I thought I'd start this topic to help with those of us that have an iPhone. Could anyone that has one and uses it to study Japanese list here which apps they use specifically to study Japanese? It might be helpful to the rest of us - particularly regarding paying apps and perhaps reviewing them before anyone shells out for them (because many apps don't seem to have reviews on them, and I'm not willing to test the waters all the time).

I've added a review of the ones I've got further down, as I couldn't add the review to this post for some odd reason. Read on....

I think people should suggest apps regardless of what hacks they do/don't require. Other people (such as myself) can benefit from them.

Why not run two threads one for jailbroken apps and one for not. I agree that they should be kept separate. Have you thought about also just using Japanese apps as a form of passive study? Also if you don't already, you can switch all the settings to Japan/Japanese. I use 駅探エクスプレス for trains and 食べログ for restaurant suggestions. On the active study front I tried 漢字力Mini but the kanji are too hard for me. It said so in the description but I had to see for myself. I always check for an SRS but until there is one that comes out that can import an Anki deck, I will just stick to the online Anki when using my iPhone. It would be great if resolve made an iPhone/Touch optimized page though (hint, hint). As has been said in other threads, the simple phone interface works the best.

The simple web interface has already been 'optimized' for the iphone - the buttons and fonts are a decent size and display properly in both horizontal and vertical orientations. I also changed the button layout to make things more compact and easier to hit.

I'm not a web designer and don't have much interest in it personally, so I'll leave the beautification to someone else. flight16 is working on a nicer interface and I hear it's mostly done.

I still think you should bite the bullet and jailbreak your phone, though :-) Or better yet, sell the phone and the contract to someone and get an iPod touch instead.

resolve Wrote:I still think you should bite the bullet and jailbreak your phone, though :-) Or better yet, sell the phone and the contract to someone and get an iPod touch instead.

If you had suggested either of these things a month ago, I would have rejected them outright. Now both don't sound so bad. I decided to give Apple until this "September patch" to get things cleaned up. If I am still as unhappy as I am now, I may be looking to do the latter if its possible in Japan (I don't even know if people are buying it anymore here) and the former if it isn't.

And for the record, I wasn't criticizing the work you have done. Just begging for more like a greedy child.

Is there anything available if I jailbreak my touch? I'm hesitant because I have a PSP that I hacked and now it's just a pain in the ass to do anything with it. New game and I need a newer firmware? No just installing it, time to spend an hour finding the current files to upgrade from whatever version I have with the blah blah blah. Too much hassle for too little gain.

I am mostly using this website (kanjikoohi) on my iphone, as I am currently focused on learning as many kanji as possible...I'm only up to 475, so I still fairly basic. I have this website bookmarked on my main home screen, and flip it open in Safari whenever I find myself waiting for something. The phone is a little slow for typing new stories, but it works great for reviewing.

For a while, I have been using the japanesepod101.com free podcasts, and still listen to those daily. The speakerphone on iphone makes it a lot more convenient than having to plug into earphones or a set of speakers as I did on my ipod classic. I just play the podcasts as background when I'm cooking or doing other stuff, or when I'm taking a walk.

I decided to try their "mywords" app for $10. It's a nice little app, but the vocab is really basic so far (7 days/70 words into it), most of which I already know. Anyway, I figure at 10 words per day, that's over 3,000 per year. The test "game" feature is a fun way to boost kana and kanji recognition without much effort. Match the kanji or kana with the english meaning. It is a change of pace from slogging it out on RTK.

I also bought "ShinKanji". The stroke order animations are the highlight. It's also cool because when you zoom in on a kanji, you can see related kanji and compounds, and click through to them. It will probably be a lot more useful when I have a few more kanji in the noggin and am working on learning the readings.

I recently switched on the chinese input, to be able to recognize hand drawn kanji. It seems to recognize my pathetic scribbles surprisingly well, but Im not sure how I will use it. I'm also not sure if I should have switched on "traditional" or "simplified" chinese. Which is closer to Kanji?

I've tried the jdict, and have not been satisfied. I would be willing to pay $$$ for a J/E dictionary that really works and helps learn, but what there is so far looks limited to me.

Oh, I also use one of the free voice recording apps, I forget which, to record vocab and sentence examples from my wife or friends, so I can review them later. It's very useful for remembering those expressions that only come up in spontaneous conversation, and you know you'll never remember because they just don't come up that often.

Anyway, that's me for now...

