App Aims: Japanese to English Language Dictionary for native Japanese speakers
 

For what it’s for, I think the Longman English-Japanese Dictionary is the best bilingual dictionary available for Japanese natives. It’s still helpful for English speakers as well but most of the information requires advanced reading skills that most non-native speakers don’t have. As a non-native myself, I sure wish I had this application in reverse. It is absolutely packed with features. To begin with, as you start searching for a word, either in English, or Japanese (not romaji), the closest match appears as you type so the more you type, the closer the match becomes. In most cases, the word appears below the search field before you even finish typing so you can quickly choose that word. Once you select a word, you can get several sentence examples, related words, conjugations, pronunciation help, audio clip of native speakers, related idioms, and much more including graphics and illustrations. For example, if you type in “eye,” there is a graphic that shows they human eye that you can zoom in on to see other related vocabulary (e.g. eyebrow, eyelashes, pupil, etc.). Other features include adding any word to bookmarks with custom notes, a search history and wildcard search. The application is intuitive with almost anything clickable to drill down on more information.

The only drawbacks to this application are its huge file size (327 MB) and its speed, or lack thereof. I found it to be extremely slow and unresponsive at times – probably due to the huge database. You also can’t zoom in on the text although it does have a small and large text size option right there on the screen.

Definitely worth the $20 for this application if you read Japanese. If not, you might want something a little easier for non-natives and something more catered to those needs.