ALC is a Japanese website that acts as a dictionary/lookup tool. For those who don’t speak Japanese, the site can be deceptively simple: there’s one textbox where you can input either Japanese or English text and it will translate it for you.
Pros
- Free!
- Provides good example sentences and context.
- Created by native Japanese speakers.
- Contains lots of slang, idioms, obscure and technical terms.
Cons
- Site is entirely in Japanese.
- Not much beyond straight dictionary lookup.
- Some inaccuracies and mistranslations.
ALC is great because it has a lot of words and phrases you can’t find in other dictionaries. This is because it uses the Eijiro dictionary as a backend.
But that also means that it has a lot of strange translations and flat-out mistakes.
Final Word
ALC is a good site to bookmark to help you understand words or phrases better in context, but lacks a lot of the more sophisticated look up tools that other dictionary sites have.
Pictures
Search results in ALC.