gWaei: a Japanese – English Dictionary Application

If you like learning the Japanese language then dictionary applications are essential for you. There is another application I just recently knew about: gWaei. You could choose the dictionaries to use for it. Basically you could have several dictionaries that are being used by this application. You have to add your preferred dictionaries first.

Available dictionaries:
English – Japanese dictionary
Kanji dictionary
Names dictionary
Radicals

All of these are from Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC. By default, you could install them if you want. Otherwise you might need to tell gWaei where else to get the dictionaries.

Searching for words is easy because below the toolbar is the search box. If you’re looking for words, you could type it in romaji or kanji. If you want to search for kanji, you must use the kanji pad. It lets you draw the kanji and the closest matches will be on the right side of the kanji pad. Just select the matching character then it will search for the various instances of that character in kanji. Even its presence as a radical will be shown to you too.

If you are looking for a word and you type it in english or romaji you could see the meaning of the Japanese word and what kind of verb it is. Other uses will also show up in the results so if you’re wondering about it then at least you get a better idea. So if you only know a part of the word such as “tabe” there will be a lot of relevant results, trying to match it with your query.

This application looks nifty. I might recommend it to some of my friends who read manga a lot.