Yomiwa - Japanese Dictionary App Reviews

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It works. Not crazy about some of the layout, but this was definitely worth buying. Super handy, and the search option actually ties conjugations back to their dictionary form. Not only that, but when you put conjugations in, the app shows the dictionary form along with (passive), (potential), (wish), etc...

An Essential tool for students learning Japanese. Learning kanji and reading kanji has been quite the challenge- especially handwritten kanji. However, with this app- I have been able to decipher and understand the notes from my relatives in Japan. ありがとうござました！

Camera recognition is useless. I downloaded this app for the kanji recognition feature and it is completely unusable, even when I am pointing it at very clearly written kanji with a solid white background. It shouldn't even be advertised as a part of the app.

Spotty Charcter Recognition. Bought this for my trip to Japan to read the more difficult written kanji in documents and Shrine fortunes and such. Sometimes it recognizes most of them, sometimes none at all. I lost confidence in this app pretty early on and just stuck to free dictionaries where you just draw the characters since they’re more reliable

Great for my needs. I travel to Japan every 3 months. I use this constantly when I encounter new words. Words also are used in example sentences which helps tremendously. The camera picture function has potential to be stellar, and the developer is working hard to make it better! They are responsive to feedback and ideas. Well worth the paid version!

What’s wrong. This app is not worth 5 stars , I would give no stars if I could........ First......The app is good but it keeps freezing and kicking me out, I paid for the one time subscription fee and it keeps asking me to pay again. I probably paid for it twice already and the app just have too many glitches so it keeps kicking me out. Hopefully this problem gets fixed. And then I can update my review 2nd it keeps asking me to make a nick name for the review and every nickname I use is taken, which leads me to believe I rated the review to low , so I’m trying to give 5 star only to rate the review

Not good for reading manga. This app does not recognize kanji well at all. Most of the time even the manual correction function does not show the correct kanji. It is a gamble whether it will recognize kanji combos as words and as the RIGHT word. I purchased this app to read manga but it makes the reading more difficult instead of easier. I often end up having to draw in a kanji to get the correct definition. Its a waste of time and money.

Best Japanese Dictionary so far. After I started using this app, I found myself not needing the other similar apps anymore.

I use it daily - great app. While I’m learning on duolingo I often look words up here. I like i can do English or hirigana (with romanji keyboard). There’s one feature ask and that would be details on a radical so I can learn the breakdown on the kanji. That would make this app near perfect IMHO. Thanks!

Amazingly useful app for offline travel.... I used this app while traveling in Japan and found it extremely useful to help me figure out signage, labels etc. I highly recommend it...

Absolutely amazing for OCR and playing games. I use this to look up kanji I’m unfamiliar with when playing video games. It is insanely useful.

Problems after update. Can’t open since the latest update. I have an iPhone XS for reference. Super disappointed as I’ve been using this app for years and have never had this problem. Would love for the developers to get in contact...thanks. UPDATE: Changed review to 5 stars after deleting app and reinstalling, worked like a charm. If you have a problem opening after updating to the last war iOS, try reinstalling. This app is worth every penny. I like using it when I read manga and watch Netflix so I can jot down new vocab. So much faster an convenient than just using a regular dictionary 😭🙌🏾

Review. Can you guys make this app show words that or uncommon common and rare please like for all words

Great app. Use often. I have been using this for many years and it is reliable and user friendly. I highly recommend.

Yomiは=good. Wasn’t always a great app, like nowdays. The developers have made it soo much better. Great dictionary, with very educational example sentences. It’s easier than ever to look up your japanese words, in english or 日本語

Great app. Very good app for Japanese learners and travelers, it has all the features you want for a dictionary + some amazing character recognition. The recognition in live mode can be unstable, but works great on still pictures. I also love the ability to copy the recognized text and to analyze it to get the furiganas, it makes reading of Japanese books much easier. It's nice to see that the app is being continuously improved and I'm looking forward to future updates! ありがとうございます！

Must be an issue with my iphone: Crashes every time.. I'm sure this translation from Japanese characters to English is very difficult, but the user experience needs work.

Great support:). I have to give you guys props, I reported the audio bug for kon’nichiwa and the development team fixed the issue in less than a day. If you are looking for an app to help you with your Japanese etc. this is definitely the way to go. Good job guys/gals 👍

Looks powerful... but HOW to use?. Without any type of accompanying tutorial nor an intuitive menu I have been totally stumped in getting anything out of the product. Googling demos and how-to’s was unproductive and the developers are yet to offer tips or referrals via their query window. Frustrating... as it appears to be an awesome set of tools. Andrew W.

