I don't know if it has ever been suggested but I just had a quick vision of what a kanji.koohii.com app would be like.. You could log in, select and make stories in one section, and review by drawing the kanji on the screen with your finger. There could be a forum and statistics of reviewed kanji section as well... Maybe some body should get started I'm sure plenty of people would pay something for it

Hashiriya wrote:

I bought this app and absolutely love the audio/sentences portion of it... i wish someone could turn this into an Anki deck

6,000 of the sentences have been made into an Anki deck: Smart.fm uses the same sentences as Japanese Sensei, though the latter has more (6,000 vs. 10,000). The sound recordings are different; Smart.fm's speakers tend to put more expression in.

With ten thousand words Japanese Sensei can be used as a basic talking dictionary.

Those who want the CFT Japanese app-- it's on sale until Feb. 3 for $16 US. (20% off of its $20 US price.) It's a good app for what it is, but I'm not too thrilled with EDICT. I played around with it a bit, but I have Anki already, so I don't need the flash cards, and I have stroke order pretty much nailed cold. It is handy to have the on/kun readings, though.

I prefer my Kenkyuusha and Daijirin dictionaries. The updated version of the Kenkyuusha is for the most part better. They made it slightly easier to page through by adding an almost transparent 4-way pad you can turn on/off very easily, and they made it easier to bookmark almost anything.

I have no clue what they added to the Daijirin. There's so much stuff lurking in there that it's hard to tell. It boggles the mind. (Hell, there's a 四字熟語 dictionary in there somewhere.)

Anyone else noticed "Jibbigo"?
They claim "Jibbigo is a bi-directional, natural speech-to-speech translation app that lets you converse with a speaker of another language through spoken language.".

Japanese-English is Y3200 - and currently number 6 "top grossing" on the Japanese app store.
No way I'm going to buy it, but it'd sure be interesting to see how good it is.

Apparently this is a product from a group at Carnegie Mellon University, and it's based on machine learning from large amounts of data (sounds a lot like google translate).

So what it is doing is
1) speech-to-text (voice recognition)
2) automatic translation (English to Japanese, or Japanese to English)
3) text-to-speech (speech synthensis)

I think 1 and 3 are resonably mature technologies (already supported by the iPhone OS?),
but like Jarvik7 mentioned, the state of the art in automatic language translation is not exactly what I'd call good.

There is a 2-part (promo) video on youtube from the Science Channel
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPsy1yuuLZQ
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7onO3N_Q9SY

The hilarious part is, they "demo" it with Japanese (0:55 sec in part 2):
The dialogue (my transcription):
    Question: Can you tell me where the nearest bus stop is?
    Translation: 一番近いバス停はどこか教えてもらえますか

So far so good.

    Response: まっすぐ歩いて、角で右を曲がってください。
    Translation: Down the block and to the left.

WTF! It just sent him in the wrong direction!

I'd like to point out that on some games, especially Square-Enix (that means the new Final Fantasy 1 & 2 games too that just got released!)  games that have been released as Apps can be played entirely in Japanese if you just change the operating system language on your iPod/iPhone

Last edited by Hashiriya (2010 February 25, 4:15 pm)

hah, well get one soon as Square-Enix is having a big sale now on their games: http://kotaku.com/5480528/square-enix-i … go-on-sale

This may have been mentioned already, but is there an iPhone app for smart.fm's IKNOW Japanese Core 2000 course? I tried to type in 'IKNOW Japanese app' on the Apple website and nothing came up.

I ask because last year I started Core 2000 (Steps 1-3) but it was so timeconsuming I gave up. If it was on an app I would consider restarting it.

Yoroshiku!!!

It's a different set up then the actual online one.

Speaking of Final Fantasy, I just downloaded the original to my Ipod and it works like a charm. Excellent graphical update and no problems with the slowdown or anything. Great way for me to get a little Japanese reading practice while experiencing a classic (I've never played the first FF until now).

Thank you god for the wonderful wonders of localization

Kotoba! has been updated and now includes multi-radical search for kanji. Pretty good for free.