About Kana Desk

What this site is

Kana Desk publishes comparison guides and study plans for people learning Japanese as adults, mostly in the US, UK, Australia and Canada.

It exists because of a specific problem. Search for almost any question about learning Japanese online — what a tutor costs, which platform to use — and the top results are quoting prices that were accurate in 2023. Platforms have changed their pricing, their trial policies and their cancellation terms since, and comparison articles largely haven't followed. Several widely-cited figures in this niche are simply wrong.

So the editorial rule here is narrow and boring: check the number against the platform's own page, date-stamp it, and say so when it can't be checked.

Who writes it

Kana Desk is written and run by Ryuta, a native Japanese speaker based in Tokyo who works in IT infrastructure.

I'm not a Japanese teacher, and this site doesn't pretend otherwise. What I bring is narrower and more useful for this particular job: I read Japanese natively, so I check these platforms' pricing and terms against the Japanese-language originals rather than the abbreviated English versions. That's how the JapaTalk figure in our main comparison came out roughly a third of what most English-language articles still quote. My day job is IT infrastructure, which mostly means I'm comfortable digging through documentation until the number is right.

Contact details are on the contact page, and correspondence about factual errors gets answered.

How we check things

• Pricing comes from each platform's own published rate page or help centre — never from other comparison articles, which is how stale figures spread.
• Policy details — cancellation windows, refund terms, trial rules, point expiry — come from each platform's help documentation, because these are the terms that go out of date quietly.
• Yen-denominated pricing is converted at a stated rate, with the exchange-rate exposure flagged, because your effective cost moves with it.
• Every guide carries the month it was checked. Where something couldn't be verified, it's listed at the end of the article rather than asserted quietly.

What we don't claim

We don't claim to have personally taken hundreds of lessons on every platform we cover. A number of articles in this niche do make that claim, in oddly similar language, and readers are right to be sceptical of it.

Teaching quality can't be assessed from outside a lesson. Ratings and credentials are proxies, not proof. Where personal experience would be the only honest basis for a claim and we don't have it, we say so instead of inventing it.

We also don't give guarantees about outcomes. Nobody can tell you how fast you'll learn Japanese, and any site that does is selling something.

How this site is funded

Links to Preply and italki earn a commission when a reader signs up, at no extra cost to them. Other platforms covered here have no commercial relationship with this site.

This doesn't determine the recommendations. There's a concrete test rather than a promise: the cheapest platform in our main comparison has no affiliate programme at all, and it is recommended twice in that article.

The full terms are on the affiliate disclosure page.

Why the domain doesn't match the name

Fair question. This domain previously hosted a web development portfolio, and the address stuck when the site changed direction. Rather than lose the domain history, we kept it.

It's mentioned here because an English-language site about learning Japanese sitting on a web-development domain looks odd, and an unexplained oddity is worse than an explained one.

Corrections

If a price or policy here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed with the correction noted. Given how much of this niche runs on unchecked figures, that matters more than usual.