Beat in class grammar analyzer. This app was developed by a Japanese and this shows in how it almost always breaks up words and usually identifies names of people and places correctly. The OCR also seems to be built in house, allowing it to be used offline, something few other apps offer. Use this app if you want to learn Japanese in the most efficient way!

It really works and keeps improving. At first it was somewhat useful but had too much trouble recognizing text. Today it is fast, good at recognizing text, and has a better dictionary and other tools. When the text can’t be recognized I use the Kanji drawing tool. It is effective and flexible — you don’t have to get stoke order right and you can be sloppy. The dictionaries keep improving and even include a name dictionary. It’s becoming an important part of my Japanese learning tools.

Widget disappeared. Please bring back the words on the news widget, it was great! Edit: Glad to hear, thanks for response dev! App is great. A daily random kanji widget would also be fantastic.

Best one I’ve found so far. I pibe that this app has the option to do flash cards, and the way it does it is much more convenient than other apps I’ve tried. You can also draw kanji, so that’s super cool

Word lookup. Does everything you need. It will only get better.

Incredible. Granted, I have only used this on screenshots to read text, but google translate has a tough time with bubbly font and this app scanned every character beautifully. It doesn’t have sentence translation, which is fine. It goes word by word, which actually provides a clearer translation than google translate messing up tenses and other grammar. I do want to visit Japan one day, and when I do this will absolutely come in handy. Thank you.

Maybe I happened. Definitely recommended. The camera is a blessing on the level of sliced bread! As the app evolves and… The simple functionality is a bit buried but with some direction and searching you can in fact still get to the root of what you are looking for. I am thankful for the developer response and tons of help that enabled me to find the functions that I used so much before. I am glad that they are still there and the app is once again very useful for me.

YOMIWA. I am not really ready to give a review like I want to. I use this app I believe a lot, but not enough to know the complete app and what more it has to offer. I do find it quite informative when I do use it so I’m giving (4) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. I will return!

Best dictionary for learning. Really impressed with improvements. Started copying text on my Mac and looking up on the phone app. Wish there was a desktop/chrome version. Better then google translate for learning.

Amazing kanji scan recognition. This app is getting 90% of what I'm shooting, which for me includes hand-brushed kanji from maps made hundreds of years ago. Pros: * you can easily set the scan zone. * you can freeze the image * app puts its reading of the kanji next to the image and highlights what it is identifying, so you can tell if it's seeing the image correctly. * app offers multiple meanings of kanji (essential) and variant versions * app will isolate several kanji in scan area and you can scroll from one to the next. * you can copy kanji to your clipboard (which I use to translate from Chinese to get possible alternative meanings or more literal translations). Kanji will vary because of the brush variances and the artistry of the calligrapher, so this won't be perfect. But my learning the kanji is now much more empowered.

Please make a Korean version!!. I love this dictionary, it’s the only one that works for me because of how well translated all of the grammar is! PLEASE make a Korean dictionary app like this to help me with my Korean studies too!! 🙏🏻お願いします！

An indispensable translation and study tool. I don’t even know what to say. This app is so much faster and compete than the already great Google Translate app. I don’t know how I ever lived without it! <3

The most essential app I have. The dictionary is comprehensive and complete, even including verb conjugation/inflections and kanji radical searches. The OCR works surprisingly well, considering the limits of the technology. Honestly the radical search is so easy to use I’ve never needed the OCR feature, but it’s pretty nice when reading or studying sometimes.

Great support from an educational app. I am still finding more ways to use Yomiwa and it has proven useful to more quickly decode Kanji when I don’t have time to look them up. Recently, the app suffered a quirky error following an update. Reaching out over a weekend, I very quickly received a reply from the developer and worked out a solution. Great support!

Life Saver!. Traveling through Japan on short notice. Invaluable app for getting by and getting what you need; like water!

Partially works. It picks up a few words but can’t handle phrases. More than one or two characters at a time and you’re out of luck. It didn’t pick up any of the hiragana or katakana on a package of Japanese sweets I have. A little disappointing but hopefully future updates will improve the app.

Favorite. My favorite Japanese dictionary on iOS. Love the bundled ocr and the browser. The flashcards are convenient- pretty easy to export. Only possible improvement would be direct anki flashcard generation, but I understand it’s an unrealistic ask. Definitely a keeper.

I WOULD GIVE 0 STARS IF I COULD. The app is a waste of money and doesn’t give you an accurate translation from pictures. I travelled to Japan and used the camera translation option and it was USELESS! It could only tell me the individual meanings and not the full, overall translation. I tried to use this app for translating menu items in Japan and it would only give me the basic meanings like “water” or “cold”, not even telling me if menu item i was translating was beef or chicken or etc. IT WOULDNT EVEN TELL ME THE TYPE OF FOOD, IT WOULD JUST SAY A BASIC MEANING LIKE “hot”. Complete waste of time.

