Nihongo - Japanese Dictionary 4+

Kanji, kana, vocab and grammar

Serpenti Sei LLC

Designed for iPad

    • 4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
    • Free
    • Offers In-App Purchases

Screenshots

Description

Nihongo is an offline Japanese dictionary, flashcard app, and reading assistant, designed to make the best use of the time you dedicate to studying Japanese.

Our dictionary is made to find what you're looking for fast, with the words Japanese speakers actually use at the top of every search result, and every word marked as "common", "uncommon", or "rare".

"Clippings", our reading assistant, is what makes Nihongo stand apart from other dictionaries. Paste in Japanese text from a website, email, an eBook, or anywhere else, and we'll add furigana or romaji to every word. We also enable you to tap on any word to see its definition. This will truly change the way you read Japanese. And now, you can get the same experience right in Safari using our Safari extension.

Personal experience (as well as a good deal of research in second-language acquisition) has shown us that the words that you're most likely to remember are the words that you're encountering naturally. To this end Nihongo automatically draws from your search history and clippings to compile flashcard decks filled with words for which you already have context. This makes it easy to study both the words you looked up during Japanese class, and those that appear in your favorite song or videogame. And by adding notes to the back of flashcards you can further connect each vocabulary word to your personal contextual understanding.

Kanji flashcards prompt you to draw the missing kanji from the words you're studying, creating stronger connections between the characters and their real-world use. Built-in kanji decks give you 2 or 3 key words to study for each kanji.

This app is only possible because of the JMDict (edrdg.org) and Tatoeba (tatoeba.org) projects. I highly encourage you to support these incredible projects that make apps like Nihongo possible!

DICTIONARY
* Over 180,000 words, 165,000 example sentences, and 6000 kanji entries.
* Every word clearly marked as common, uncommon, or rare.
* Add your own notes to any dictionary entry.
* Quickly identify transitive/intransitive word pairs.
* Audio pronunciations of words and example sentences (Requires Nihongo Pro)

PHOTO LOOKUP (OCR) [Pro]
* Look up words just by taking a picture.
* Uses Google Cloud Vision to provide high-quality text recognition.
* Just tap on a word to look it up.

CLIPPINGS (READING ASSISTANT) [Pro]
* Adds furigana or romaji to text pasted into the app.
* Tap on any word to see its definition without leaving the clipping.
* Flashcard deck automatically created so you can study the new words in a clipping.
* Display text horizontally or vertically.
* Have Nihongo read any clipping out loud.

FLASHCARDS [Pro]
* Flashcards automatically generated from words you lookup in the dictionary or paste into the app.
* Nihongo learns what words you know, and won't bother you again with words you've mastered.
* Built-in kanji flashcard decks up through Middle School.
* Intuitive spaced repetition flashcard system for vocabulary and kanji drawing.
* Level up flashcards by studying every day.
* No penalty for missing a day of study, come back anytime.

SEARCH
* Search using English, Japanese, or romaji.
* Supports searching for conjugated words in both English and Japanese.
* Search for kanji using radicals and stroke counts.

SAFARI EXTENSION [Pro]
* Add furigana or romaji to webpages.
* Tap on words to see definition within Safari.

Nihongo Pro Terms of Use
Read our full Terms of Service at https://nihongo-app.com/terms_of_use.html.

What’s New

Version 1.30.9

Bug Fixes
* Fix issue where the Safari integration was not working properly on iOS 17.4.

Ratings and Reviews

4.8 out of 5
1.2K Ratings

1.2K Ratings

Reachfh99 ,

Works well for reading manga

I am using this to read manga for learning Japanese. I do a screen capture and load it into the app, which recognizes text. I can then look up words. On the whole, it works quite well, and is the best I have found. It ends up getting about 80% of the text recognized by OCR, particularly good for kanji. The dictionary is good as well. Things that are not working as well as I would like: * It tends to translate word by word (or short phrase), which makes it miss some phrases * The missing 20% of the text that it can’t recognize for OCR, sometimes inexplicably, which exacerbates the problem above of not correctly translating a phrase. * The number of clicks required to read page after page is high. It would be nice if this use case was streamlined. I generally pair it with DeepL for whole sentence translation. That is pretty amazing, but doesn’t do OCR. It would be great to be able to make it easier to e.g. copy all the text found, or do some deeper integration.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for taking the time to write up the detailed feedback, this is really useful. FWIW I'm working on a whole new text parser, which should help with a lot of the recognition problems you're having. Full-text OCR is also definitely on my short-list of features to add. Thanks!

DarkRedAngel247 ,

The Perfect App

This is the best app I have ever used in my life. Have tried other OCR apps to use on manga and they are complicated to use/don’t work well. I love how I can just click on any word and with a tap of a button able to the add the image so I can see where that vocabulary word is coming from/get context. It’s also easy to transfer decks from iPhone to iPad if you are unable to sync. Press share and then email it to yourself as if you click on export it’s in a format only Anki can read. You can even reorder vocabulary so if you accidentally deleted a word just re add it back it and click on the i button by the deck name. I’ve never happy I got the lifetime while it was 50% off. Worth every penny.

Thisprogramsucks ,

Mistakes

I purchased the app for 3 months and as a dictionary if you know Hiragana works fine. However it’s use of romanji sometimes is off (eg du for zu) I will probably end up buying the app permanent more for it flash cards to review words that I have looked up (a nice feature) however it has some irritating problems and mistakes. 1) the Kanji at times when it gives examples in its usage is outright wrong. You click the Kanji word and a different Kanji appears. 2) Also the example sentences they give with certain word seems to be computer generated so that even more complex words are added to the sample sentence making the sample sentence incomprehensible at times. It seems that a sentence would be generated to use as much complex words as possible so it can be reused for other examples. 3) The sample sentence does not include the the translated word, making me wonder whether the meaning given by the dictionary is correct. eg try look up Osameru/ Osamaru. Has potential to be a five star application but would try the application for a few months and make sure you can tolerate the mistakes.

App Privacy

The developer, Serpenti Sei LLC, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

  • Purchases
  • Location
  • Usage Data
  • Diagnostics

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Supports

  • Family Sharing

    Some in‑app purchases, including subscriptions, may be shareable with your family group when Family Sharing is enabled.

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