nipponcurated 
AI conversation apps are the first Japanese products that genuinely make you speak. Every one of them removes the same thing: the person you are speaking to.
Business Japanese is a direction, not a level. It has its own official test, and like the JLPT that test cannot hear you speak a word.
Two very different products are sold as Japanese writing practice. Neither one catches the style consistency rule that Japanese children learn at eight.
Counter apps compete on how many counters they carry. A native speaker in Tokyo counts how many a Japanese adult actually says in an ordinary week.
Learning hiragana and katakana takes about two weeks, not a weekend, and you should spend nothing. Katakana is the harder half and everybody underestimates it.
Understanding Japanese but freezing when you speak is three separate problems. Only one of them is fixed by shadowing, the method Japan invented.
Advice to read Japanese without looking anything up was built to avoid a dictionary cost that no longer exists. Pop-up readers changed the strategy.
Anime Japanese is not mainly a rudeness problem. Much of it is role language, a costume that tells you who a character is. Nobody actually speaks that way.
The JLPT never asks you to speak or write a single word. That one fact explains why almost every Japanese learning product is built the way it is.
Japanese adults are formally taught keigo at work, and the three-type model English guides still teach was officially retired. Keigo is a direction, not a level.