Quote:
Originally Posted by KyleGoetz
My Canon has sample sentences for tons of words, and a very advanced kanji search where I can search phonetically by kanji that are parts of other kanji. Do iPhone apps have this? Just curious.
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Basically, no, at least not yet. Japanese does have lists of proverb, counters etc. not present in Kotoba but neither have example sentences when you find a word. The yet to be released version 2.0 of Japanese does promise example sentences, multi-radical search and flashcards though. I do find Japanese to have a cleaner interface and more importantly, to be quicker than Kotoba to find words as the list compounds appears live as you enter the kanji characters. It's worth the price in my opinion (I think there is a discount for it now, and people with version 1.0 will get a free update to version 2.0).
The dictionary for both are based on WWWJDIC as far as I can tell, which is in my opinion, handy at least up to my level (okay, that doesn't say much but anyway), as long as you know the reading of the kanji you are looking up. The problem I have with the iPhone, is that character recognition does not work nearly as well as the IME pad (nothing I've tried does though - not even dedicated denshi jishou). It's a shame, because it's technically easier to draw kanji on the iPhone than with a mouse.
At some point, a learner will probably want a 'real' Denshi Jishou. I wouldn't buy an iPod Touch/iPhone (mine's PAYG) *just* for those applications, but it's good to have if you already have one. Another nice thing with those devices is that you can also install Spaced Repetition software which is handy when you are learning on the go.