👌. The problems I've had with this app have been fixed! Really helpful

Great app, but needs furigana/romaji settings. Love the app, and it’s become my daily Japanese dictionary. My only complaint is that the text analyzer defaults to showing the romaji/furigana above the words on every new paste, when I’d like to have a way to leave it off unless enabled, since I like to read in the analyzer and don’t want to rely on furigana or romaji above the word.

Essential for serious Japanese learners. This app does an amazing job of Kanji recognition, even for names!! It is essential for serious study - I am using it to read online newspapers and a paperback novel. My reading skill has greatly improved. The way to use this app is to do a screen capture to your photo roll, or use Camera+ with image stabilization turned on, and then read in the photo. The live camera is too jittery. The ocr window generally needs to be adjusted to be narrower and the zoom increased somewhat in order to get the best accuracy. The developer, Vivien, is extremely responsive to feedback and provides bug fixes.

The camera tool's Godsent gift for visual novels and books. I'm thanking all the developers for making such an app like this especially the camera tool, it's a really saving time tool, I remember when I started learning Japanese in order to play my favorite visual novel games, I was wandering everywhere in the internet without any routine, just wanted sites and tools to help me with knowing the kanjis and words that I don't even know why I started in the first place looking up for, but in no time I got all exhausted from this unorganized routine actions, I realized that I was focusing more on the kanji meaning and words more than what I want to read and understand, and then again, in no time I got bored from these games because I literally didn't get the game mode neither what is happening in it, but when I started using this app is camera tool it made things much more easier and time saving with an organized routine, with all the kanjis and even the words meaning infront of my eyes in one tap, it gave me the leisure to read and understand what the games try to tell me

Favorite Dictionary App. I love this app because it writes the Kanji in Hiragana instead of Romaji. The example sentences are great too and sometimes make me laugh.

Worked Well in Japan. I know Chinese, but am innocent of Japanese, so I downloaded this before heading to Japan for a two-week tour. It served splendidly. I nearly always found what I was looking for, and the available voiceovers supplemented with romaji in many compounds made it useful even though I never mastered kana. I was particularly pleased to find many geographical and historical names. If I ran the zoo, I’d increase the number of proper names and include romaji in head entries, but as it stands this is already worth far more than it costs.

Problem solved!. I now happily give this app 5 stars! I used this app a lot when I studied abroad in Japan and I still frequently use it whenever messaging my friends or while I am learning the language. Thank you developers for quickly fixing this app!

Good app, new bug. I love this dictionary, but the latest update as of July 10 has the handwriting input crashing the app every time I attempt to use it (iPhone 6S with iOS 11.4). Edit: As promised, the bug is fixed! Many thanks to the Yomiwa folks.

Best Kanji Jisho. This is the best Kanji dictionary I have ever used. Looking up words is super easy using either romanji or hiragana. The kanji lookup isn’t bad either. Whenever I draw a kanji it does a decent job of figuring out what I’m trying to draw. It also supplies other guesses if the first guess is not what you wanted. The best part by far is the Outlier dictionary which is available for nearly every kanji. It is an additional one-time purchase of $30 but I think it is well worth it (about 30 or so entries are available for free, such as 後). Outlier will break down the kanji into its radical components and show how they explain the original meaning and on-yomi pronunciation. Sometimes the original is far removed from the modern, but even then it is helpful to see the components as I often know how to draw those. At a minimum this is a great reference tool. Add the Outlier dictionary if you are seriously studying kanji and it’s an indispensable study tool (paired with a good kanji textbook such as “Kanji in Context”). I just got to 250 kanji and I wish I had used Outlier from the start. Update: I’ve now studied 900 kanji over two years. The quality of the Outlier dictionary remains very high! I also recently purchased the optical reader to help with unfamiliar kanji in manga. It scans text and allows me to easily look up any kanji or word. It works like magic, even in lackluster lighting. I highly recommend it if you want to read kanji in media.

Great app which stands out from the pack. The Analyzer feature is great for learning Japanese sentence structure. You get daily vocabulary words with links to related Japanese articles. Translate Japanese text from photos or using your camera! Responsive customer service! Unique app which is worth the cost!

