ALC

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.

Visit ALC →

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.