imiwa‪?‬ 4+

The #1 Best Translation App

Ive tried a lot of the translation apps, and none can touch this app. It provides an incredible amount of extremely useful information about each word. I like it for the following reasons:
(1) has very accurate, nuanced and detailed definitions in multiple languages
(2) provides info about what each kanji means (both as the whole word and broken down into individual kanji elements)
(3) provides the grammatical structure of the word (e.g. it is an intransitive verb, い or な adjective, etc.)
(4) provides all of the forms/conjugations of verbs and adjectives (e.g. present tense, past tense, ongoing, etc.).
(5) provides kanji, hiragana, and romanji
(6) has easy-to-access links to similar and related words
(7) enter full sentences and it will break down each piece of vocab in the sentence
(8) lets you know if the kana or kanji is more commonly used
(9) has language cards you can practice that are organized according to both JLPT and school grade levels of difficulty
(10) can bookmark and write notes
(11) very nice “copy and paste” function
(12) lots of kanji info: kanji brush strokes, info about radicals, lists other words using the same kanji radicals, etc.
There are other apps with similar features (e.g. “Shitabe Jisho” and “Japanese”) but Imiwa is much cleaner and easy to read.

BEST language dictionary

Imiwa is the BEST English-Japanese dictionary out there. Actually it's the best cross-language dictionary I've used period. Although I admit, I mostly look at free ones, often paid ones I find are junk.

Imiwa makes it so easy to look up terms in romaji, or if you've installed Japanese keyboards on your phone/ipad you can look up by hiragana or kanji directly. If you install the one Chinese keyboard that lets you draw the characters it's even better.

Once you've found a word, you can see example sentences, when they are available. You can also see the breakdown of the kanji in the word, and continue to see what that particular kanji means. The kanji definitions have all the readings, radicals, and brush strokes.

Imiwa lets you have multiple lists. I save lists for fun phrases, cool words, kanji I need to study, and (when that was a concern) words for the different JLPT levels.

...I use it a lot in the car to look up a Japanese lyric I just heard. Or a random word I suddenly realize I don't know the Japanese word for but I should.

If you are studying Japanese, or even if you just like anime, it's a no-brainer to install Imiwa on your phone.

Best app for Japanese learners

UPDATE 11/21: Taking one star away since as of the new version, there are two really annoying bugs that make the app much harder to use. When viewing example sentences, only the first line of each translation is displayed until the example is scrolled past (vanishes from view). When you view the example again, the full translation is then visible. This workaround doesn’t always work because not every example can be scrolled past. The other bug is that the search icon on the top right doesn’t work sometimes when viewed from an entry. The magnifying glass overlaps with an “X” and stops working. I’m not sure how exactly to reproduce this but it happens often enough.

***
This is by far the best Japanese dictionary app that has ever graced the App Store, bar none. It's simple to use and extremely effective, allowing you to look up the definitions you need at lightning speed. The devs deserve a big thank you for keeping the app free all these years.

As of iOS 11, there are a few small bugs in the UI (eg the search icon on the top right didn’t seem to work sometimes when viewed directly from a dictionary entry). Hopefully the devs can get that fixed as it’s a bit annoying when you’re looking up many words at a go and have to hit an extra key to go back each time.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for the kind words, an update is coming for iOS11 and all screen geometries 心配しないでください　＾＾