Cranks Wrote:Is this thread still relevant? Sorry, I was wondering if anyone who uses both Midori and Japanese could explain the difference between the two in terms of actually use. Being a Japanese user right now, I feel that Midori seems a bit lightweight from looking at the screen shots. Am I right? I would try Midori if it were actually better.

Please see my post above. Midori and Japanese are both missing some crucial features. Now that I have both, I find that about 90% of the time I use Midori. It's only for conjugations that I turn to Japanese.

Come to think of it, the combination Midori + Kotoba probably covers every important feature, for the price of just one app. So for those who haven't bought Japanese yet, this combo would be my personal recommendation. For those who already own Japanese, the decision is easy: if want handwriting recognition, buy Midori. Otherwise stick with Japanese.

Don't really want to bring this back from the dead, but I think there's been a few things lacking from the Midori description. I haven't used Japanese, and I converted my E<->J dict from Kotoba! to Midori about 6 months ago.

Midori->Anki no problem.
E-mail yourself a list of words from any of your favorite lists. If I recall (been lazy about Anki recently) this includes english, かな、漢字、and the folder name (can be useful to add to tags). This is the main reason I got Midori as I only have confirmed that Kotoba does it and Kotoba is basically a lesser version of Midori and vica versa. I'd love to see a list of all dictionary apps or electronic that have efficient ways of getting them into Anki, but I'm only aware of kotoba and midori having e-mail csv of a bookmark folder.

Word Frequency lists for every kanji!
Come across a new Kanji and want to see what compounds or forms it is commonly used in? Click on the kanji (each kanji listed at the bottom of the word's page) to go to the info page for that kanji. The info on the page is:
-all possible readings (katakana for onyomi, hiragana for kunyomi with letters that must be written after the kanji grayed out)
-A step by step stroke order illustration set, or check stroke order in video form by clicking the kanji
-Grade the kanji is learned, apprx usage frequency (lower number is more frequent), JLPT level (1-5), components (along the lines of radicals)
-***List of about 20 words (or less if it's a rare kanji) listed from most frequent to least frequent as per some newspaper wordfreq list. Any words that you have in any favorite list will be highlighted in yellow. I'm unsure about where they got the list from, but it seems to be ok, and it this is one of my favorite features of the app. If I come across a new word that's too obscure to make the top ten of the list, I won't hesitate to set it aside until I come across it again. Alternately if I see a compound with a new kanji I'll browse the most common compounds for that kanji and sometimes add one to my anki bookmark folder.***

Radical lookup-Recent update added look up by radical which is pretty handy if you just don't know the stroke order. Click a radical, and you can "browse" any kanji that fit in the above keyboard bar. It slides left to right and I think it's organized by # of strokes. Add more radicals and you'll have fewer options, like kotoba!. Notably it grays out radicals that can't work in conjunction with the first one as opposed kotoba which takes them off the list.

Handwriting-Has lookup by handwriting that has two noteworthy features in my opinion
A:Very stroke order sensitive, which has the upside of making you better about stroke order (turns out I'd been screwing up 馬 for a while...). If you mess up stroke order a bit just hope that it is still good enough to get in the top 8 as that's all it displays.
B:It is NOT based on the apple chinese writing system which is awful because many characters do not exist even if written perfectly. Chinese and Japanese have many of the same chars, not all.

Acceptable flashcards included
Probably not much of a draw, but if you don't use anki or just want to do a few quick non-srs reviews then midori has you covered. Take a pre-made list (JLPT kanji level x, school year x, etc) and you can do srs (haven't tested it really yet) or traditional flashcards. You can choose to have any combo of reading, meaning and kanji on the front, and all info is on the back. Apparently on the kanji cards it also lists the top few common compounds. But seriously, it's still often going to be better to just e-mail yourself a csv to anki so that when you decide to go j-j or whatnot you won't lose all that srs data.

Edit: Since this is not my first long post on midori I figured I should mention that I'm not at all financially associated with them, just a happy user that tends to ramble.