gogoNavi Japanese <> English for Android

Very helpful when studying Japanese and fumble to find the words you look for when speak others.

It helps on my daily life a lot.

I love it, but here are a couple of ideas for improvement: • Include hiragana/katakana alphabets • Add audio and romanization for each word/phrase

To be honest, when I first started using this application I was thrilled to find a Japanese-English dictionary that accomplished my basic needs. Unfortunately it has several issues that make it not nearly as ideal as the FREE "Kotoba!" dictionary. Notably, there is no way to zoom in on Kanji - meaning for especially tiny Kanji - example 鬱 - うつ - "utsu" - look like a tiny black smudge. This is incredibly irritating as it makes it impossible to distinguish the Kanji. "Kotoba!" - FREE application - while isn't perfect, has a much more thorough definition, reading (of both Hiragana and Kanji) is much more legible and easy to read, and even includes Romaji. Another feature is a stroke order, with moving image for many of the more common Kanji. Considering this "gogoNavi" is a paid application, I expect better support, and frankly better features than a free program. The one small redeeming quality is that you can save a favorites list of words and it has a history of recently searched words... these two features are the only reasons I still on the rare occasion use this dictionary over the free "Kotoba!".

The hiragana is to small to make out the variation marks. There are too many words actually. A lot of the time when I use words from this dictionary my Japanese room mate would give me a weird look followed by "thats a very old/unusual word ... no one uses that word any more." He described some of the words as being so old that it's like listening to Shakespear in Japanese.