I thought I’d devote a couple of posts to Android Japanese-English dictionaries, since they are so important to have.
Right now, I’ve got two main ones I’m using. I’m going to talk about Aedict in this post.
Aedict has a lot of features I like. Let me go through the main ones:
- Wildcard searches. You can add a ? before or after a kanji character, and get a list of all words with that character in that order, i.e. 先? and ?先 are two different searches.
- Notepad. You can save words to a notepad, you can have multiple notepads with different categories (verbs, nouns, い adjectives, な adjectives…), you can export the notepad to CSV format to pull into Excel, you can create a quiz on your notepad entries…really nice.
- Kanji search choices. This dictionary uses all the normal ones (by radical, by drawing, by entering rōmaji/hiragana) and also uses the SKIP system, which I like a lot. (There is an optional plugin for OCR scanning of kanji, which I haven’t tried yet.)
- JLPT Quiz. This is a quiz for kanji only, but you can review the on’yomi and kun’yomi for the expected kanji at each level of the JLPT 1-5. You can also review the Joyo list, Heisig, or your own list of notepad kanji.
- “Translation”. By this I mean, you can paste a sentence into the search bar, and the app will try and do its best to give you all the words it can find, matching up vocabulary with more than one kanji in them correctly. It’s not perfect, but it gives you a good start into working your way through a problem sentence you are reading.
The developer was also very responsive to the one defect I brought to his attention, and it was fixed pretty quickly, within a week and a half.
There is a free version, but I liked it so much, I paid for the full version. It’s really worth supporting.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk about Akebi.