MOST USEFUL JAPANESE APP FOR STUDYING. Seriously, as the title says, this app is AMAZING and it’s probably the most useful tool I’ve ever used in assisting me with learning new vocabulary, new kanji, and how to use both in application. If you’re studying Japanese and you need an app that’s really gonna help you excel, it’s this one. So many useful features like writing kanji and recognizing it from your handwriting and from a photo you take/upload. Helps me learn new characters and words. 🤟🏼

Clunky and unpolished. While useful, the app feels pretty clunky and unpolished. The image translation tool clearly misses quite a few hiragana/kanji, and I can’t find an option to translate from right to left instead of left to right. Viewing inside of the image is also incredibly messy & hard to garner information from. Overall, it helps you get the meaning, but the ease of use on this app is lacking. Wouldn’t want to pay $9 to have to deal with that.

Bad reviews are misguided. I’d like to preface this review by saying yomiwa is an excellent app for its intended purpose. I am a high school student and use the app for studying. the photo recognition works great and the app provides a lot of sample sentence to go along with the vocab which I find incredibly helpful. Again, The photo recognition works well focused in on a sheet of paper or on a wall, not outside on a street sign. If you don’t speak Japanese or read it and want to be able to get around, you’re better off with a travel dictionary or something. However as far as research purposes go this app works great and easily worth the money in exchange for the added convenience.

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Great!. Yomiwa is just what I was looking for. Augmented reality meets Japanese Kanji Dictionary. Sure beats looking up kanji any other way! I really could have used this technology 12 years ago in Japan. PLEASE FIX THE FOCUSSING OF THE CAMERA - IT'S DRIVING ME CRAZY! There are no instructions with this app and there are a few essential things I found by accident. For example: Manual Mode finds more than three characters - you can swipe left and right to see more alternatives! Alas sometimes it still doesn't produce the right kanji. Yomiwa seems to have trouble focussing which is annoying considering the iPhone 5 camera has such an excellent ability to focus near and far just by tapping on the subject. A little tweak could surely fix this. Anyway, at the moment, Yomiwa works far better when you just take a photo of Japanese text with the normal iPhone camera and then just use Yomiwa for character recognition by letting it access your "camera roll". Much less stuffing around with the auto focus problem this way. Can you make it "copy" text so the words can be pasted into Kotoba or another dictionary app?

Unique and very useful. The OCR brought me into the app but in reality I don’t use it much (though it works pretty well). I have found more value in the dictionary itself (kanji info, examples sometimes not seen in other resources, and the easy way to build up word lists and exporting those). More recently I’ve come to appreciate the unique “wall” corner of the app which is a community where people can ask questions and often get useful answers, and occasionally find interesting study materials. As a serious student and user of many other Japanese apps, I find this app a particularly valuable resource. Also the app developer listens and cares, therefore I highly recommend this app without hesitation.

Best Yet. 本当に一番いいアップです！have all the apps on phone and iPad- Japanese, Midori, Imiwa, Google Translate but am using Yomiwa more and more. The drawing not always the best but it is not bad.

Highly recommended!. I have tried several Japanese dictionaries on the App store and I have to say that this is by far the best one, especially if you are actively studying Japanese. I first gave it a try mainly because of its OCR feature, but quickly started using it as my main dictionary when I realized that the dictionary part itself is what makes this app really stand out. Compared to several other Japanese dictionaries it correctly lists which verbs are transitive and which are intransitive as well as if the word in question is commonly used or not. Those functions are actually essential if you want to have a good grasp of Japanese. Furthermore the team behind it is extremely helpful and responsive to feedback and just improved the way word lists are made as well as added the ability to study using a flashcard system. Considering how much the app has improved since I bought it I am sure the app will be even better in the future. Highly recommended!

Perfect for learners of the Japanese Language. Can finally read native level Japanese books.

error in study list feature. This app is mostly great but I’ve recently had trouble with the list feature, which I use to create flash card learning sets. It has been randomly replacing the words of newly created sets with words of different sets, meaning I’ve been loosing many of the words I have saved and the titles of many sets no longer match their content. It has happened several times now and I don’t think I can continue using the app while this is an issue, as it’s my main way of recording and studying vocab

Meets my requirements.. I have been using Yomiwa since I began studying Japanese. For me, the interface has been very good, and I’m able to find what I need relatively quickly and accurately. There are always limitations when trying to find exact terminology from one language to another, but the breadth of examples and explanations helps me find the best option. The drawing mode has been useful and is pretty forgiving regarding my untidy writing. I was happy to pay for this app, as it offers a lot of features that work well together that I couldn’t find in a reliable free app.

Excellent. Best Japanese app no doubt.

Can’t test before purchase. Wanted to see how the camera recognition worked but can’t test without purchasing first. Oh well, deleted and back to Google Translate.

