Shirabe Jisho 4+

Let me start off my saying I don’t usually write reviews for anything even if I liked it. I’ve bought a lot of things this year and liked most of them but I can only remember reviewing one (or was it two?) of those things and I just did that because it’s Etsy so people work really hard on hand making that stuff. But anyways I’m surprised that not that many people have this app because it’s literally amazing. I was a bit stressed over finding a good Japanese dictionary for my self study and this is literally perfect! You can search up a word in several different ways, and it tells you everything about the word from breaking down the word into its separate kana/kanji to breaking down the kanji into it’s different radicals. I love that it has the ‘common’ marking on words when you search them up as well because it’s really important to know if people actually use this word that you’re looking up, ya know? And it also has a little button for an audio of the pronunciation and while it’s a bit robotic, I was so happy that it had that because it gives me a little bit of insight about the pitch and accent of the word so I can feel more confident about it. I’m just rly surprised that this app doesn’t have 1 million downloads but it’s everyone else who is missing out!

You’ll never need another Japanese study app (especially one you have to pay for). This one is FREE! You can draw kanji on the app to find out the meaning, and you can also draw a couple at once. This is really great if you don’t want to lug around a kanji dictionary and search through pages for one specific kanji. This app makes it incredibly easy to look up kanji. There are example sentences for many words, phrases, and verbs. You can also click on any words to see the meaning in those examples. There are break downs of all words and kanji stroke order. I often use the kanji stroke order tool to improve my handwriting. You can type English words to see translations and it tells you when it’s a very commonly used word. This app is really useful for learning kanji/ vocabulary and is a tool I often use when I read books written in Japanese. I don’t use it as a translator though. I use a translator app for that. I would very highly recommend this app to anyone who wants to supplement their Japanese learning. I recommend using this app in junction with a textbook.

I’ve been using this dictionary for almost as long as I’ve been studying Japanese for, since 2 years ago. I’ve tried out Midori for a while, but didn’t want to buy it since it was too expensive, so I went for this app instead. Both apps have the exact same content and example sentences, except that this one is completely free, so naturally, I picked this app over Midori. I like the favourite function and they way I can bookmark words for later revision. If the developers can make this app compatible with the Apple Watch, that can allow my bookmarked words to show up on my Watch so that I can revise from my wrist on the go, I’d be eternally grateful. Of course, it’d be even better if I can also search for words from my watch too, using the Scribble function, or through a little Japanese keypad. I had to use Erudite to make it possible to add words to a list that can appear on my watch for revision, but since I’ve bookmarked hundreds of words in the Shirabe Jisho app, it’s a real pain to have to boomark all the words again.