About Inku

Inku is an iPhone app for learning Japanese. It is made by one person in Calgary, Alberta. This page exists because people who buy small software deserve to know who made it, and why.

What we are reacting to

I tried the usual apps. I used Duolingo for 89 days, then noticed I could pass a lesson without reading any of the Japanese. I switched to Anki and filled a deck with scraped vocabulary I never reviewed because the blank card flow felt like a second job. I tried a handful of paid apps that all wanted me to enroll in a system.

The pattern I kept hitting was the same. Apps that were designed to make me come back tomorrow were not designed to make me learn anything today. Streak flames. Heart lives. Notifications at 9:02 PM because that is when their data showed I was most likely to tap. The interface screamed, and the Japanese whispered.

I am almost forty. I do not want another app that thinks my attention is the product. I wanted something that treated me like an adult who has ten minutes and wants to use them well.

What Inku is

Inku is a flashcard app for iPhone, iOS 18 and up. It teaches hiragana and katakana (92 characters), the 200 core N5 vocabulary words, roughly 65 N4 words so far, and four phrase packs (casual, polite, travel, anime). Every word is spoken aloud by an actor.

The review session is finite. You open the app, Inku shows you today: maybe 15 cards, maybe 25, depending on where you are in the schedule. You answer each one, and then you are done. The home screen tells you what happened and what is waiting for next time. There is no feed to scroll.

Scheduling is handled by FSRS (a modern spaced-repetition algorithm). It is the same math that makes Anki work. The difference is that in Inku you never see the math. You just see a small, warm stack of cards that will appear again when they need to.

What Inku is not

• It is not a streak app. There is no fire to keep alive.
• It is not a chatbot. It will not generate cards for you on the fly.
• It is not an all-in-one Japanese platform. It will not teach you to read a novel. It will teach you enough that the other tools you use will make sense.
• It is not a social network. There is no profile, no leaderboard, no shareable score.
• It is not free. I chose to charge for it so I could build it without selling data or running ads. The yearly plan is $29.99 with a 7-day trial. The monthly plan is $4.99.

Why iPhone only

Because I am one person, and shipping one platform well matters more than shipping two platforms poorly. iPhone gets the design attention it deserves, the haptics, the widgets, the pitch-perfect system fonts. Android will come when Android can have the same care.

If you are an Android user, email app@inkujapanese.com and I will put you on a list to be notified when work begins.

How the app is built

Inku is SwiftUI and SwiftData. It is fully local-first. Your progress lives on your iPhone, not in a database in Virginia. There is no account to create because there is no server to log into.

Pronunciation is pre-recorded through ElevenLabs (the Shizuka voice) at build time. The mp3s ship inside the app, which means the app works on a plane, in a subway tunnel, on a mountain. Furigana is pre-computed with kuromoji so every kanji in the app has a rendered ruby reading attached.

Subscriptions run through RevenueCat and Apple In-App Purchase. Crash reporting uses Sentry. That is the entire third-party surface. If you use Inku, those three companies see anonymous technical data. Nobody else sees anything.

Who is behind it

My name is Bao Hua. I am a sole proprietor. I live and work in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Inku is my current full-time project. If you want to know more, the author page has a short bio and links.

I answer every email to app@inkujapanese.com personally. If you have a suggestion, a bug, a translation fix, or a question about something you tried, that is how you reach me.

What we are building next

• N4 expansion. The N5 deck is complete. We are filling out N4 through the year.
• Kanji recognition mode. A separate practice flow for reading kanji without leaning on furigana.
• Widgets.A home-screen widget that shows today's review count, not a streak.
• iPad. Same app, more room to write kana with a finger or Apple Pencil.
• Sentence mining. Optional, opt-in, and done by you, not by me.

Thank you for reading this far. If you have been waiting for a Japanese app that respects your time, try Inku for a week. If it is not for you, cancel the trial and keep the hiragana guide.

Where to go next: How to learn Japanese from scratch · Inku vs Duolingo · Why I stopped using Anki