IPhone Applications for Learning Japanese

Japanese Learning on the Move

By all accounts, the iPhone should be a seriously useful piece of kit for the Japanese learner with it`s portability and touch screen functionality. However, it doesn’t quite seem to have the killer apps required to make it a truly useful piece of kit. However, it still has a few useful applications, which are discussed below.

What It Can Do

Readthekanji/Surusuru

Of course, with its built in Safari web browser, the iPhone can access web-pages and thus the Japanese learner can use any web based applications he has in his learning tool-belt. In personal experience, this would include readthekanji.com which works decently, if not brilliant, on the iPhone. The layout isn’t exactly suited to the iPhone’s resolution, and the user finds himself scrolling around a lot to see all of the information. Presumably the SRS application SuruSuru will also work through the iPhone too.

StudyArcade

StudyArcade is an SRS application for the iPhone, available through the app store. You can connect to your online Anki decks with this, thus giving the ability to share a deck between a PC application and StudyArcade on the iPhone. However, when the writer tried this several months ago, a few syncing problems between the phone, PC and online Anki account were present, causing both the iPhone software to crash when trying to sync large amounts of information (like present in a Heisig/Kanji deck) and also caused some loss of progress/review information in the deck attempting to be synced. Several months have passed since this event, and the software may well have improved in the meantime, but proceed with care.

iAnki

Anki is also available through the iPhone through a web browser, using the iAnki plug-in. Running Anki in this manner however is far from the elegant experience provided by the desktop version. Also, the process you have to go through to set up the application and plug-in is not completely trivial. Anki is definitely something that would benefit from having a dedicated port provided for the iPhone.

Kotoba

The iPhone provides quite a large number of Japanese dictionaries in the App Store, Kotoba is the best this writer has found to date. As well as being free, Kotoba provides a number of great features:

- A relatively neat interface in which to display results, provides lots of similar and alternative results to search through
- Multi-language support, giving results in French, German and occasionally other languages
- Native application integration with tatoeba.org, which provides example sentences to show word use in context
- A kanji decomposition, showing the individual kanji of a compound word, the keywords associated with the kanji, and the On/Kun Yomi readings of the kanji
- A cork-board to attach kanji you want to study later to
- Individual kanji look-up, including stroke order, radical, frequency, and a raft of other information (including Heisig number and other external learning scheme indexes)

The biggest missing link in the iPhone learning experience however is Japanese Handwriting Recognition. For some reason, Apple have chosen to not add this in yet, while they support Chinese handwriting recognition. It could be argued that the market in China is bigger, hence it makes more sense for them to support their market. However, Apple have tackled the hard part of the problem, which is the algorithm to detect characters successfully. Surely to turn the Chinese support into Japanese support, they would only have to delete the characters that are present in Chinese, but not in Japanese, add the characters in Japanese that aren’t used in Chinese, and then modify the frequencies to represent each character`s frequency in Japanese better? In any case, if enough people request the functionality from Apple, they might be more inclined to produce this functionality.

Japanese Handwriting Recognition would be a real killer app in the Japanese learners arsenal. It’s still very difficult and slow at an intermediate level to look up Kanji you don’t recognise as you are forced to take the radical look-up/stroke count route in a dictionary. Handwriting recognition on a touch screen like this would allow learners to rapidly enter kanji, even on the move, to look up words they didn’t recognise. Couple with a “pin-board” style app to save the kanji inputted for later digestion, and the iPhone would turn into a great device for the Japanese learner. This and a Heisig look-up mentioned in would massively increase the iPhone’s usefulness to the Japanese learner.

So there you have it, a series of techniques and applications available to the Japanese learner. Most of them are free and readily down-loadable, so get out there, download the software, and start learning!