I'm getting an android phone in the next few days and I intend to have some nice apps there.

Please advice me on:

-Japanese/Mandarin Chinese learning apps (I know there's Ankidroid)
-Games
-every other useful apps you know of.

Thanks.

Ha, wish I knew.

There is the online anki, though, which is pretty useful. I've used it a few times. I'm pretty sure that the android marketplace has as much Japanese stuff as the iPhone marketplace (I know that's not the name). As you noted, there's ankidroid as well as ankimini, but one isn't so hot yet, and the other requires rooting, I think... I'm not certain, though. There's also a seemingly-good dictionary (Oxford English-Japanese) but I've not tried it (Too cheap to pay!). It's about 10 dollars, so it's not too pricey. A lot of the reviews complain about being unable to use romaji, which is kinda funny.

As far as japanese studies go, though, I mostly use the last.fm app, for the tag radio. As long as I put in 'jpop' or 'jrock' or similar, I never get any non-Japanese bands. One out of every ten or so will have a lot of English in it, but most of the music's good. There's also a pandora app, but I've not been successful in getting it to play only Japanese music.

You do not need to root your android phone to run ankimini. However, it does require a little toying, e.g., Installing ASE (Android Scripting Environment), modifying the ankimini main script, etc. Minor stuff if you are technically savvy, probably scary as hell if you aren't. See http://kd7yhr.blogspot.com/2009/10/getti...droid.html

For inputting japanese, I'd recommend simeji.
Be sure to go into the settings and try all 3 types of keyboard input.

What about dictionaries (for japanese) for free? One of those where we can write the kanji (android phones have touch screen) would be pretty cool.
I tried one that was very good but it was online so...|:

A dictionary would be very handy really.

I have ankidroid, now it really is awesome with the 4 options to choose (again, hard, easy, very easy). Before it only had two and it wasn't an srs, the items appeared randomly.

Thanks.


EDIT:
I found this awesome website that shows all android apps. It has a bunch of dictionaries! I believe the one called JED is very useful, it looks a lot like the one I have for chinese. You can write in romaji or english.

http://www.androlib.com/r.aspx?t=free&r=...dictionary

CarolinaCG Wrote:What about dictionaries (for japanese) for free? One of those where we can write the kanji (android phones have touch screen) would be pretty cool.
I tried one that was very good but it was online so...|:

A dictionary would be very handy really.

I use Aedict, nice interface, its offline (it downloads JDIC when used for the first time), quick and even has some Quiz ability (I've to try it sometime).

Aedict is the best you can have, there is everything you need in there, kanji seach/description/tons of examples for every kanjis(on/kun reading, stroke order, kanji search method by radical/recognition) you can analyse words and sentences, you have a katakana/hiragana table and much more.

Thanks Thurd and Elidan. I will download that one then





This thread is not japanese learning exclusive, you can suggest other apps you think are cool.

DroidWing - An EPWing reader for Android to load EPWing dictionaries. This is GREAT.
Simeji - Great Japanese IME.. I like it's flick style.
BeyondPod - Great podcast manager I use to handle my Japanese podcasts
NewsRob - RSS reader that integrates with Google Reader, tons of Japanese RSS streams
Browser - I use Anki Online every day...
Clipstore - A Clipboard monitoring program that I run in the background. It keeps a list of stuff copied - so when I'm studying something in an Anki deck and I want to mark it for further study later or something, I just copy it and it creates a list for later. Very useful.

And that's basically it...there's not a lot of other love for Japanese. There's a few standard apps, so you can look at weather in Japanese or something. But I haven't found much that's useful (or more useful than just loading a website in the browser)

+1 for JED. I used aedict too, but jed searches as you type, so it is MUCH more faster,
it also finds conjugated forms (at least masu and te form) of the verbs and shows furigana.

I personally also play a lot with kanji flashcard, although it has only 1000 kanji or so...

As zanzou mentioned before, not much love for Japanese on android :'(

None of you mentioned anki droid. Are you already aware of it?

I have a chinese dictionary, Hanping, that I use a lot, you can type in english or pinyin, it's useful but its difficult to search with pinyin because there are hundreds of hanzi with that sound.

Do you know of any kind of pdf readers? I have the official, but it is so slow...

As for games I recommend:

-Abduction
-sudoku
-Bonsai blast


My Hero has only 5 or 6 new apps (without those that were already there) ._.

I did try anki on android no so long ago, but I have a dedicated "japanese
learning center" ( aka netbook ), so I didn't really use it.
There is also smart.fm for android which I dropped for the same reason,
but looked really promising.

You might also be interested to know that there is Chinese IME bundled with HTC-branded phones sold in Asia: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=512530

I too will buy a netbook soon for that same purpose (and because I get tired of carrying my portable computer everywhere, it is big and heavy. And it is hard to take it out of my trolley during the train trips.

It would be really cool if the new firmware (after 1.5) could actualy have imes. My phone is not rooted |:

CarolinaCG Wrote:None of you mentioned anki droid. Are you already aware of it?