Worthy. I used to use an app called Shinkanji - that app became inactive so I had to find a worthy replacement. Tough call because Shinkanji was really good. After just a couple of days with Yomiwa, I’d say it is a worthy replacement. It has OCR, which Shinkanji did not have so that’s a big bonus. It is less good at recognizing hand drawn kanjis than Shinkanji was, and my suspicion is that it may not be taking stroke order into account, only shape. If this improves, I will give the app five stars.

Useless. The app translates each character individually rather than combined and is thus useless. It also wasn't accurate at recognising hand-drawn characters (a list of possibilities to choose from would be helpful here).

It is getting better and better!. This app was pretty bad before but it is just getting better and better! I was so surprised to see it can recognises so many blurry images I took. Definitely worth it.

My favourite dictionary. I have multiple Japanese dictionaries on my iPhones and iPads. This is the one I spend all my time in. I mainly use the word search, as my language level is too preliminary to be reading the word of the day stuff. The sample sentences are very useful. They are the same more or less as my other dictionaries but being able to see them all in one list rather then getting them handed out 6 or 8 at a time is good. Recently I asked for an option to change the font size and voila! we now have that option. You have to restart the app, at least in the first version for the size change to take effect.

Great concept, needs work.. The app doesn't pick up the correct characters very often and therefore is not usable. However it is an excellent idea and if the scanner could be more accurate I'd be celebrating this app!

Excellent. Very useful. I do agree with other reviewers who say the camera focus is lacking. It's not so good at reading even neat handwriting but the quick (and educational) workaround is to scrawl it yourself using the pen function, in which case the recognition is very good. If your handwriting is terrible you'll be asked if you actually meant these other ones. Pairs very well with the Imiwa? app. I would like an in app option to make a list of words I've recently looked up, for revision purposes. For now we can take screenshots to build lists of new words on our phones.

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Gateway To Japanese. Kanji-laden Japanese can be quickly deciphered with this inexpensive iphone app. I’ve used it to read all manner of texts online for approx. a half-year, and recommend it for anyone wishing to read Japanese.

Useless.... Try to use the app multiple time with no success... It's a good thing they have menu with pictures or a mockup of the meal in a display outside... I could not decipher the menu for simple things like figuring out if it was a beef or pork soup...

Awesome. I love this app, excellent features and stellar customer service.

Is it free. Before I download it I just need to know is it free?

Five stars review. I honestly love this app I’ve stumbled upon on. It’s good for looking up Japanese and English meaning etc. plus it also helps you to learn Japanese in my opinion x3 thank you for making the best Japan app ever!

Ideal App. Exactly what I was looking for. If you want to translate kanji on the go this app is definitely worth it!

Indispensable. I’ve been using this app for almost 8 years. I used it as a beginner and I’m still using it even though I’m fluent I still use it for really difficult words. This app has it all- I even used it through my architectural college in Tokyo, and sometimes it would translate to English words I had never heard of! This app is gold! 🙌

Not worth the money. When compared to free Google translate I found this app performed worse when translating signs - it just gave translation of each word without capturing the whole phrase or meaning

Lots of kanji in Japan. Amazing app for anyone trying to learn kanji

Works Perfectly. This is a great companion for Japanese learners! The app does a great job on a variety of fonts. Highly recommended!

Great app. This app has been very useful for living in Japan. Having a grasp on grammar and needing quick offline vocabulary has been really handy. I have used the camera function a few times. It's ok... But don't expect miracles. The support is prompt and helpful. It's a cheap app. Worth it.

Upgraded a year ago and now I have to pay again. God why does my review keep being deleted. I payed $13 ONE YEAR AGO (I have the receipt) so I could use this app ocr. Now the app ignores I did the purchase, and now asks for another purchase ($17 now!) so I can keep using the ocr feature I originally paid for! It's dumb, it's scummy and if I could, I would take my money back. So beware. Do NOT support devs that ignore past purchases (which were made A YEAR AGO). They may come with another update that might ignore your “pro” purchase in a year from now...

Fantastic!. This app is great. Was looking for an app that could read kanji accurately. CamDictionary is hit or miss...but this one is really good.

