Hi!
I'm looking for a good English - Japanese dictionary for my iPhone.
I already have Kotoba and other WWWJDIC based dictionaries. I find the example sentences etc. a bit weird at times, and usually just use yahoo's e-j dictionaries.
However, I'd like an offline solution, so do you guys have any recommendations?

I really enjoy the two yahoo e-j dictionaries (I believe they are eプログレッシブ英和中辞典 and 新グローバル英和辞典).

Thank you very much!
Z

genius

Are you talking about the ジーニアス英和(第４版)・和英(第３版) dictionary?
I might go for this one, but it's pretty expensive..

Generally the best E-J dic is said to be Kenkyuusha's 新英和大(or 中)辞典, which I think has an iphone app, but if I were you I'd just get an EPWING viewer and search many dics at once. I set up my EPWING viewers (EBWin (PC), EBMac (Mac), qolibri (PC,Mac, Linux), EBView (Linux) and EBReader(Blackberry) ) to search Meikyou, Daijisen, Koujien, Daijirin, Kenkyuusha 英和, EDICT, NHK Accent Dictionary, a katakana dictionary, etc, all at once. It's really convenient to be able to take my dictionaries anywhere.

is there an EPWING viewer for iOS?

as for the original question, I have used since I bought my first iPhone (3 years ago) the Wisdom application, and frankly I see no reason to try anything else (especially given the cost of each of them, Wisdom included). It does assume a certain level of kanji reading ability (it's more for Japanese learning English) otherwise you'll be frustrated having to jump much. It's $31.99, which is admittedly hard to swallow (I think it is still the most expensive app I have bought for my iPhone and/or iPad). It runs on both iphone and iPad without having to buy it again, fwiw.

i have a few of the JDIC based ones like Kotoba and Wa, but I never use them, honestly. Nothing against the apps, but I've come across way too many oddities in the JDIC data to really ever trust apps based on it.

rikishi Wrote:is there an EPWING viewer for iOS?

Yes. ^-^ There's an EPWING viewer for pretty much every major OS and mobile OS.

Like rikishi I use "The Wisdom", daily. Got it about 3 years ago and it's grown on me ever since. It's my go-to dictionary. Since your Japanese is pretty advanced you will be able to use it to it's full capacity. It has quite a lot of example sentences (that you would actually use)... so I can usually put whole or partial English phrases into the "example search", and see various (situation specific) ways of expressing them in Japanese.