All Language Resources is an independent review site. If you click a product link, we may earn money from a seller at no cost to you. Writing and analyses are author opinions. Learn More

Shirabe Jisho

Rating 4.5
Price:

Free

Summary

Shirabe Jisho is a Japanese Dictionary app for Apple users. You can search over 170,000 dictionary entries in both Japanese and English using handwriting, radicals, and romaji. Each entry is comprehensive, with stroke order diagrams for several thousand Kanji and example sentences from the Tatoeba project. It also provides positive, negative, and masu conjugations when relevant. You can customize your own word list or choose from the pre-made lists that include common words, expressions, slang terms, colloquialisms, JLPT levels, and parts of speech. Unfortunately, the app uses text-to-speech pronunciation, but you can use Forvo on your desktop browser to listen to native speaker pronunciations for free. The lists of similar kanji under each kanji entry are especially helpful to identify potential mix-ups. Although Shirabe Jisho’s breakdown of kanji components is not as comprehensive as in Kanji Study for Android, it still provides a helpful list of the basic components. If you have both an Android and an Apple product, Kanji Study for Android is still your best bet. However, for Apple users, Shirabe Jisho is a 100% free and ad-free dictionary option that is well worth your time.