Zenbu Japanese

Zenbu Japanese is an offline-first Japanese dictionary, image-text reader, and translator for iPhone. It helps learners understand the Japanese they meet, whether it is typed, photographed, handwritten, or heard in a video. Its dictionary is also free on the web, along with free kana charts, kanji lists, and word frequency lists.

Zenbu Japanese Overview

The iPhone app has five areas with one dictionary behind all of them: the Dictionary, Image Search, Translate, Player, and Lists. You can look up a word offline, point the camera at a menu or a sign, draw a kanji you can't type, talk through a conversation in Japanese and English, and watch YouTube with Japanese captions you can tap.

Dictionary

The dictionary has more than 200,000 words and works with no connection. You can search in Japanese, kana, romaji, or English, and conjugated forms are found too. Kanji you can't type can be drawn in any stroke order or found by their radicals. Each entry shows furigana and pitch accent, every conjugation and what it means, and real example sentences, and each kanji has its readings and stroke order.

Among equally good search matches, the most common words come first. The frequency lists you choose set that order: JLPT levels and YouTube are built in, and Japanese Wikipedia, TV and movies, anime, manga, novels, visual novels, and video games are optional downloads.

Image Search

Take a photo, or choose one from your library or files, and Zenbu reads the Japanese in it, across or down the page, even with English around it. Tap any word to open it in the dictionary with the photo still in view, or switch to Translate for the whole passage.

Translate

Translate lets two people share one iPhone and speak Japanese or English in any order. Speech appears as it is spoken, and the translation is read aloud after a pause. A listening mode follows a TV, a guide, or announcements. Translate downloads Apple's Japanese and English speech recognition and translation once, then runs on the iPhone without a connection.

Player

Player plays YouTube videos with their Japanese captions under the video. Paste a link or search YouTube from the app, then tap any word in the captions to pause and look it up. You can repeat a line, step through line by line, or slow playback to 0.5×. Player needs a connection.

Lists and Known Words

Save words and kanji to your own lists, and mark the words you know: their furigana is then hidden in example sentences and captions. Tapping a kanji shows which part of a word's reading belongs to it.

Free on the Web

The web dictionary has the same entries as the app's search, free in your browser with no download. Every word has its own page with readings, pitch accent, conjugations, kanji, and example sentences, and you can browse words by hiragana, katakana, kanji school grade, JLPT level from N5 to N1, frequency list, and part of speech. Image Search, handwriting, Translate, and Player are only in the app.

The site also offers free tools built on the same dictionary: hiragana and katakana charts with the words that start with each kana, kanji lists by school grade, JLPT level, and jinmeiyō, and frequency lists of the most common words, from JLPT N5 to YouTube and anime.