User friendly
I’ve been using this app for about 15 years, downloaded it when it first came out for a fee and so glad it is free now.
It’s got a very user friendly interface, ability to bookmark (basically set labels) to vocabulary and kanji that you want to categorise and revise. It’s got kanji lists arranged by JLPT levels as well as school grades and frequency in societal use. The flashcard function allows you to test yourself, using the app’s preinstalled kanji lists and also using the bookmarks that you compile yourself. The ability to search kanji by drawing them is a real timesaver.
My only wish for this app is for an ability to test yourself using the “random” sequence setting and be able to mark whether you got each card correct or incorrect. You are able to mark for correct/incorrect on the “spaced repetition” setting but not with the other settings.
It’s got a very user friendly interface, ability to bookmark (basically set labels) to vocabulary and kanji that you want to categorise and revise. It’s got kanji lists arranged by JLPT levels as well as school grades and frequency in societal use. The flashcard function allows you to test yourself, using the app’s preinstalled kanji lists and also using the bookmarks that you compile yourself. The ability to search kanji by drawing them is a real timesaver.
My only wish for this app is for an ability to test yourself using the “random” sequence setting and be able to mark whether you got each card correct or incorrect. You are able to mark for correct/incorrect on the “spaced repetition” setting but not with the other settings.
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Part of my daily routine
I bought this app around 10 years ago, and have used it every day since. It is an invaluable resource. It contains animations on how to draw kanji, related words, lists of tenses and conjugations and lots of other things.
The only thing to bear in mind is the translate feature. This is very good from a literal technical and translation perspective (highlighting and linking things to take you to the relevant entry), but won’t give you how something would be interpreted when spoken/written. You’ll need to use something else for that. This doesn’t overshadow how good the rest of the features are however. Highly recommended!
The only thing to bear in mind is the translate feature. This is very good from a literal technical and translation perspective (highlighting and linking things to take you to the relevant entry), but won’t give you how something would be interpreted when spoken/written. You’ll need to use something else for that. This doesn’t overshadow how good the rest of the features are however. Highly recommended!
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Spoken Content Broken
Update: The fact that the app’s spoken content still hasn’t been updated in 2025 is incredibly frustrating. Listening to spoken content is important for learning pitch accent, unfortunately the Midori app still uses the oldest version of Japanese iOS voices for all spoken content. So I’ve stopped using the app.
Old review: Good app. I wish the app would use the iPhone’s “Spoken Content” settings. When you highlight a sentence and tap “Speak” within the app, the app will unfortunately use “Kyoko”, a very old Japanese speech voice setting and doesn’t recognize the iPhone’s internal speech settings (my iPhone 14 Pro uses female Siri for Spoken Content but the app doesn’t recognize it).
Old review: Good app. I wish the app would use the iPhone’s “Spoken Content” settings. When you highlight a sentence and tap “Speak” within the app, the app will unfortunately use “Kyoko”, a very old Japanese speech voice setting and doesn’t recognize the iPhone’s internal speech settings (my iPhone 14 Pro uses female Siri for Spoken Content but the app doesn’t recognize it).
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13 years
I've been using this app for 13 years, and it is hands-down the best Japanese dictionary app available. The ONLY thing I wish was different is that it would save your data when changing to a new device.
The best and still going strong
I’ve been using Midori for as long as I can remember owning a smartphone - I remember having it on my iPhone 3GS. It’s always been solid and slowly improves with time, with solid features being added like the new photo capture recognition mode, that is flawless. Midori is the best all-rounder Japanese dictionary out there.
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