Top 5 Best Online Japanese Dictionaries For Beginners

Online Japanese dictionaries are useful for beginning and advanced learners alike. They take less space and support advanced search features, which beats flipping through pages after pages of a printed dictionary.

Read on to see our top picks for the best online Japanese dictionaries, and our handy tips to quickly look up any Japanese words you see in the wild.

Top 5 Free Japanese Dictionary Apps

These apps are highly popular with beginning learners of Japanese:

#1 Mazii Dictionary

Mazii stands out as the best among online English – Japanese dictionaries app. The app has 4 main tabs, each dedicated to an area of trouble for beginning Japanese learners:

1. • Vocabulary
2. • Kanji (Chinese characters adapted for use in Japanese)
3. • Grammar
4. • Sentences

It also saves your search history – no more of those “tip of the tongue” moments!

Level up your Japanese by mastering the three alphabets. What are they?

#2 Akebi Dictionary

If you’d like something more straightforward, Akebi is a great choice. The app is also packed with tons of features, including text translation, proper name translation, and help on typing Japanese.

Advanced learners may find Akebi short of their purposes. Still, the app is a great start for beginning learners.

#3 Weblio Dictionary

Weblio is an English – Japanese dictionary that offers concise definitions and real-life examples. With over 10 million entries, it will be your all-knowing guide on the journey to master the Japanese vocabulary.

Do Japanese people speak English? See if you can guess which other languages are used in Japan.

#4 Todaii Dictionary

Todaii offers a one-tap search function, which will save you the trouble of switching apps every so often. The app is also bundled with an extensive collection of reading materials across all levels (from N5 to N1) to help you with reading comprehension.

#5 Tanoshii Dictionary

Tanoshii is the go-to choice for Japanese words, Kanji characters, and grammar structures, thanks to its user-friendly design. You can also listen to the pronunciation, practice writing Kanji, look up past searches, and keep track of your favorite words!

The app also recognizes handwriting, so you can always look up new Kanji characters as you read more Japanese.

JaViDic – Japanese Dictionary for PC

JaViDic is a Japanese dictionary app for PC. It is especially popular among specialists in the technical and economics fields, as well as in Japanese translation.

JaViDic can help you:

1. ▶ Understand technical Japanese with over 330,000 terms across specialized fields, as well as searching by categories.
2. ▶ Quickly search for Kanji by strokes, distinguish between On and Kun readings, and learn the stroke order effectively.
3. ▶ Activate your inner polyglot with built-in multilingual dictionaries, including English – Japanese, English – Vietnamese, Japanese – Vietnamese, and Vietnamese – Japanese.

Though JaViDic is not available on mobile devices, it remains a solid choice for learning industry-specific terms in Japanese.

Look up words easily with the Japanese Dictionary JP extension

Japanese Dictionary JP is a free Chrome extension to help you quickly look up words on the web.

Follow these 3 steps to install it:

1. ➤ Step 1: Open Google Chrome and go to the Chrome Web Store.
2. ➤ Step 2: Search for “Japanese Dictionary JP,” click “Add to Chrome,” then follow the instructions to finalize your installation.
3. ➤ Step 3: When it’s done, click on the extension icon on the top-right corner of your browser to get started.

Here’s how it works:

1. ➤ Step 1: Click on the JP Dictionary icon to activate the extension.
2. ➤ Step 2: Open your favorite Japanese news websites, for example.
3. ➤ Step 3: Choose how you’d like to use the extension:
   1. ◦ Highlight a word or a text to look it up or translate it.
   2. ◦ Hover the mouse over a text to translate it.
   3. ◦ Highlight a word or text, then right-click to look up individual words and translate the whole text.
   4. ◦ Type “jp”, blank space, and paste the text you need translated onto the search bar.

Refresh the page so your settings can take effects. Now you can look up Japanese words without leaving your browser.

Online Japanese dictionary: 4 powerful tips to learn the vocabulary

Dictionaries aren’t a simplified translation tool. Here’s how you can take advantage of their powerful features:

1. ▶ Notice the word class: You can get by only knowing the meaning of a word, but you’ll need to know the grammatical class of a word to make a correct sentence.
2. ▶ Listen to the pronunciation: Prioritize dictionaries with built-in pronunciation. Listen to how the characters are pronounced in specific contexts can help you avoid pitfalls and make it stick.
3. ▶ Learn by examples: Read the examples closely to understand what a grammatical sentence looks like. The Japanese word order is very different from English, so make sure to get lots of practice by making sentences with the words you just looked up.
4. ▶ Read the thesaurus: Some dictionaries also act as a thesaurus, which includes information on slang words, synonyms, and collocations. These features help you speak Japanese more naturally.

Key Takeaways

We hope our list of free online Japanese dictionaries has been useful. They are among the most authoritative and accessible apps today.

If you are not fluent in Japanese and you’d like to translate a formal or technical Japanese document, dictionaries are not enough. Instead, look for professional translation services to ensure accuracy.

If you need to translate:

1. • Legal, technical, medical, and other specialized documents that are rich in industry terms
2. • Marketing content, books, newspapers, and such that require a creative touch

Contact Thao & Co. translation company for carefully crafted and highly accurate translations!

All of our professional translators hold Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Linguistics and JLPT certificates at N3 level or above. Their expertise, along with our time-tested translation and proofreading workflows, ensures timely delivery and total accuracy for all of your translated documents.

For more details on our Japanese translation services, leave your request on the Get A Quote page. We will get back promptly with a detailed consultation.

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