Reviewer’s Comments
Japanese by codefromtokyo is quite frankly the best English-Japanese Dictionary we’ve seen. And we’ve looked at a fair few. What makes it great is that it’s more than just a dictionary. Of course there’s a search function to look up specific words in either Japanese (kanji, kana or romaji) or English that brings up the most related words first like a search engine. Incidentally, I never had any troubles searching for words and finding what I was looking for. But words are also organized by vocab lists according to what you might want to study. For example, the opening screen shows the following lists: Japanese Characters, Classification (with 43 sublists), Counter, Expressions, Proverbs, and JLPT Tests which contains the vocabulary you need to learn for 4 different levels. The Classification lists and Counter lists are especially helpful. For any foreigner learning Japanese you probably know how difficult it is to learn how to correctly count items according to what the item is. The dictionary is also loaded with tons of information for each word – Kun-Yomi, On-Yomi, Radical, Translations, Popular Compounds, Conjugations and you can even see an animation of the stroke order for specific Kanji characters. Now, if it only had flash card functionality and audio clips and/or sentences showing how it’s used in context of a real sentence, it would be perfect. Oh, wait. Both of those functions are supposed to be available in the next update.

In conclusion, I would say the $20 is definitely worth it. You would spend a lot more than that in textbooks that weigh a ton and are never around when you need it. If only I had this app 15 years ago when I was studying Japanese for the first time…