Best Japanese Reference iPhone Apps with a ton of information at your fingertips.

Daijirin 大辞林 $22 is a Japanese Encylopedia for iphone with a wealth of information. Contains 2,700 images which is about 80MB and another 60MB is pure data which is just an insane amount. I'm guessing on exact amounts but was told over half data is image related though. Includes a dictionary but nothing you'd want to use as your main one though, but sufficient to cover many words to make virtually every text hyperlinked. Best thing about this is how you can take any text within the Encylopedia and highlight it and it'll reference to that subject, person, thing, acronym, definition, etc. that your seeking. Navigation is also pretty slick as you scroll through various categories with tons and tons of sub-categories.

Index covers tons of categories give you access to 255,000 entries. Within index able to navigate from the main categories which include: All, Japanese Alphabetical, Seasonal, English Alphabetical ABC, People, Places, Arts (books, songs, documents). Then narrow down by going into tons of subcategories. Double tap returns within entry returns you to previous index. Watch video of index.

Hyperlinking is probably the biggest draw of Daijirin. I loved how my Canon Wordtank everything in the dictionary definition hyperlink to. Daijirin is no exception as practically anything can be looked up. Just hold your finger over starting kanji and scroll down. If needs be scroll left then up (see 2nd screenshot) to capture entire word / subject. Upon release you'll instantly be taken to your hyperlinked word / subject. We went from sugar ----> a sugar plant ------> Southeast Asia. Watch video of hyperlinking.

Bookmarks tap plus sign to bookmark any entry and edit them to delete one at a time or click minus sign multiple times for a mass selectable deletion. Also you can move a bookmark to the front of your list by clicking the blue play button at bottom. History is automatically added when browsing through entries. Option to delete entire history exists.

2,700 images / charts and what it looks like if you pinch and zoom in on the text. However, zooming is impratical to use currently with massive amount of up/down/up/down scrolling required. Hopefully they'll add an option for even bigger font size than the current large one.

Searching you have three modes namely Backward, Forward, and Entire. Backward matches any suffix. Forward matches any prefix. Entire must match entirely not just partial. Showing you English and Japanese to give you an idea.

Settings include changing text size small, medium or large. Although I'd like to see it even larger text as an option. Can also invert the screen so it has a white background with black text if you wish. Middle screenshot is showing small text size and screenshot on right has large text size.

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