imiwa?

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.

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.

I’ve downloaded and used pretty much every Japanese language app available for iOS. This has been my go-to app Japanese app for almost a decade now. Being able to create dictionary lists, import and export those lists, create flashcards from the lists, and find almost any word I’ve come across with example sentences has spoiled me to no end. All of this with a great UI and for free no less! It’s not been without its bugs from time to time, but I’ve found they always get addressed with updates. Did I mention it’s free and has been going strong for over 9 years? If you enjoy this app as much as I have, you should seriously consider donating to the developer’s PayPal account.

I think this is a must for learning Japanese. One suggestion though, I think adding some sort of graph for Pitch Accent would make it even better, since for example the pronunciation for 家具 (furniture) and 嗅ぐ(To smell) sounds absolutely the same, so having a Pitch Accent graph will help with differentiate and learn about the native sound. It could be either for each word (such hassle) or a general graph of how to identify the pitch for most words. Anyways great work, it is really appreciated!

I recently discovered the auto clipboard lookup feature, it’s just so useful I felt compelled to leave a review. As someone self studying Japanese this is such a valuable resource. The only improvements I can think of would be more options to turn off displaying some information. It can be a bit overwhelming to have so much information displayed, I want to be able to trim the fat so to say. ありがとございます。