Guide · Updated August 2026

The hands-free Japanese learning app.

"Hands-free mode" should mean three things at once: the app speaks every prompt, hears your spoken answer, and takes voice commands — so after one tap on Start you never touch or look at your phone. Kotoba is built that way from the ground up: a free, voice-controlled Japanese vocabulary trainer with speech-recognition grading and spaced repetition, for driving, chores, walks, and every other hour your hands are busy.

Why "hands-free" usually isn't

Ask for a Japanese app with a hands-free mode and you'll mostly be pointed at passive audio — Pimsleur, podcasts, audio courses. Those are hands-free in the sense that a radio is: sound comes out, nothing goes in. The moment an app needs to know whether you got the word right, it reaches for the screen — a tap to flip, a button to grade, a written answer. That's why learners keep asking forums for an app with a real hands-free mode and coming up empty: apps designed around a screen can't retrofit their exercises to voice. Hands-free has to be the starting constraint, not a feature toggle.

What a session sounds like

Everything in that loop is audio. New words get a slow spoken breakdown and a native example sentence; review words get quizzed right before you'd forget them (FSRS spaced repetition — the same modern algorithm Anki uses); your spoken answer is graded by cloud speech recognition. Mid-session, "repeat", "skip", "pause", and "got it" are all voice commands. As words mature, the difficulty climbs: you hear the example sentence with a beep where the word belongs and supply it yourself.

Built for the hours your eyes are busy

• Driving — dash-mount or pocket, audio through car Bluetooth, the hands-free mic carries your answers. Sessions are easy to ignore when traffic needs you.
• AirPods anywhere — chores, walks, the gym. The phone stays in your pocket.
• Dead zones — sessions keep working offline once audio is cached; if speech recognition loses signal it degrades to spoken self-grading instead of stalling.
• No app store — it's a web app (PWA). Open the site, tap Start.

The honest scope

Disclosure: this page is by the developer of Kotoba.

Kotoba is Japanese-only and vocabulary-first: the JLPT N5–N3 lists, nearly 3,000 words with 40,000+ native-quality audio clips, each taught inside a natural sentence. It won't teach you kanji (visual by nature) or replace a grammar textbook. If you're comparing the broader field: Pimsleur is the polished passive course, and a couple of newer paid apps (Danki on iOS, JLPT Speak) also do voice-graded Japanese review — we think being free, browser-based, and voice-controlled end-to-end is the strongest combination, but the comparison pages linked below lay it out honestly. For the wider method question, start with how to learn Japanese while driving or audio spaced repetition, explained.

Frequently asked questions