I bought an HTC with Android recently, after I lost my ipod touch in a trip. I've installed ankidroid but all it does is open the file on capitals of the world. No options, no indication of how to upload other files or anything. I installed also Anymemo which claims to be better but, although it has proper menus and whatnot, the heisig file does not start from the beginning. Plus it has 6 easy to hard choices, which is too many in my opinion.
Any ideas how to get the Ankidroid to work?

Jeromin Wrote:Any ideas how to get the Ankidroid to work?

Sure, you need to copy the deck (.anki file) from your Anki directory on your PC to your SD card on your phone. You'll see a file called country-capitals.anki in the same folder. Disonnect your phone from your PC and run AnkiDroid again. It'll go back to the capitals deck again (goes to the last used deck by default). Push the menu button, then select switch to another deck, and pick your deck.

Jeromin Wrote:

CarolinaCG Wrote:None of you mentioned anki droid. Are you already aware of it?

I bought an HTC with Android recently, after I lost my ipod touch in a trip. I've installed ankidroid but all it does is open the file on capitals of the world. No options, no indication of how to upload other files or anything. I installed also Anymemo which claims to be better but, although it has proper menus and whatnot, the heisig file does not start from the beginning. Plus it has 6 easy to hard choices, which is too many in my opinion.
Any ideas how to get the Ankidroid to work?

1) download this: http://ankidroid.googlecode.com/files/An...MENTAL.apk
2) enable unknown/non-market apps (settings -> applications -> unknown sources)
3) install the downloaded file via astro or similar
4) copy an anki deck from your PC or wherever to the root of your sd card (so /sdcard/whatever.anki)
5) open ankidroid, menu, switch to another deck and choose your deck from the list.

you should then be able to put your user and pass in via preferences and then sync your deck no problems.

http://groups.google.com/group/anki-andr...3f0b4f584a#
^^ read that too - this version is the beta so some functions don't work (can't remember specifically), but on the whole it is fully functional.

CarolinaCG Wrote:It would be really cool if the new firmware (after 1.5) could actualy have imes. My phone is not rooted |:

I do not think that installing an ime requires rooting, it is an apk like any other applications; just download the zip on your phone, unpack it, double clicking on the apk to install. (Install astro file manager before installing, it will handle zip files for you)

There is an other ime under development by the way.
Check out this site: http://sites.google.com/site/hanwritingime/
Based on the youtube videos, it will be a must for any chinese and japanese learner/user.

+1 on DroidWing. I even got the NHK accent dictionary to work on that. You click on the word, and you can hear it pronounced properly. Awesome. I've got a ton of dictionaries on my Nexus One now thanks to DroidWing. It officially beats the pants off of my old iPhone, because with one search, I can search them all. (Even the online dictionaries.)

+1 on Simeji, too. Much faster than using the iPhone's globe key to switch between US, JP, and CHN traditional keyboards. The only downside is that there's no "draw the kanji and have it recognized app" for JP yet. I'll have to try the ones under development. *fingers crossed* Would be awesome if they could fold one into Simeji, too.

My favorite App right now is Chroma Doze. It's a GPL white noise generator. It lets you play with the audio spectrum a bit to modify the white noise you get, but it's awesome for drowning out noisy environments when you just need to be able to concentrate. It's in the Market.

I also like:
AstridTasks-- awesome task manager. LOTS of power. Just add a task to see what you can do.
AK Notepad-- great note-taker.
Pure Calendar Widget-- puts your upcoming calendar events, any size you want, in a widget. Very handy, very flexible.
Beautiful Widgets-- gives you the Sense-UI look, skinnable, without having to mess with Sense UI. Nice for us Nexus One owners.
WeatherBug Elite-- WeatherBug on steroids. Much better than the iPhone version, and the widgets are hot.

If you use the newest version of Aedict (an EDICT parser), it has a feature that allows
you to write kanji with your finger.

I strongly recommend EBAndroid, an EPWING dictionary reader. You'll need to load your own dictionaries onto an SD card but you can use as many as you like. Best of all, it's free. Pretty much identical to EBPocket on Windows Mobile for those who have used it.

EDIT: Just tried DroidWing after reading the recommendation in this thread. DroidWing is much better.

What dictionaries do you guys use with DroidWing?

Not really related to Japanese but there is a nice app called Swype. Its a really neat keyboard replacement that lets you type words by swiping your fingers across letters and let the algorithm (or you in some cases) decide which word it should be (look at some videos on YT). So far it works in English, Italian and Spanish and I must say its very impressive.

I was told recently that IME on Android still wasn't quite up to snuff. That is, the "dictionary" the provides the various Kanji choices to select while you are typing is very limited. What has been the experience of those of you who are using Android? Thanks.

The IME I use, Simeji, integrates with Social IME... so if the word you want isn't displayed, you can hook into the internet and grab it from there. Then the word is stored locally in a dictionary file. It's provided me with people and place names (even for small towns) without much problem. 　No real problems for me.

Just a heads up... I'm not sure who all has access to Japanese apps in the Android market, but there seems to be quite a few English-japanese dictionaries in it now.

Just do a search for 辞書

I think I saw Genius, Longman and Daijirin among others.