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+--- Thread: Any suggestion for an iPhone handwriting app, dictionary? (/thread-3573.html)
Any suggestion for an iPhone handwriting app, dictionary? - totsubo - 2009-07-21
I'm looking for an application for my iPhone that will let me me scribble a kanji on my iPhone and give me the reading/etc. Can anyone recommend one?
I've looked through the app store and searched the RtK forums but haven't found anything.
Also, if you have a favourite iPhone Japanese/English dictionary please let me know. I am looking to install one.
Any suggestion for an iPhone handwriting app, dictionary? - mezbup - 2009-07-21
Kotoba is a great Japanese/English Dic for the Iphone... You can TRY using the Japanese Kanji Input IME on the Iphone but IMO its not worth the headache it will cause you. Ur best bet and my most handy tool so far would be getting a nintendo DS and the dictionary Kanji Sono Mama Rakubiki Jiten... great input recognition plus thousands of example senteces plus it has a J-J dictionary aswell as example sentences where idiomatic uses are pointed out! It makes looking up anything you dont know the reading (and can't look it up on a computer) very, very easy to look up.
I found the kanji IME on Iphone was atrocious.
Any suggestion for an iPhone handwriting app, dictionary? - yukkuri_kame - 2009-07-21
Our longest iphone app for japanese learning thread:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=1858&page=1
Shinkanji is the app I find most useful for looking up unfamiliar kanji, though I mostly use the radical search, rather than hand-drawing. There is a thread including comments by the developer here:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=1902
Kotoba is a "good enough" dictionary - and free. I am looking forward to the day when my Japanese is good enough to use a japanese-japanese dictionary, as many of the better iphone dictionaries are designed for japanese doing ESL.
Any suggestion for an iPhone handwriting app, dictionary? - wahnfrieden - 2009-07-25
The absolute best dictionary is iDic for iPhone, since it is an EPWING-format dictionary reader. You need the EPWING files though. But every great 'real' dictionary, like Kenkyusha or Genius, is available in EPWING.
Every other dictionary uses EDICT, which is garbage in comparison. It's not even really a dictionary, just a gloss, and the Tanaka Corpus example sentences it often comes with are totally inaccurate and unreliable. You're better off using one of the web-based dictionaries like goo.ne.jp or ALC.
Any suggestion for an iPhone handwriting app, dictionary? - FutureBlues - 2009-07-26
wahnfrieden Wrote:The absolute best dictionary is iDic for iPhone, since it is an EPWING-format dictionary reader. You need the EPWING files though. But every great 'real' dictionary, like Kenkyusha or Genius, is available in EPWING.I love to repeat myself, really, I do.
Every other dictionary uses EDICT, which is garbage in comparison. It's not even really a dictionary, just a gloss, and the Tanaka Corpus example sentences it often comes with are totally inaccurate and unreliable. You're better off using one of the web-based dictionaries like goo.ne.jp or ALC.
99% of the time I open a dictionary on my iPhone it's because I need to double-check something, i.e. a gloss.
Any suggestion for an iPhone handwriting app, dictionary? - Jarvik7 - 2009-07-26
@FutureBlues:
Not everyone is you. I think the over-reliance on EDICT as a learning tool by most of the English native JSL community is seriously holding us back as a group. It does of course have uses, but primary dictionary/learning tool isn't one of them.
That said, iDic isn't the only EPWING reader on the appstore now. The author of the most popular pc/wince EPWING tools released EBPOCKET for iphone a few months ago. There are both free and pay versions.
Rather than kotoba, I think ShinKanji Lite (also free) is better for kanji lookup. Personally I use kenkyuusha shinwaeichuujiten's native iphone app the most since it has a nicer interface than the iphone EPWING readers.
Any suggestion for an iPhone handwriting app, dictionary? - CKBrown1000 - 2009-07-26
Kotoba! for the dictionary. End of story.
Any suggestion for an iPhone handwriting app, dictionary? - privard - 2010-06-25
Edict has its purposes--funny the amount of vitriol a dictionary brings out! Either it's for you or it's not. But I second the recommendation of EBPocket and EPWING dictionaries. There are English instructions at http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/iPhone.html#install for how to install EPWING dictionaries to EBPocket on your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad (free dictionaries at the same site, too, including an improved version of the dreaded, baby-killing Edict, plus a version of Kanjidic with stroke-order diagrams for 6355 JIS X0208 kanji).
All the major players are available in EPWING or can be converted to it easily (Koujien in EPWING format will run 8000 yen or more, Daijirin will run 6000 yen or more and needs to be converted to EPWING [though it's not hard], and the set of both Kenkyusha Daijiten [E>J and J<E] in EPWING generally runs about 25,000 yen). Like anything else they're worth it if they're what you need.
There's also Eijiro, which is made by and for professional translators--it's got everything in Kenkyusha and a lot more, especially technical terms from many disciplines and casual Japanese you don't find in regular dictionaries. You can try Eijiro for free online to see the breadth and depth of the entries, though the online version lacks the features you'd get running it in EB Pocket (http://www.alc.co.jp/). As Eijiro is made for pros, for the simplest words it assumes you know the basic meaning and just gives you more colorful ways of saying them (for straightforward things like "dog" you can turn to Edict); for the other 99% it gives full definitions with example sentences comparable to Kenkyusha and other dictionaries. However, it also has a huge stock of separate sentences and phrases, and the sophisticated Cross Search feature in EBPocket lets you find the one that says just what you need, either to use as a phrasebook or to illustrate how a particular word is used in a particular context--it's the best way to see, e.g., where a word fits within the word order of a sentence, what particle it takes, etc. High-level Japanese speakers can download the original in EPWING format from the Eijiro site for 5000 yen; for the same price people who need more help can download a version from my site, http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/docs/Eijiro.html, that has hiragana added after almost every kanji-containing word, making it much easier to read and use (it also allows you to look up a word by either how it's written with kanji or how it's pronounced in hiragana--the original and all other Eijiro apps require that Japanese words be entered in kanji if they're normally written that way). The JLT version of Eijiro comes as a set with a dictionary that helps you conjugate verbs or find the tense and dictionary form of a conjugated verb--see http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/docs/Conjugations.html for info and screenshots of that.