Super helpful customer service. I couldn’t believe how quick and responsive their customer support was. One of a kind

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Amazing app!!. The app is working perfectly fine with camera freeze and also with pictures from camera roll! IM SO HAPPY I BOUGHT THIS APP!!! its helping me so much understand kanji and its functions! The app didnt work well on my iphone 6 ios 10.x.x but now its working because THE APP DEVELOPER HEARD MY EMAIL AND SUPPORTED ME IM HAPPY ABOUT IT THANK YOU VERY MUCH YOMIWA,

Works erratically. This apps best feature is that it works offline. It's worst feature is that it works poorly. In live acquisition mode small red squares highlight characters it has recognized. However these flicker rapidly with every tiny movement of the phone, losing the "lock" on the character. You can "freeze" the photo but the app has no ability to analyze the photo like google translate does. Basically you must hit the freeze button at exactly the right time when all the characters you want have been locked. And even then, the app has a hard time identifying a series of characters that make up a single word. Instead you get definitions of individual characters which is often unhelpful. Even under perfect conditions this app is frustrating and the rest of the time it's maddening. For a $4 I expect something that works. The app in its current state is a parlor trick to show friends but is not useful as a traveling tool.

Buggy. When I try to translate a kanji in a photo the app immediately crashes.

I’m in Japan now.. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t translate correctly. It’s not worth the money. Don’t get it.

Definitely Useful. As someone who has lived in Japan I can vouch that this app is very useful. The fact that you can just point and figure out what kanji on a street sign means is both a time and life saver. Plus, it has the draw function that can cover for the odd time the camera can't pick a kanji up due to a weird font or something. It also functions as an English-Japanese dictionary which is also very useful in studies and just figuring out that one word that is on the tip of your tongue. This app is useful for those just starting Japanese as well as for those already fairly learned in it. It's become my tool of choice.

Waste. The most huge waste of money in App Store ever!!! Back to google translate.

5/5. 5/5

Works great for some purposes. Amazingly good optical character recognition of Japanese characters. I personally would like the ability to Copy & Paste recognized text. As that would allow some options to run found charters through other translation software. Doesn't do the next step of converting thought chunks into intent-words. On the other hand it does fragment out the idea bits into a conceptual stream which has some useful future Artificial Intelligence potential.

残念. Doesn’t work period. No wonder they don’t tell you their email address.

Endorsement from a native speaker. This is an excellent app—and this is a personal testimony from a Japanese transplant, trying to keep up with my mother tongue by reading novels. In fact, I wish there was something like this years ago when I was spending countless hours flipping through dictionaries and learning Kanji…

Great App. Now I can read and text to my friends and relatives in Japan.

Saving my life!. This app is absolutely essential for any gaijin living in Japan. Better than all of the books and other apps combined. You'll feel you can finally leap back the layers of the onion that is Japanese society. Buy it!!!!

Comparable to google translate. My friends and I have been writing to Google to include yomigana to their image translation, to no avail - but there was no need! Yomiwa does it for you! When I am translating large passages, no program works faster for me than this one. Small side note, it does make more mistakes than Google translate's image translation, but only in Kanji recognition, and only about 3-5% of the time. The translations are always spot on when yomiwa recognizes the kanji. Yomiwa also has trouble translating compound grammar, it will often switch to translating single characters when it does not recognize the grammar pattern.

If you need to look up kanji.... It can save a lot of time. Worth it.

Crashes daily. This app crashes so much. I attempted to back up my data and it crashed. Not it can’t even get past the logo without crashing.

Great app, but twitchy. This app is a great translator app. It allows on the fly translation of Japanese which is a must have when you're learning your way around Japan. The problem is how twitchy it is. I wish there was an option to implement stabilization, and smarter detection as you have to move the text box quite often to get a good read if possible. Yomiwa should include a "straighten" option or include a better way to detect text on a screen. Right now for example, bottles or lettering that isn't perfectly straight is misread.

Very satisfied. Experience so far with Yomiwa has been great: Very affordable (for its capability) Love the camera feature Offline capability makes it very travel friendly Very happy with this app!

Instant Recognition Very Cumbersome. I love the concept and inspiration behind this app, but the default instant recognition/translation of content makes meaningful translation during travel (signs, product packaging, tickets, etc) virtually impossible. The problem is the app immediately tries to ID and translate isolated pictograms in Kanji haphazardly across the image out of textual context-- so you get random lists of possible meanings of various pictograms and have to quickly try to select just a series of characters together and hope the app translates the phrase or idea in the context of nearby characters (which it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't). I found myself having to take pictures first and then carefully selecting area of text and hoping for meaningful context-sensitive translation. So for on-the-fly travel translation, this app didn't really help me. For identifying the dictionary meanings of a single Kanji character isolated at a time, it works great though. Hiragana too it seems to translate fine. I applaud the author's intentions though and hope the app improves going forward!

Lacking key functionality for iPad.. The app functions well enough and as far as I can tell (currently studying Japanese) gives accurate info. However the dev is not putting much effort into the iPad version. It has NO multitasking capabilities and hasn't been updated to support the 10.5" form factor. Using the Apple Pencil to write characters is no diferent than using fingers. While this app has more information, the lack of multitasking alone means that I will be sticking with the Google Translate app and Romajidesu in a browser for now.

