You make a good point. Pleco is leagues better than anything available in the Japanese domain. I wonder why that is the case - why nobody has stepped up to make an equivalent Japanese app? It might be related to the Japanese publishers not wanting to sell their data. EPWING is an established format and there are plenty of epwing viewers on Android already so I'd guess advanced users will do that instead.
My point was I guess, Japanese has a larger -variety- and quantity of apps. Tofugu and Wanikani are good, we have a really good public domain dictionary (edict), Japanese has the largest number of shared decks on AnkiWeb etc. Not to mention the huge amount of subtitled media available online.
fwiw jisho.org at least handles pasting in sentences and breaking up the words for you. That's 90% the reason I use it!
Would love to hear more about what makes Pleco stand out for you. I make a dictionary app as well (https://nihongo-app.com) and am always trying to improve it.
It has OCR, it can parse text from your screen (screen reader) or clipboard, has male and female recorded voices, handwriting recognition, has about 20 different dictionaries including Chinese->Chinese and Cantonese, character etymology, their own flashcard system, the UI is extremely good. The search supports wildcards but is really fast. They are really attentive too, for example when their userbase pushed back against their flashcard system saying they use Anki, the devs added an extremely powerful and customisable Anki integration too.
To be honest I'm not the target audience for your app anyway, I'm not interested in yet another Edict-based dictionary - there are tons of them around and the quality is not good enough once you get to a certain level.
If you're interested in what makes a good dictionary, as opposed to a good app, I want to note something that I really want but that dictionaries generally do not provide:
Words generally accept several different parameters (known in linguistics as "complements"). If I look up the FrameNet entry for "notify (v.)" ( https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/lu/lu9183... ), I see that it belongs to the semantic frame of "telling", with 7 "elements" potentially in play. Those are:
1. Addressee
2. Manner
3. Medium
4. Message
5. Speaker
6. Time
7. Topic
Some of those elements can appear with "notify" because they can appear generally on any verb (like Time, as in "I notified him yesterday"), and some are more specific to "notify" itself (like Message, as in "I notified him of your decision").
The FrameNet entries for notify also tell us how each element may be marked in a real English sentence, and provide examples in which each element is color coded. This is what I want to see in more dictionaries. I particularly want it for elements that are specific to the particular word.
For a concrete example from my own life, I spent a long time being aware that 保护 was Chinese for "protect", and yet I was completely unable to figure out how to use it in a sentence. The issue is that "protecting" involves (a) an agent, the subject of 保护; (b) a person being helped, the object of 保护; and (c) a threat. No dictionary that I consulted indicated how to talk about the threat in a sentence in which the verb was 保护, nor did any of them even feature an example sentence in which a threat appeared. Modeling a sentence on the example of English, in which the threat involved in a protecting action is marked by the preposition from, does not work and will confuse Chinese speakers.
It turns out that the way to mark the threat is to include it in a subordinate clause governed by the verb avoid. 我保护她免挨饿, "I [will] protect her to avoid going hungry", not "I will protect her from going hungry". This is important information if you're trying to speak Chinese! But it's absent from the dictionaries. It is intensely frustrating to know exactly what information I'm looking for, to know that a dictionary is the place to find it, and yet to find that it is mysteriously absent from the dictionary.
This is really really interesting. I wonder if the data from FrameNet would be enough to reliably generate this kind of information in a Japanese dictionary, and if the license supports is usage. I'm going to explore this more, thanks.
- The main panel. You put in characters, and Pleco calls up a list of dictionary entries. As I mentioned above, if you put in several words at once, Pleco will try to call up entries for all of them, but it can't tell where one word ends and another begins, so if you do this you're not unlikely to end up fetching incorrect entries.
- The entry view.
- The stroke order view. Tells you the stroke order for a given character and will play an animation of the same on request.
- The dictionaries. There are a lot of them for different purposes and the quality level is high. This is easily the most important aspect of Pleco.
- Handwriting entry. You get a full screen to draw on like a touchpad. (One character at a time.) Input goes to the lookup field. There is no time limit on drawing the character (as is normal in handwriting IMEs), because this is an app for language learners. This is, obviously, an important way of looking up characters you don't recognize.
- "Reader" mode. When you enter the reader, the contents of your clipboard are laid out. (For this to be useful, you should have some Chinese text in your clipboard.) You can click on Chinese characters to open a popup window with dictionary entries for whatever is highlighted. (This will automatically highlight the character you click on, as well as any following characters that can join with the first one to make a single dictionary entry.) Because Pleco can't recognize word boundaries, there are also controls to directly manipulate what text is currently being highlighted.
- Reader mode also has a refresh button, in case the contents of your clipboard have changed. And a history button to review stuff you were "reading" a minute ago. It is great. I have a common workflow of talking in wechat, copying the message someone has sent to me (can be done with long press), and jumping over to Pleco where the message will be laid out for convenient lookups.
- Pleco also offers "graded reader" addons; books and stories that are written at a simple level and intended to help Chinese learners develop. Those are fairly nice in and of themselves, but when you get them through Pleco there's also an integration with the reader mode.
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Tangentially, a feature that I'd like, as a dilettante in Greek, is the ability to look up every form of a word that inflects. Wiktionary often provides full tables of verbs for inflectional languages (see e.g. https://es.wiktionary.org/wiki/ser#Conjugaci%C3%B3n ), and I would find such tables valuable in a dictionary app. (Pleco doesn't have them and doesn't need them, since the level of inflection in Chinese is juuuuuuust above zero. Japanese has more.)
My point was I guess, Japanese has a larger -variety- and quantity of apps. Tofugu and Wanikani are good, we have a really good public domain dictionary (edict), Japanese has the largest number of shared decks on AnkiWeb etc. Not to mention the huge amount of subtitled media available online.
fwiw jisho.org at least handles pasting in sentences and breaking up the words for you. That's 90% the reason I use it!