JLT on the iPhone

JLT on the iPhone: The same dictionary program used in the Complete System, EBPocket, is now available as an iPhone app (and it works perfectly on the iPad and iPod Touch, too). With its advanced search features, expandability, and fast performance, it's the best dictionary app for Japanese on the iPhone. For only US$4.99, you should definitely spring for the Professional version ; the free version is limited to only the Forward and Backward search types--it lacks the Cross search that adds so much to Eijiro, and a few other features. With EBPocket, you can use all the great JLT dictionaries: Edict (heavily customized by JLT to give much better English-to-Japanese search results than the standard Edict that comes with the app and is widely available elsewhere); Enamdict, a huge dictionary of Japanese proper names, including place, personal, and commercial names; Conjugations, which not only helps you conjugate verbs but also lets you enter a conjugated form to find out what tense of what verb it is; Kanjidic, which is exactly what you'd expect--it also includes stroke order diagrams to teach you how to write each kanji properly; and the crown jewel of the JLT system, the JLT version of Eijiro--I've added yomigana to almost every kanji-containing word in both the E-to-J and J-to-E parts of Eijiro, not only making it far easier to read the results of any search but also making it possible for the first time to look up a Japanese word in Eijiro by how it's pronounced as well as by how it's written. You can also add some of the excellent commercial dictionaries in EPWING format like Daijirin and Koujien (both Japanese-Japanese dictionaries), the intermediate and large versions of Kenkyusha, the Nouveau Petit Royale French<>Japanese dictionary, and others; plus any of the excellent free EPWING dictionaries, some of which are described elsewhere on the site.

How good is it? In short, superb. The combination of EBPocket Pro, the JLT dictionaries, and Tegaki Keyboard is far and away the best Japanese dictionary system you can get for your iPhone. The update to iOS 8 has finally fixed the major flaws that made the iPhone inferior to the best Android phones for Japanese use. In short, the iPhone can now be just as good a Japanese dictionary as the Samsung Galaxy Note (and maybe the LG G3 Stylus) and much better than any other Android or other phone or tablet. It's also finally just as good as the JLT Complete System for all but the heaviest of users--the old JLT system is still slightly faster and more reliable for a professional translator or grad student struggling through mountains of Japanese text every day, but no one else would notice a difference (though the JLT system, at 13,000 yen, is an affordable portable option for someone who doesn't want an iPhone). The important thing in the update to iOS 8 is that you can now install third-party keyboards, including actual Japanese handwriting recognition systems. Previously, you were limited to a Japanese keyboard (which requires that you know how a word is pronounced in order to enter it), the built-in Chinese handwriting recognition (which has gotten much better for Japanese use over the last year but still doesn't let you enter kana, meaning frequent keyboard changes in the middle of words), and third party apps with Japanese handwriting recognition that worked only within the app (requiring you to select and copy the text you just entered, switch to the program you want to use it in, and paste it in where you want it--a huge pain if you have to do it more than occasionally).

There are also apps that let you use the camera to scan in a character or word you see written somewhere. The best of them are Japan Goggles and Yomiwa. They're not perfect, but in the right circumstances they can be quite useful. They can read only certain printed fonts (nothing handwritten), and then only if the lighting's right, the phone is held very steady, and the surface is unblemished. And even when these apps are able to read the text correctly, they sometimes can't find the words in their small built-in dictionaries--leaving you to copy and paste or manually enter the word into the other dictionary program or web browser. These apps are useful enough to be worth installing and using, but they fail too often to be relied on--you'll still have to fall back on using handwriting recognition most of the time.

Installing JLT dictionaries to EBPocket: Instructions for several methods are described in Japanese on the EBPocket home page, but here's a quick guide to one of them in English. It may be helpful to consult the screenshots in the Japanese instructions, even if you'd rather follow the English instructions here.

Here are the standard JLT dictionaries. Other than Eijiro, the JLT dictionaries can be downloaded for free from their respective pages. Edict, Enamdict, and Kanjidic are all based on the dictionaries of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, under the fearless leadership of Prof. Jim Breen, at Monash University in Australia (copyright and license terms), and Conjugations, while put together by JLT, uses data from EDRDG and many other sources. See the pages below for more information and to download the free dictionaries. You can download or buy these dictionaries once and also use them on your Android or regular Windows, Linux, or Mac computer as well as your iOS device.

Eijiro--While the Japanese-English dictionaries in a typical electronic dictionary have about 100,000 entries each way--and the best have about 250,000--Eijiro has over 2 million entries each way. Not only that, but Eijiro's entries are rich with variants and example sentences (over half a million each way). Not only that, but, unlike any other version of Eijjro you can find, the JLT version shows the pronunciation of almost every Japanese word, and it allows you to search for words by entering either kana or kanji. JLT conversion of Eijiro dictionaries and sale on this website by written permission of EDP (obtained August 11, 2008). "Eijiro" is a registered trademark of Sachiko Michihata. The current JLT version of Eijiro is based on v. 142 of the Eijiro database.
Edict--for everyday things, it's got 130,000 J>E and 175,000 E>J entries, all with the full information right in front of you--kanji, hiragana pronunciation, English definition—in nice compact entries. The JLT version has been heavily edited from the original to offer vastly improved English-to-Japanese search results. Plus, you can instantly jump from any verb in Edict to its entry in Conjugations, below, then jump back!
Enamdict--kanji and readings for just about every personal, place, and commercial name in Japan--with Japanese versions of many foreign names, too.
Kanjidic--a dictionary of all 6355 kanji in the JIS X 0208 set, each with the definition in English, a full set of information about about the character, and a stroke order diagram to teach you how to draw the character correctly. Combined with the kanji lookup tools of your iPhone, this is the easiest and most useful kanji dictionary you'll ever find.
Readings--a huge dictionary custom made by JLT. Quickly find the pronunciation or kanji spelling of almost any word, even if it’s not in one of the dictionaries. This was built to help with using Eijiro before I was able to add the readings right into Eijiro--it may not be so useful anymore, but I keep it available in case someone finds a need for it.
Conjugations--Quickly find out how to say and write any tense of any verb, or you can enter a conjugated form of a verb to find out what tense it is and what the base verb is (it’s not always easy to tell--unless you've got the Conjugations dictionary), then jump to that verb's entry in one of the other dictionaries.

