Japanese is an app for iOS that includes a Japanese-English dictionary and various study methods. It’s available for $7.99 in the App Store.
See Japanese In The App Store →
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Pros
- Stored locally (no internet connection required).
- Lots of lookup methods (by radical, handwriting, and SKIP).
- Built-in study features for JLPT.
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Cons
- Handwriting recognition feature is sensitive to stroke order.
- Uses JMdict/EDICT.
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Japanese has been a longtime favorite of Tofugu, but a lot has changed about the app since we wrote about it in 2010. Fortunately, those changes have been good: the price has gone down ($7.99 from $16), and the app has been regularly updated with new features.
Lookup Methods
You don’t always have complete information when looking up a word or kanji, so it’s important for a Japanese dictionary to have multiple lookup methods. Fortunately, Japanese has a variety of ways to look up information, including by kanji radical, by SKIP, iOS voice recognition (for both English and Japanese) and handwriting.
This multitude of lookup methods is definitely one of Japanese’s better features, but it’s not always foolproof. Those unfamiliar with these lookup methods will need to learn how to use them before being able to take advantage of them, and the handwriting feature is, like Midori and other iOS apps, very sensitive to stroke order. You can generally make an educated guess about a kanji’s stroke order, but there are always exceptions.
Available Information and Studying
When you look up words in Japanese, you get lots of information like conjugation, JLPT level, kanji used, counters, and example sentences. You can also add personal notes to words to add even more information.
Of course, all of this information is pulled from Jim Breen’s JMdict project and the Tatoeba Project, each of which has its own pros and cons (which you can read about here).
Japanese is also bundled with a spaced repetition system (SRS) for studying. You can study by JLPT level, or create your own, custom set of words or kanji to study.
Final Word
Japanese is a great app for Japanese lookup and studying. It’s less expensive than some of the other apps for iOS and has a useful set of features. Japanese was good in 2010, but I’d say that it’s even better today.