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!

As someone just beginning to learn Japanese, I can’t speak to the accuracy of the app’s translations. I can speak, however, to how easy this app makes looking up Kanji and Kana. I’ve since wrapped my head around particles and where words begin, but in the beginning it was very difficult to know where to start a search. This app does a great job of intuiting what you’re trying to find and providing you relevant and common results, which can’t be said for the other apps I’ve used. This was actually the second Japanese dictionary app I downloaded because I was unable to find any entries in the other, and this app has since replaced it. You can then build lists of words you’ve searched and study generated flash cards of those words in the spaced repetition format common in apps like Anki. The flash cards include a scratch pad for Kanji and although you can’t add pictures to go along with the words, I find the organic nature of looking up words creating the decks makes up for it. Granted I’ve never actually messed with Anki but that’s a separate issue. Anyway, I’m getting off topic. Great app. Download it.

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.