There are also a wide variety of other dictionaries available around the web, everything from English-English dictionaries, Sanskrit-English, and archaic kanji to various encylcopedias, Shakespeare, and texts and dictionaries for various religious studies (the Buddhist terms dictionary is especially impressive). Some of the most useful are listed here on my site, along with a few others I've converted from free and open sources and data made available.

Japanese Handwriting Entry Keyboards

Some you only find if you search the App Store in Japanese ("手書"), some only in English. Prices below are in US dollars and of course yen, depending on which app store you use. These are all in both the US and Japan App Stores, but may not be in other countries' App Stores. Links below are to the Japan App Store; to find them in the US App Store, search for 手書 or the app's name in the store from your iPhone or iPad itself or from iTunes.

Top choice: 手書きキーボード (Tegaki Keyboard)--480円

This was my first choice when it first came out in late 2014 and, a year later, it still is. Best features, great price, and--most importantly--it works beautifully. It's quick and accurate. I even found the 30-stroke 鸞 on the first try. I've been using this every day for over a year now--it never lets me down. Some of the great features:

You can change the auto-enter delay and even turn auto-enter off, which is great. The delay determines how long after you stop writing it automatically enters its first choice--too short and it enters at any pause, before you finish writing the character or before you have a chance to confirm what it thinks you're trying to write. But an experienced user would keep it very short to be able to enter character after character very quickly. You'll probably want to start with it turned off.
The default writing area is fairly large, but you can also choose an even larger one. Having enough space to write really lets you write faster--you don't have to be so precise about moving your big old fingertip inside a tiny box.
It has arrow keys to move you back and forth one space at a time in the text you've entered. This sounds minor but it's a big convenience, as how you'd move the cursor in iOS is a big pain in the neck. A very thoughtful feature.
It has a big search key (magnifying glass icon), which some of the other keyboard apps lack.

The extremely generic name makes it very hard to find anything about the app online. These folks are great developers but they really need to hire a marketer. The other minus is that, although the developers have a number of apps in the US and other app stores, this app is now available only in the Japanese app store. You can establish an account there, switch your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch to the Japanese store, buy the app, then switch back to your regular app store, but it shouldn't be necessary.

Mazec--$8.99 or 1080円 (US or Japan app store, probably also available in other national app stores). A great keyboard, but given that Tegaki Keyboard above works just as well and has slightly better features for half the price, Mazec isn't my top choice. But it does everything right: big enough writing area, all the necessary keys, finds everything I tried to write on the first try, including the characters that stumped MyScript Stack and Rakibo. If you can't access the Japanese app store to get Tegaki Keyboard, Mazec is an excellent fallback.

Rakibo--Free in the US and Japan app stores (and probably others).
Note: this review is from October 2014--Rakibo may have gotten better since then. But if the info below still holds, you'll still be much better off with Tegaki Keyboard or Mazec. This works quite well. For very complex characters--30 strokers like 鸞--you may have to write very slowly and try a couple of times. In this it's not as good as the built-in Chinese handwriting or the options above, which to my never-ending amazement find things like 鸞 right away almost every time. The input box is about the same small size as that in the built-in Chinese, but the lines are thicker so it feels more cramped. However, for the characters you'll encounter 99% of the time, it works quite well--and even then, I suspect my success in finding ultra-complex characters would go up as I got used to the app (it seems that only about 1% of kanji have more than 20 strokes, and of course these are mostly rarer kanji you're less likely to encounter--so having to take a couple of attempts and an extra few seconds when you do run into one isn't a big drawback). Also nice: a big window listing all the potential kanji for what you've drawn, which greatly helps with complex kanji--you can still pick the kanji out right away even if it isn't the app's first guess. Also the predictive text is sometimes useful, sometimes a little weird--I think there might be something I'm not getting about what it's trying to do, so that may be a learning curve issue. Minor flaws: the delete, space, and return buttons are so tiny they're sometimes hard to hit, and drawing near the bottom of the input box can sometimes cause it to switch modes (modes are all Japanese, hiragana only, katakana only, roman characters only, and other [meaning accented and other European characters, cyrillic, Greek, symbols, and more--though I couldn't for the life of me get it to understand ç, it worked well for everything else I tried]).

MyScript Stack--free

Note: this review is from October 2014--this may have gotten better since then. But if the info below still holds, you'll still be much better off with any of the options above. Looks like it may be a faster way to enter English than a keyboard, but it's useless for Japanese. It finds simple kanji easily, but try anything with 6-8 or more strokes and you'll usually have to write it in again and again, and it often won't find what you're looking for at all. Plus, it just doesn't feel very precise, so you have to be extra careful (and even then it often doesn't work). This is fresh out the door, so it may get much better with a little development, but for now the Japanese handwriting feature is terrible. It is free, though, so it may be worth a shot for English use--I'm keeping it on my phone for a while to see how I like it. But I'm trying to figure out a how a free keyboard app turns a profit--is it going to cause ads to pop up all over my phone when I'm using it?

JLT Dictionaries on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch

updated December 22, 2015

Basic Info ＊ Get the Dictionaries＊Installing the JLT Dictionaries on Your iPhone ＊Handwriting Keyboards

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