Really quite funny. If I point this at Japanese characters, clearly typed, I get gibberish. But any busy pattern or even romanized languages will come up as a ton of words you never knew you needed to know. Conclusion; Best *toy,* not great accuracy. I like to run people's faces through it to see all the things it comes up with for Japanese writing.

Works Great. It’s an invaluable toolkit for anyone learning Japanese.

Simultaneously the best and worst app ever. This app is genius. The idea is, anyway. And sometimes, it works...and those are beautiful moments. Often though, it doesn't recognize words, instead choosing to focus only on a single character, before flipping violently away from the character like an injured porpoise. But again, for all that, this is still an insanely useful app. Mr or Ms developer, please keep improving this app - when it really works every time, it will be the best app on the app store for Japanese learners!! Don't give up. :)

Love it. Oo

No sentences. It be better if it did a sentence too not just each word.

My go-to japanese app. This is the best app i've found for what it does. Living in Japan and trying to learn Japanese sometimes requires speed and efficiency. When i'm at the doctor and come across an obsure medical kanji I don't need a translation and I don't have time to do a dictionary search for every kanji by its radicals. Yomiwa elminates this with it's fantastic camera-kanji recongition system and user honed community. But perhaps even more useful i've found is the ability to lookup a kanji by drawing it. Yes there are other apps out there that allow this but Yomiwa is the only one i've found that ingores stroke order allowing you to quickly draw what you see and move on instead of contemplating with line goes next. Saving me a ton of time.

They fixed the crash!. I hadn't been able to use this app because it always crashed on startup, but they fixed it and now all of the promised functionality works great! There is a quirk to the drawing part in that knowing stroke order is needed to get the right character; for Japanese newbies, you might get the wrong character the first couple tries. Also, I'm not sure how the Vocabulary Lists work. Otherwise, the photo-taking, character-swapping, and identifying of characters is very good and helpful. Looking forward to using this app more!

Great app. Good stuff works well

Great application regardless of font or object size. I've used this work related, speaking and reading some Japanese with stroke order knowledge. From the smallest fonts to poster or billboard sized samples this is a great application. The recognition is generally only affected by lighting conditions and even that is rare. Thank you for a nice functional tool for on the fly needs.

A must have for all Japanese learning people. I have passed JLPT N2 level and find this application very useful and time saving. Especially when reading paper books where there is still a lot of new vocabulary. It saves time from going to the dictionary every time. It works best when you can get a clear shot of the image and it is in focus. Even in moving trains can be used by focusing by tapping and freezing the image. Good recognition algorithm. A must have for every Japanese learner.

Inaccurate. Tried to use the camera feature with my genki Japanese textbook. It was very inaccurate and couldn’t identify most words. The feature appears to be in early development and i would like a refund.

It is not working well for me.. After using the excellent Pleco app while traveling in China, I hoped to find something similar for traveling in Japan. This app is new and had two positive (though sparse) reviews, so I decided to be another guinea pig. In short, the app fails to be useful in the most important scenarios, like reading signs and menus. In two days of using it, it says that the character it has identified are "not found in the dictionary" about 80% of the time. My limited experience with the app suggests that the character recognition works well, but the step of parsing those characters and matching them to dictionary entries is quite poor. This is another case where I wish you could sample an app rather than be forced to buy it, because I would definitely like my money back.

Helpful. I find it helpful when doing my Japanese homework.

Great concept, poor execution. I've tested this app out on various documents, signs, posters, etc., and it is rarely ever able to recognize the characters. Occasionally, it might produce the correct character, but you have to hold impossibly still, or it disappears the next instant. Even using the "freeze frame" feature, the app can't recognize most kanji. The option to input characters through handwriting also rarely returns what you're looking for. It's a great app conceptually, but unfortunately does not actually work well. Maybe things will be fixed with updates, but right now, I say it's not worth the money I paid for it.

Love this! Almost perfect OCR. My favorite Japanese dictionary app is Midori, but it lacks OCR. This app fills in the gap. I bought this specifically for the ability to look up printed kanji with my camera, but I was surprised by some other nice features. Kanji lookup includes handy stroke order animations. The ability to post a pic to the "wall" is a nice attempt at providing a community to get help with tricky readings. The App Store pics didn't show this, but you can set it to give you kana lookup instead of romaji which I was really happy about. The main feature, OCR, is great but would benefit from a little improvement in the speed/responsiveness of its performance. The freeze feature helps make up for this, but improving the algorithm would make it a 5-star app in my opinion. Look at Google's Translate app as a benchmark. Granted, that has Google's massive & well-funded team behind it and this app is just a couple devs. They've done a very good job considering their resources. The UI could also use a bit of improvement, particularly when it's sometimes hard to make out the red kanji characters when doing a live camera translate. But there is a separate window which clearly displays the characters, so this is a minor issue. Overall, a terrific app. I don't think there is another OCR app out there for Japanese students, so I was really grateful to find this. My days of laboriously hand-drawing kanji or looking up radicals are gone!

