🇯🇵 Best Japanese dictionaries for beginners

Built on the free JMdict/KANJIDIC data, it handles wildcard searches, deconjugates verbs, draws kanji by radical or handwriting, and tags words by JLPT level and commonness. Free with no account required. The example sentences come from Tatoeba and vary in quality, and for nuance between near-synonyms a monolingual dictionary will serve you better once you can read one.

Works entirely offline, shows conjugation tables and example sentences, supports handwriting input, and can export selected words straight to Anki — which makes it the practical companion to a paper textbook or a book you are reading on the train. Completely free with no ads. Android and Windows only; iOS users should use Shirabe Jisho instead.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

Around 6 million words recorded by native speakers across 400+ languages, usually with several accents per word so you can hear regional variation. Free to search on the site; the paid tiers are aimed at API users and bulk audio downloads. Indispensable for names, place names and anything a TTS voice would mangle — many learners wire it directly into Anki for card audio.