
What you do get is Glass, a thank-you. It is a cosmetic theme: a softer, translucent treatment of the cards and headers. The only thing it changes is how the app looks. It teaches you nothing, schedules nothing, and unlocks no material, and I would rather tell you that plainly than dress it up. You also get the monthly development notes in Settings, and Yokoso stops asking you about support entirely, which feels like the least it can do.
The real thing, though, is not a feature and never will be. It is that the app stays free for everyone else, and you are part of the reason. That is not a badge in a profile. It is just true.
In the iPhone app: open Settings and the supporter card is the first thing on the screen. Purchases go through the App Store, on your Apple ID, the same as any other subscription. There is a monthly option starting at 2.99 dollars, and one-time tips if a subscription is not your thing.
On the web: the same card is in Settings and payments are handled by Stripe. Same tiers, same one-time options.
You can stop at any time, and stopping is easy on purpose. In the iPhone app, cancel in your App Store subscription settings and the thank-you turns itself off when it lapses. On the web, use the manage link in any Stripe receipt, or the cancel link in Settings, or just email me. You do not need your sync code and you do not need an account. The support page has the full cancel instructions. Canceling never removes a single learning feature and never touches your progress. It cannot, because none of it was ever gated in the first place.
And to say it once more, because I mean it: if this is not the month for it, or not the year, or simply not something you want to do, that is completely fine. There is no reduced version of Yokoso waiting for you. Use the whole thing. That is what it is for.
This one is free, and it is the answer I would pick if you asked me which helps most.
Yokoso is shaped by the people using it more than by any plan I wrote down. Some concrete examples, all of them things that exist because a learner wrote in or posted about them:
None of those were on a roadmap. They were all somebody taking ten minutes to explain what was annoying them.
You do not need to write a bug report like an engineer. This is plenty:
Feature requests and "this explanation confused me" notes are just as welcome as bugs. So is telling me a word is wrong. The material is large and I am one person, and a correction from someone who lives here is worth a great deal.
Email james@yokosoapp.comIt reaches the person who builds the app, and you will get a reply from him.
Is Yokoso really free? Yes, permanently, and every learning feature is included. Not a trial, not a lite version, no lesson cap, no ads. If you never support it you still get all of it, and nobody will nag you about that.
What does supporting actually change? For you: the Glass look, which is cosmetic, plus monthly development notes in Settings and no further support prompts. For everyone else: the app keeps being free and keeps getting worked on. Every learning feature stays free either way.
Can I stop at any time? Yes, and you do not need a sync code or an account to do it. Cancel in your App Store settings for the iPhone app, or through Stripe or by email on the web. Nothing is removed from the app when you do, because nothing was gated to begin with.
Does leaving a review or emailing feedback earn me anything? Gratitude, and that is deliberate. No feature, no discount, no badge, no extra content. The moment an app pays you for a review, the review stops being worth anything to the next person reading it, and honestly the same goes for feedback. I would rather have your real opinion than a purchased one.
Do I need an account to use Yokoso? No. There is no signup screen. Sync across devices is optional and works from a code you generate, with no email attached to it.
Is there a way to help that is not any of these? Tell one person. Genuinely. The single most effective thing that has ever happened to this app is somebody mentioning it to a friend who had just moved here.
Yokoso does not exist because it is a good business. It exists because I moved to Japan, could not read the sign on my own street, and could not find the app I wanted. It stays free because the alternative was building the kind of thing I would not want to use.
That only holds up if enough people carry a bit of it. Not most people. Not even many. Just enough, and the ones who do are carrying it for everybody who cannot, without ever meeting them. If that is you, thank you. I mean that in a way that is difficult to get across in a web page, and I think about it every time somebody writes in to say the app helped them handle something in a language they could not read a year ago.
And if it is not you, it really is fine. Go learn some Japanese. That is the entire point of the thing.
Open YokosoNew here? About Yokoso explains what it is trying to be, and the install guide puts it on your home screen in about a minute. Questions or trouble go to support.