Does not do what I need it to. Updating. (Probably in reasonable of me to expect a general purpose translation program to properly translate specialized martial arts terminology ). I do not need a common conversational menu translator. I need to translate specific martial arts and spiritual texts. About the only thing if gets right is left and right Have to figure out how to get my $ back

Extremely helpful tool. Thanks so much!

Excellent App BUT needs refresh. I love this app and use it all the time, but it has been crashing a bunch lately. No other app makes word lookups into flashcards as seamlessly. Would love a light UI refresh sometime! Great even for obscure and technical entries. Usually has an excellent bank of example sentences, as well.

Very useful.. This won't be long. Not entirely sure how many people will ever actually read this. I enjoy this application. It's very useful for studying kanji whether for casual or academic reasons. The drawing function lets you try to find kanji on your own and will assist if your just a little off the mark. I would recommend it anyone studying Japanese. - No I'm not a robot.

Best tool for kanji recognition. Amazing ability to identify hand written kanji, essential tool for students of Japanese.

Excelent !. Yomiwa review When I first examined this application , I noticed the trial version had an issue drawing a kanji correctly. I purchased the full version confident this issue would be resolved. The reply from it's developer was most informative and exactly as stated in the reply, the issue was resolved in approximately 3 updates. - This application's excellence at kanji recognition and built in dictionary are the very reasons I tolerated this issue and purchased it. - You will not regret in the least your purchase of this superb utility. - I offer my most sincere appreciation and gratitude to it's developer. - Another ability setting Yomiwa above others, is the OCR manual correction. Sometimes conditions are less than favorable, such as OCR of a monitor. Yomiwa allows each character to be corrected by a convenient scrolling list of similar characters. This is helpful to say the least. Yomiwa is by far the best in kanji recognition :)

Helpful. I really like the photo recognition capability. I use it a lot when reading Japanese Manga.

Traveling in Japan. And this is not helpful at all, im sorry. Maybe if I knew some Japanese it would be useful. If you're trying to use this app to help you get around (and like me, know NONE), you have a better chance of taking a Japanese class for a year and then traveling to Japan 👏🏼.

Wish I liked it. I was really excited about this app as it is so difficult to look up Kanji by radical or stroke count. The concept of using your phone for instant character recognition and definition is great. But after trying the app, it is still just a concept that doesn't seem to have been realized. Admittedly, I am using it with a relatively new iPhone, which could be a big part of the problem. But it is very difficult to get the app to focus on characters you want to read. The way it scans past every character except the one you are looking to define is headache inducing. This problem is obviously worse with body copy (say around 10 point type), which is the size of most of what you are likely to try to read. For headlines or magazine covers set around 24 point type, it works fine. At some point this concept is going to work and make learning kanji much easier. Yomiwa on an iPhone, however, is unfortunately not that point.

Awesome. I mostly use the camera feature to help me read kanji I don't know or have forgotten since I studied Japanese. It makes reading manga for the intermediate reader of Japanese sooo much easier than it was before. I've found it to be pretty accurate. It even recognizes compounds, which is exactly what I need. There are some times when it doesn't read correctly and/or it's difficult to get the camera to focus correctly (the lighting sometimes seems to have an outsize effect on its sensitivity), but overall this tool is WELL worth what I paid for it. Technology can do so much these days. I highly recommend this tool to aid in reading Japanese manga or other print material for those who already have some background in the language but aren't highly proficient in reading kanji.

Awesome app. This app is great. I have a Mitsubishi tractor that has Japanese writing and I was able to decipher 95% of it. The draw feature is great. You just draw the symbols and it will convert it for you. The only thing I would add is a partial eraser so if you mess up a little you can just erase that part. Great app. Would recommend for sure.

Great , does job but doesnt work well with handwritten kanji. great

Great Japanese dictionary. This app has a very comprehensive dictionary, word lookup is blazing fast, and it has lots of good examples for each word.

The best ever app for Japanese learners!. The best ever app for Japanese learners!

Pretty good translator. It does a great job of translating text, but it has a hard time with words that are considered slang.

Awesome Helper for Travel !!. Really helps out scanning signs and restaurant menus in Japan.