I’ve learned Japanese in the late 90s, when electronic dictionaries were your best bet. As exchange students in Japan, we pocketed those things and looked up every piece of vocabulary and every kanji we saw on the streets and/or in subtitles, newspapers, manga…
Nowadays I suppose mobile apps have made electronic dictionaries mostly obsolete. But in the Starter’s Guide here I found mostly learning apps, no real dictionaries – or did I miss something? What are the **reliable** go-to methods people currently use to look up vocabulary and kanji they see?
3 comments
I use jisho.org a dictionary website
For me it depends; for online content i can easily copy and paste, i use japandict because i like its aesthetic, but many people prefer jisho (a website) over it. When there is content that can‘t easily be copied, i now use midori, a paid app for IOS devices that includes quite good text recogniton as well as the ability to bookmark and export words which is very convinient to create Anki flashcards. (Both midori and Japandict also support handwriting kanji as well as radical search, though i prefer the latter)
My favorite dictionary is Takobato for android. It has a massive collection of words, including things like internet slang and specialty terms. It also has the ability to understand words that you have miss spelled and offer suggested words. There is also the option for kanji lookup built into the app but it usually has to be done by selecting the radical based on stroke count.