I've been trying to edit my first post, but it keeps coming up with some error, so hence posting a new message. Here is a brief review of the apps I've got now.

wwwJDic
Cost: Free
Pros: Free, comprehensive, easy to use, multiple input styles
Cons: Needs to connect to the net, results are sometimes way off.
A front-end for the wwwJDic website by Jim Breen, so you know its pretty comprehensive already. A must have for anyone serious about Japanese language study - if you don't get another (paid) dictionary. The design is simple and minimal, making it very easy to navigate. Input can be romaji, kana or even finger spelt kanji - for the last one to work you must enable the Chinese keyboard under International keyboards. Unfortunately this type of input is not very accurate, perhaps because my fingers are too thick, or maybe I'm still getting stroke order wrong?!

Kanji Flip
Cost: 350 yen
Pros: Great for studying for the JLPT, uses SRS
Cons: Seems to be missing kanji, SRS system is a little odd
This app uses the KANJIDIC dictionary file, and focuses explicitly on learning the JLPT kanji characters; as well as the bonus of having a section for hiragana and katakana. It's a flashcard app; not unlike this website or Anki, however the SRS side of things doesn't seem to be trumpeted much, so not sure how good/accurate the algorithm is. As it's targetting the JLPT, the main page is divided into 5 sections - Hiragana & Katakana at the top, then Level 4 (with 86 Kanji), Level 3 (246 additional Kanji), Level 2 (986 additional Kanji) and finally Level 1 (2230 additional Kanji). You simply choose which level you wish to study for, and go from there.

One odd point is that progress from studying previous levels is NOT carried over, so basically if you compared it to this site, it would mean once you load in more kanji characters, your older reviews which WERE in box 4+ are brought back to box 1. This seems like a huge waste of time, and seems counter productive to the entire SRS system itself.

Another point is that the Kanji numbers seem less if you compare them to Peter van der Woude's JLPT study page, where it's 103 Kanji for Level 4, 181 for Level 3 (for a new total of 284) and an additional 739 for Level 2. He doesn't provide study supplements for Level 1, so I can't compare it.

All in all it's a relatively fair price for an app which has no equivalent at the moment (unless you download a flip card app and make your own decks). The design is intuitive if a little gaudy, but works well.

Japanese Flip
Cost: 600 yen
Pros: Useful tool to have for students of the JLPT
Cons: Isn't all encompassing so price-tag might be unjustified for some
Created by the same guy who did Kanji Flip (see review above), the layout of the design is almost identical, making it a breeze to navigate and use if you already have the other app. Once again it's split into 5 catagories, specifically targetting study for the JLPT, but this time focusing on words, so it mixes kanji and hiragana/katakana. At the top are 415 words for Level 4, 910 additional words for Level 3, 3738 additional words for Level 2 and 6000 additional words for Level 1.
The last category is "Add your own words", which I'll get to later.

Once again it uses the system whereupon when you change levels it doesn't remember what your progress was with words from the previous levels that you studied for and passed, and therefore treats them as new. The designer seems to think this is helpful for the learning process, but it seems counter productive to the SRS system.

The word lists themselves see ok, comprehensive but not comprehensive enough for the hard-core student. I would recommend this app as another "tool in the arsenal", rather than the be-all-and-end-all.

The section to add your own words is a great addition, however it is also a little flawed, as there is no choice which JLPT level to put the words into. So for example if you are studying JLPT Level 2, then you decide to add some new words that you learned from your Japanese friend, those words will be added to the Level 2 stack - and they won't necessarily be anywhere near the top of the stack. This is both a good and bad thing, so I won't go into it further at this point.

Thanks Sevenhelmets for the comprehensive reviews. Very helpful.

About the "mywords" app from japanesepod101.com, I forgot to mention the best feature, which is the pronunciation. I THOUGHT my pronunciation was pretty good, but this app allows you to record your voice and compare with a native speaker. It was a little disheartening to discover that my pronunciation was off by so much, but at least now I know how I sound. A very helpful feature, even for very basic vocab. You can always work on pronunciation.

As far as listening immersion goes, I tried to make a jpop station for pandora, but there just don't seem to have the licenses for too many japanese albums, and their system doesn't seem to factor in language. AOL radio has a jpop station, which I try to listen to occasionally. I don't like jpop so much, and it's hard to make out the words anyway.

I also listen to Yomiuri news podcasts and watch Japanese videos on youtube.

yukkuri_kame Wrote:I also bought ShinKanji.

