UCHIKOMI

A Japanese sentence trainer, not a flashcard app

Uchikomi shows you a sentence in English or German. You type the translation in Japanese — kanji, hiragana or katakana, whatever you can manage. Nothing to tap, nothing to pick from a list. If you can't produce it yourself, you don't know it yet.

The library holds 2,000+ everyday sentences across seventeen categories — daily life, food, travel, work, school, feelings, adjectives, the gym, gaming — graded from JLPT N5 to N1. Every kanji in an answer can be tapped for its reading and meaning, drawn from a built-in dictionary of 600+ words.

How the practice works

Only your first attempt at a sentence counts. Get it right and the sentence moves toward mastery; get it wrong and it comes back sooner. A sentence is mastered after ten correct first tries in a row, and a single mistake sends it back to the start. Mastered sentences leave the rotation and return weeks later to check whether they really stuck. The number of sentences in progress is capped, so new material only arrives once the old material is genuinely learned.

Modes

Beyond sentence translation there is a kanji reading quiz, hiragana and katakana drills, a speed round, Object Rush for single-word recall, branching dialogues, a daily challenge that is the same for every player, and head-to-head duels and races against other learners.

Questions

Is it free?

Yes. The full sentence library and every practice mode are free. A paid tier adds cosmetic themes, cloud sync and some statistics.

Do I need to install anything?

No. It runs in the browser on phone and desktop, and can be added to your home screen if you want it to behave like an app.

Do I need to know kanji?

No. Hiragana answers are accepted as correct throughout, so you can start as soon as you can read kana.

What does the name mean?

打ち込み (uchikomi) means "to type in" — and in judo and kendo it is the word for repetition drill: the same movement a thousand times until the body knows it. Both readings describe what this is.

Is there German?

Yes. The interface and all sentence prompts are available in German and English; you can switch at any time in the settings.