ankimini

I recently did a review of Kotoba! here. It's a great free JMDict based reader for the Touch/iPhone.

I'm in the process of checking out Diajirin too, but I haven't had as much time as I'd like to really drill down into yet.

ShinKanji is also an interesting alternative. It was the first (and remains one of the only) apps to introduce it's own written kanji recognition (so that you don't have to enable yet another keyboard on your device (Chinese) in order to look up kanji by writing them). It's UI is a little quirky, but it's under very active development. It's quite nice, really. The lite version is nearly fully-featured too, so its easy to try before you buy.

Japanese by CodeFromTokyo is WELL worth its heavy price tag, and really considering what you get it should cost a lot more. It has a huuuuuuge amount of content, and different ways to search. I bought an extra ipod touch just for this app alone (as kinda a stand alone jisho)
Features:
-150,000 words
-12,000 kanji
-Built in flashcard system
-Kanji stroke order
-Conjugations for all verbs
-JLPT word lists
-Example sentences - you can click on individual words in example sentences to access entries for that word - all example sentences come with furigana
-Search by radical, component, kana, romaji, handwriting
-Different classifications of word lists for easy review of different topics
-ability to make own notes
-simple "shake to look up new word" rather than manually reversing through menus
-hiragana + katakana charts
-history of recently searched words
-Full referencing to other databases for all kanji (eg, where thatr kanji is in Heisig or Kanji Learners dic etc)
-all words broken down into their individual kanji with those kanji explained
-word classification (eg, noun, i-adjective, na-adjective)
-it runs fast

Sorry did I miss something? - Apart from having a J-J option, I really don't see where they can improve on this app.

Considering what you are getting with this dictionary you really can't moan about its price tag. Sure there are free dictionaries like kotoba, but for functionality that doesn't even come close.

Should I get a job as a sales rep? : /

Seriously, hands down. Go check all the five star reviews for this on the app store. It's worth far more than every penny.

I only use two:
Ankimini (a must for anyone with an iphone. If you have problems with the kanji showing up, get my clean generation hack.)
Kotoba (Free EDICT dictionary which works really well. I'd LOVE to have daijirin on my ipod but let's face it, why pay for something when there's free stuff around.)

The Smart.fm app is pretty good, but they won't have example sentence support until a later update.  I also use Kotoba! and I use Safari to do my RTK reviews a lot of the time.

with so many Japanese learning apps out there... it's surprising that the only one i find particularly useful is AnkiMini... I don't do a lot of kanji study on mine though, as i like to be on my computer where i can run things over with rikaichan when i need to...but, i do a heck of a lot of grammar study on mine...

i was looking on there website just now hoping to find a list of all those example sentences http://www.iucjapan.org/html/text_e.html unfortunately they only have a book version hah! why can't some company upload a huge amount of easy to understand example sentences that i can just copy/paste into Anki? the only stuff i found useful like that so far was the ALC example sentences... thanks a million for those spreadsheets Katsuo

Last edited by Hashiriya (2009 December 19, 10:35 am)

What's the advantage of ankimini over iAnki, by the way? Why bother jailbreaking? iAnki works fine for me. I like 'Japanese' too. I export the vocab lists and generate flashcards with J-J defs and example sentences from them. iEijiro is useful for E-J, too. Good for finding out collocations when writing. There are some simple manga like Neko Ramen, and some detective games as well, which are good for a quick bit of reading.

well so much for the KiC sentences idea:

Thank you for your interest in our Kanji in Context software.
We regret to say that currently we have no plan to sell this software for computer use.
Instead, we have just launched a new software of Kanji in Context, "iKIC" for iPhone and iPod Touch.
The iKIC is available through App Store.

Sincerely,
Chieko Yoshida
IUC Yokohama Administrative Office

I'd have to second the iAnki suggestion. Pretty easy to setup when you follow the steps, not too much of a pain to sync either. Other than that I'd recommend setting your iPod's language to Japanese, and use the thing to look up Japanese content

Oh man I never thought about using it while walking... We have a treadmill at home, and I usually do SRSing and walking on that seperately... Not anymore! Haha!

I've been sort of using Kotoba but haven't really been happy with it, so I was very interested to hear about Japanese by CodeFromTokyo, which I'm downloading  at this very moment. NOTE: It's 20% off through today (12/28)! Other things on its iTunes page that caught my eye: search by SKIP code, lemmatized search, SRS, and the reviewers who said they'd abandoned their Canon Wordtanks after using this app. Now I'm looking forward to uploading to my Touch and playing with it.