Good, but intended for native Japanese speakers
This electronic edition of the WISDOM dictionary, like the print edition, is designed for Japanese, not Westerners. The use of kanji only (i.e., the lack of romaji), make it very difficult to use effectively for any Westerner who has not mastered well over a thousand kanji. That said, for advanced learners who are trying to break the dependence on romaji it works very well. The definitions are concise and search terms can be entered in kana.
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Really good but
You do need to know kanji if you're planning on using it to learn Japanese. It would be really cool if you could click on the kanji (show in red) and have it display the hiragana reading for it. I guess it's made more for Japanese people learning English.
Still the design is very nice and clean (it doesn't feel cheaply put together). Worth the money.
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not worth the price
A bit disappointed, thought it might playback in Japanese but nop pressed the playback icon happened to be english. Was a bit skeptish at first in the end regretted
for paying out too much. I suggest they should a least have a demo b4 purchasing the full version.
Could be more useful for English speakers
I purchased this with the full intention of using it bidirectionally (english->japanese->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 -> 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.
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Great - if it's what you need
The Wisdom dictionaries are fairly well known in Japan. That said, they are written for native Japanese speakers, not people in the earlier stages of learning Japanese. If your Japanese is good, then these are very helpful. If you're still at a beginning/intermediate level, then this simply is not what you need.
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It's good
It's very helpfull for japanese speakers.
A decent dictionary for people who can already read Japanese
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.
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probably a fine dictionary... if you're fluent in Japanese
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.
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Not very helpfull
24 dollars and it doesnt even have romanji! It really wont help you with your English - Japanese translations, it should just be a Japanese - English dictionary. No japanese pronunciations that I have found, just English, and not good ones at that. Don't buy if you are looking for a English - Japanese dictionary.
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