The iPhone may not be selling as fast in Japan as it is in the United States, but a Japanese language application is proving to be a big hit with iPhone owners.
Until now, if you wanted to learn Japanese using technology, you’d resort to electronic dictionaries. Or, if you were running a recent version of Windows, you could download the Global Input Method Editor from Microsoft.
But if learning Japanese on the go is on your list of things to do, you’re in luck. iPhone and iPod touch owners can now eschew their language dictionaries in favor of an application called, aptly enough, Japanese, from Codefromtokyo, a privately funded company founded in 2007 by Mark Gaensicke, who lives in Tokyo.
“Do you also dislike carrying a paper-based dictionary around and rather want to have one of those electronic dictionaries (denshi jisho)? Look no further, it’s here,” writes the Codefromytokyo developer on the company’s Web site.
Using the Japanese app, available at the App Store, users can learn how to write kanji characters and pronounce Japanese words and phrases. The app is specifically designed as an aid for users learning Japanese, known to be one of the most difficult languages to learn, let alone master.
Japanese is written with three different scripts: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Kanji, used to write nouns, adjective stems and verb stems, has thousands of characters, while hiragana, used to write inflected verbs and adjective endings, and katakana, used for emphasis on certain words, each have 50.
Using Japanese
When you start up the application, Japanese presents a user interface that resembles the iPhone’s Address Book. Searching works quickly, and results appear within seconds and are sorted by relevance to assist the user in choosing the correct word, according to Codefromtokyo.
Entries are shown in their Japanese form along with a transcription for…