WISDOM

This dictionary appears to be a very nice Japanese to English dictionary. I imagine it would be useful to a native Japanese speaker. For a native English speaker, you cannot search for Japanese words using Roman-ji in any useful way and get a English translation. Essentially it assumes you know several thousand Kanji not to mention Hiragana and Katakana. It also uses a lot of Kanji in describing English meanings. Since it is not what it is is advertised as, I rate it as only a 1.

This was the first app I had ever purchased when the app store went up, and still the app I use most. <br/><br/>Occasionally it doesn't contain a rare Japanese word I'm looking for, and it would be nice if it could be used for Kanji stroke order reference, but otherwise it's perfect. Essential for any Japanese as a second language speaker.

It’s just OK, doesn’t have some relatively common words like 遷移。I wouldn’t recommend for business or professional use.

The previous review is completely accurate, the dictionary has no romanji (which I'm fine with...), but worse yet, it doesn't even offer kana to help with pronunciation. So even if you're learning Japanese and are quite familiar with hiragana and katakana, this dictionary is basically useless. It's pretty much only intended for people that are completely fluent in Japanese (and can read all of the common kanji...). It also doesn't have anything cool like the drawing input that nicer electronic dictionaries have for looking up kanji. The lookup of words seems very sluggish to me too... The Sanseido dictionary this uses is free to use online too, so I can't really see the justification for charging $24.

I purchased this with the full intention of using it bidirectionally (english-&gt;japanese-&gt;english), but unless you're very familiar with kanji, you're not going to know how to pronounce the words it shows you when doing the english -&gt; japanese look-up. It only shows the kanji for it, not the individual hiragana. It's pretty useful when going from Japanese to English since you already have to know how to pronounce the word to look it up, and you can just focus on the english meaning it displays. It does have audio samples, but surprisingly, they're only for English words. (At least that I've seen). Overall, I think they could've done more to help aid English speakers... perhaps with an upgrade.

I translate Japanese to English for a living, so I use dictionaries on a daily basis. And while I probably don't absolutely need one on my iPhone, I figured it might come in handy and I was curious what it was like. There are better dictionaries out there, but this is certainly not a bad one. The entries are on the short side, but it's very attractively presented and controls very smoothly. As another reviewer mention, there is no romaji (Romanized Japanese), and that is because this is intended for a Japanese audience. I don't think you can fault it for that. My main complaint is that there doesn't appear to be any way to look up words within a dictionary entry, or to look up words in another application, such as email. This is probably hard to implement on the iPhone, though, because it lacks any means to select text, or to copy and paste text. Overall, a pretty impressive little dictionary.

for JLPT2 and higher students of Japanese. Avoid unless you are intermediate or advanced. It is the dictionary I turn to when looking up new vocabulary. Having sample sentences in Japanese context is priceless. Worth every penny. Only wish is, it'd be great if there were a way to just browse entries!<br/><br/>For those of you complaining about the lack of romaji, I highly recommend that you eradicate it from your studies ASAP. It will mess with your pronunciation and cripple your reading skills. IMHO even furigana will hurt your learning in the long run.<br/><br/>V2.0 was released recently. The GUI is not as slick as before but there is a lot of added functionality: jump, sample sentence search, set phrases, bookmarks, history, etc. Overall, a nice upgrade in terms of functionality.

I've been using this app for years on the iPhone and it's just as good on the iPad. I'm also happy with how quickly they released retina updates. <br/><br/>There isn't quite as much content as Kenkyusha or some of the other major dictionaries, but the app itself is so much better that I'd still say this app is by far the best. And the content is also quite thorough with good definitions and lots of examples.