Today, Japanese language learners have access to a huge number of electronic dictionaries. Which one should you use? This variety can lead to what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the “paradox of choice.”
To help you avoid overanalysis and decision fatigue, I've gone through dozens of dictionary sites and apps, leaving only the ones that are ideal for Japanese translation.
Japanese
An elegant, powerful, and easy-to-use app. It’s free, available for both iOS and Android, and has a number of great features that are sure to come in handy when traveling. These include support for handwriting in Japanese, a special tool for pasting text from blogs, emails, text messages, and more.
Everything you need to learn Japanese is provided here: built-in flashcards for reviewing the material covered, the ability to create custom bookmarks. For greater convenience, words are classified by topic, JLPT levels, words are broken down into constituent parts with the meaning and reading of each individual kanji. The application database contains 180,000 dictionary entries and 58,000 example sentences.
The application is available for Android And iPhone.
Simply Learn Japanese
The Simply Learn Japanese app includes lessons, practice sessions, phrasebooks, and dictionaries on the Japanese language. It is perfect for those who have just started learning Japanese and have not yet accumulated enough knowledge, but must go to Japan on vacation or a business trip. Beginner training begins with learning numbers, time, and dates, as well as memorizing basic dialogues.
During the learning process, you will learn not only words, but also entire phrases that can be useful in your studies. There are more than 1000 popular phrases in total, divided into 32 categories. Of course, the application has a built-in search for the desired phrase, the pronunciation of which can be heard performed by a native Japanese person, and not by a robot. If necessary, the pronunciation speed can be reduced for better understanding. After studying, you can take a quiz to assess your level of knowledge.
The application is available for Android And iPhone.
Aedict3 Japanese Dictionary
Aedict3 includes a number of great features, including a wide range of ways to search for kanji, including freehand drawing, radical search, and SKIP codes. There are also searches using Romaji, Kana, Kanji, English, and Russian. You can search using any form of verbs or adjectives (the program automatically recognizes their dictionary form).
The app supports automatic vowel lengthening (if you type しゅかん, the program will also give results for しゅうかん), accent placement to help the user distinguish homonyms. You can use the built-in SRS flashcards to memorize words, and the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) quiz for testing.
The application is available for Android.
Takoboto
Takoboto is another decent and very simple Japanese-Russian dictionary with full offline support. In addition to English, you can translate words into German, French and Russian with usage examples, definitions, etc.
The app works great as a phrasebook, translator and dictionary, and is completely free, without purchases or advertising. I did not find any errors during testing.
The application is available for Android.
Nihongo
Nihongo was developed by Chris Vasselli, who previously worked with Box, Subspace, IBM, and a Japanese student who thought out the user interface very well. They managed to solve the problems associated with the high competition in this field, and now they continue to improve and adapt the application taking into account user feedback.
The application focuses on using genuine Japanese content, automatically creates cards of words whose translation you were looking for, there is an option to add pictures to these cards. Each new word is rated by popularity: common, uncommon, rare - this will allow you to learn popular words faster. In addition to the built-in dictionary, which can work without Internet access, there is a function for translating words from a photo.
The application is available for iPhone.
Imiwa
Based on Jim Brin’s JMdict, Imiwa is another decent Japanese dictionary for iOS. It offers a lot of powerful features, including 170,000 entries in Japanese and English, with some available in Russian. There are over 13,000 kanji entries with multiple search options. In addition to translation, it shows example sentences, verb and adjective conjugation, and has a sentence analyzer. It is also possible to use the dictionary offline.
The application is available for iPhone.