Jim Breen on the iPhone

by 56 Comments

I’ve always been a fan of Jim Breen’s Japanese dictionary, so when I found out that there’s an iPhone app out for it, I was really happy. Finally, I don’t have to load the entire Jim Breen page, and now, with the iPhone’s new ability to write in Japanese, all my dirty iPhone dreams would become a mobile reality.

The dictionary is the little wwwJDic icon, and yes, huge M’s fan!

Looking up Japanese Vocab

The first thing I did was look up words, English -> Japanese. I found that it wasn’t always perfect, but neither is the original Jim Breen dictionary, for that matter. Sometimes, the web version requires you to scroll through lists and lists of results. Although it is sometimes difficult to find the vocabulary word you were originally searching for, Jim Breen’s depth of search results are handy when you’re looking for something out of the ordinary.

Back to the iPhone version!

The iPhone version is quite a bit worse than the real version. The iPhone version will only allow you to see the first page of results when the vocab word you’re looking for can sometimes be on page two or three. For example, when I searched for telephone, it wouldn’t come up with 電話 (でんわ). Instead, it came up with things like telephone box, push pin telephone, etc. The results for telephone were probably on pages two or three, but since those results aren’t included in the iPhone version, there was no way to find the right translation. There were situations like this where it was obvious it didn’t quite work right, so at least you won’t be tricked into thinking a translation is something it’s not.

Here’s one that did work. I searched for the word Monkey, and it came up with these results:

I turned “Common Words Only,” since this normally helps the real version of this dictionary come up with more usable search results.

First result was correct! Sadly, the results aren’t always the best possible results. That’s something that hopefully they will work on for the future of this app.

Translating Kanji into English

Here’s another feature I was excited about. Since the iPhone can now type in Japanese, being able to look up kanji would be wonderful. Unfortunately, at this time (August 6, 2008), the app just crashes whenever you try to look something up. I hope they fix this feature soon.

Overall Impressions

I wasn’t entirely impressed with this application. It has a lot of potential for being a great Japanese dictionary for the iPhone, but it just doesn’t work consistantly enough (right now). I think it will get better, so it’s worth checking out after they fix some of the bugs. There’s another Japanese dictionary on the iTunes App store, iJisho, but that ones way way worse, plus it costs money. The wwwJDic application is free, and you can’t beat  that, especially when it beats the current competition (which isn’t all that great either).

Even though this application is buggy, and it doesn’t always come up with good search results, it’s still the best thing available, so if you’re looking for a Japanese dictionary for your iPhone, this is your best bet.

Other News: Don’t forget about our Twitter Contest, where you can win the tastiest Japanese candy in the whole world known and unknown plus the universe too.

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  • http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/iPhone.html Peter

    A much better version of Edict is the customized one at JLT. For Japanese to English it's the same as the standard, searchable by kanji or kana. But it's been heavily edited to be much better when searching English-to-Japanese. For example, with the standard Edict, when you look up “horse,” you get a lot of irrelevant results up front–”uma,” the actual word for horse, comes up only after scrolling through quite a few screens–it's around the 40th result. In the JLT version of Edict, it's the first. Plus there's a version of Jim Breen's Kanjidic and Enamdict on the JLT site–and Kanjidic has been altered to show you stroke orders for all 6355 kanji, and to let you look up kanji directly (by entering kanji), by reading, and by SKIP order. And there's a dictionary that shows you how to conjugate every verb in Edict (“what's the past causative of 'hasamu'?”), and to enter a conjugated verb to find out what tense and what verb it is. Plus you can add any dictionary in the standard EPWING format (Koujien, Daijirin, Kenkyusha, and a special version of Eijiro with yomigana added for every kanji compound, Genius, etc.). Morever, the app that runs all these dictionaries, EBPocket, doesn't have any of the problems you describe above–it works well. Visit the page below for links to the app ($4.99), to download the free dictionaries, and for instructions for replacing the version of Edict that comes with the app (which has the same E-to-J problems you mention above) with the free JLT dictionaries. Disclosure: I make the free dictionaries mentioned; I don't have anything to do with the app.

  • http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/iPhone.html Peter

    Sorry–click on my name to get to the page with the links to the app and the free dictionaries and instructions.

    And, yup, Prof. Breen is indeed a cool guy.

  • http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/iPhone.html Peter

    I'm kind of put off that iJisho claims you can use the Chinese handwriting input to enter kanji without mentioning that it doesn't work very well for a lot of kanji, and it doesn't work at all for many others, even some very common ones. If you buy the app expecting to be able to enter kanji by handwriting, you're going to be frustrated. Simply put, Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji have been evolving separately for 1300+ years, so the characters aren't all the same anymore. Some kanji, even common ones, don't exist in Chinese, and others have a different stroke order (confounding the handwriting system if you enter the correct Japanese stroke order). It's a good thing to use, but you can't depend on it for finding kanji, because a frustratingly high percentage of the time, it just won't work.

    For some of the common kanji that aren't in Chinese and more detail on why they're not, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character#…

    Try entering the kanji for, e.g., common kanji like the ones for black, Buddha, and the “ki” in “genki” (and thousands of other words) on your iPhone.

  • http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/iPhone.html Peter

    A much better version of Edict is the customized one at JLT. For Japanese to English it's the same as the standard, searchable by kanji or kana. But it's been heavily edited to be much better when searching English-to-Japanese. For example, with the standard Edict, when you look up “horse,” you get a lot of irrelevant results up front–”uma,” the actual word for horse, comes up only after scrolling through quite a few screens–it's around the 40th result. In the JLT version of Edict, it's the first. Plus there's a version of Jim Breen's Kanjidic and Enamdict on the JLT site–and Kanjidic has been altered to show you stroke orders for all 6355 kanji, and to let you look up kanji directly (by entering kanji), by reading, and by SKIP order. And there's a dictionary that shows you how to conjugate every verb in Edict (“what's the past causative of 'hasamu'?”), and to enter a conjugated verb to find out what tense and what verb it is. Plus you can add any dictionary in the standard EPWING format (Koujien, Daijirin, Kenkyusha, and a special version of Eijiro with yomigana added for every kanji compound, Genius, etc.). Morever, the app that runs all these dictionaries, EBPocket, doesn't have any of the problems you describe above–it works well. Visit the page below for links to the app ($4.99), to download the free dictionaries, and for instructions for replacing the version of Edict that comes with the app (which has the same E-to-J problems you mention above) with the free JLT dictionaries. Disclosure: I make the free dictionaries mentioned; I don't have anything to do with the app.

  • http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/iPhone.html Peter

    Sorry–click on my name to get to the page with the links to the app and the free dictionaries and instructions.

    And, yup, Prof. Breen is indeed a cool guy.

  • http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/iPhone.html Peter

    I'm kind of put off that iJisho claims you can use the Chinese handwriting input to enter kanji without mentioning that it doesn't work very well for a lot of kanji, and it doesn't work at all for many others, even some very common ones. If you buy the app expecting to be able to enter kanji by handwriting, you're going to be frustrated. Simply put, Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji have been evolving separately for 1300+ years, so the characters aren't all the same anymore. Some kanji, even common ones, don't exist in Chinese, and others have a different stroke order (confounding the handwriting system if you enter the correct Japanese stroke order). It's a good thing to use, but you can't depend on it for finding kanji, because a frustratingly high percentage of the time, it just won't work.

    For some of the common kanji that aren't in Chinese and more detail on why they're not, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character#…

    Try entering the kanji for, e.g., common kanji like the ones for black, Buddha, and the “ki” in “genki” (and thousands of other words) on your iPhone.

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