Wakaru is an iPhone and iPad study aide for learners of Japanese language aiming to ease reading of Japanese texts.
Japanese is notoriously one of the most difficult languages to learn. What makes progress slow is the difficulty to acquire new vocabulary just by reading.Reading is in fact painstaking as one should constantly go back to a dictionary to search reading and meaning of unknown words hence interrupting the reading experience.
Wakaru features a web browser and an ebook reader for the iPhone and the iPad with built-in dictionaries :
- Japanese-English (165 000 entries)
- Japanese-French (15 000 entries)
- Japanese proper names (700 000 entries)
While browsing Japanese websites or reading a Japanese text, Wakaru allows you to lookup any word in the built-in dictionary. You just select a word and a pop-up with reading and meaning slides from the screen bottom.
It handles conjugated words and can lookup full sentences.
You can create quickly flashcards from the words you have searched and review them within the app.
In addition, Wakaru can link to external dictionary applications :
- Wisdom English-Japanese
- Petit Royal Japonais-Français
- Daijirin
- Daijisen
- Ruigo
- Goo Jisho
- Midori
- Weblio
- Imiwa?
The ebook module can download free ebooks from Aozora Bunko (10 000+ free Japanese ebooks). Ebooks can be searched by author or title.
More interestingly, ebooks can also be searched according to their kanji level. This features is very useful to find a text adapted to his/her level in Japanese.
The ebook module can also open and search within PDF documents.
Wakaru is available on the AppStore for just $2.5 per year, or 0.5$ per month.
The look-up in PDF document is included.
As our users are telling, Wakaru is a great app to read Japanese.