Ah nice, I've been wondering about that app, it certainly looked promising.

yukkuri_kame Wrote:I recently switched on the chinese input, to be able to recognize hand drawn kanji. It seems to recognize my pathetic scribbles surprisingly well, but Im not sure how I will use it. I'm also not sure if I should have switched on "traditional" or "simplified" chinese. Which is closer to Kanji?

I have "Traditional" switched on, with "Handwriting" enabled.

Bit of a newbie question, but where does one access the online version of Anki? Anyone got a URL for me?

yukkuri_kame Wrote:Bit of a newbie question, but where does one access the online version of Anki? Anyone got a URL for me?

Start with anki.ichi2.net if that isn't cutting it for you follow the phone link from there and then access the "simple" page.

dilandau23 Wrote:Start with anki.ichi2.net if that isn't cutting it for you follow the phone link from there and then access the "simple" page.

Thanks for that. I have neglected Anki and worked mostly with this forum, but if I can access it on iphone, this is going to make it more useful to me.

Back to the "ShinKanji" app, using the Chinese character recognition, I have discovered I can use it as a simple tool to look up Kanji which I am unfamiliar with. If I can draw at least one of the primitives, I can usually scroll through a list of related kanji to find the one I am looking for, and from there I get On and Kun readings, stroke order animation, as well as a concise English definition. This could turn out to be very useful, but I'll have to test it out further.

Somewhat off topic, but "Air Sharing" is a new iphone app, list price $6.99, but currently FREE at the app store for a limited time. Allows user to store and view a variety of files. supported file types include PDF, iwork, keynote, web archive, MS word and more. Go get it while it is free...

I put some screenshots of the jailbroken Anki client here:
http://ichi2.net/anki/download/ankimini/

resolve Wrote:I put some screenshots of the jailbroken Anki client here:
http://ichi2.net/anki/download/ankimini/

It looks pretty good.....just wish it was available for non jailbroken iPhones - ie via App Store.

I'm beginning to understand the complications of making Anki for the iPhone though. First theres the whole "recoding" of the program, from python to C. Thats a lot of time spent switching it over, then debugging etc etc. Then after that resolve would have to apply to sell via the App Store, which I've heard is $99 bucks USD per year. THEN he can submit it for download, but it still would go through Apple's screening process....if they didn't like it for some reason, they could refuse to sell it via the App Store, in which case, a LOT of wasted time and effort for nothing......

It's a large amount of work, and accomplishes little. iPods are relatively cheap and if you jailbreak them then you're not locked into a contract. If you have an iPhone, then you have access to the internet most of the time, and don't need an offline app.

resolve Wrote:If you have an iPhone, then you have access to the internet most of the time, and don't need an offline app.

Yes, while I'd gladly pay $1.99 for a slick, off-line version that I can use on an airplane, or when internationally roaming, the online version is good enough.

I can't speak for how much time it would take to get the Anki engine up and running for the iPhone/iTouch, but I got an interface done within a couple of minutes using the SDK.
Seeing some of the software that is available, it is quite obvious that they have a "review" process so they CAN say no, but rarely do.
Frankly, if resolve had the time, he's sitting on a good other source of income, but I'll take it for free!
Now to figure out how to jailbreak my iPod Touch. (2.0.2, is it even possible?)

Edit: resolve, I'm not trying to tell you what to do! As someone who used to code, I know how annoying it can be! It's just with the shit flashcard software that is selling on the iTunes store, it's a damned shame your software isn't up there.

Yes, 2.0.2 has been jailbroken already afaik.

If I had no job or external commitments, I'd consider a rewrite in C just for the challenge. But as it stands I'm pretty busy and a jailbroken version + the website solves the problem for most people most of the time. I try to use what little time I have efficiently. :-)

Since I've got you here, does this have multiple deck support? (Am I just missing a features page? Trying to jailbreak my touch as we speak.)

Edit: Just saw that at the bottom of the readme. boourns.

I have a hacked iPod Touch... that won't connect to the internet.
It says I have wifi, but it won't acutually do anything. Ugh. WTF.

WOOHOO! No idea what it was, but it works now.

Actually, wait....
I didn't type caps when putting in my WEP key...it allowed it, said I was connected, but never connected... The last time I put it in caps... Hmm. Stupid.

You can juggle config files and restart the server using mobile terminal. You could even script it. Lack of inbuilt support for multiple decks is not a showstopper

What terminal app is there? I'm too dumb to figure out how to grant permission so I can sudo.

Wait...duh. Login.

Anyway, I have a script to start Anki, but for deck changing, do I need to kill anki and start it back up? How would I handle that?