Lost in Japan app for iPhone and iPad

4.1 ( 5311 ratings )

Travel Education
Developer: LucSens Oy

Free

Current version: 1.5, last update: 7 years ago
First release : 26 May 2010
App size: 3.36 Mb

Take a photo of a Japanese character and get instant translation in English. No internet connection required!
The Worlds first real Japanese - English dictionary!

* As featured on Japan Times: "Living in Japan: Theres an app for that"

Can be used as an input method or to make flash cards using Notes.
It recognizes over 3000 (most frequent 95%) Japanese characters.

BEFORE USING

After tapping the "take photo to translate" button you have to pinch to zoom and frame the character. Pieces of other characters must not be in the frame. As a rule of thumb, Japanese characters have their height equal to their width.

Even if the character has not been recognized properly, use the arrow buttons to scroll through the next 9 best candidates. Most likely the character youre looking for will be there.

DISCLAIMER

* Works best with clear images and good contrast, black text on white background and regular printed characters.

* requires an iPhone with autofocus camera (3GS or newer)

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This package contains data from the KANJIDIC (www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/kanjidic.html) dictionary file which is the property of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, and is used in conformance with the Groups license.

Pros and cons of Lost in Japan app for iPhone and iPad

Lost in Japan app good for

Works surprisingly good for a free app. You need a real large writing of the kanji/ kana at best when it stands alone in bolt writing. Fun to try it but not really useful to learn Japanese.

As long as the strokes are a little thicker than a pencil line, it does extremely well. Its too bad that it cant load album photos.

I downloaded this and it worked. Its a good proof of concept - it can detect and give translations for Kanji characters. The trick is to make sure that it only sees one individual character at a time. Here are some problems that I encountered: - When I first downloaded it, the app closed right after I took a picture. I fixed this by restarting my iPhone - The app sometimes doesnt detect characters. I think to fix this, you need to make sure only one character is shown to the app (you need to zoom in, because it will break if there are edges of other characters). - Because of the low quality of the iPhone camera, the app cant detect characters that are too small (eg: it works with big characters, but I couldnt get it to detect small text, probably because the zoomed-in version is low quality) - I think it only detects characters in a "normal" font - I couldnt get it to detect artistic/calligraphic writing Although this app has room for improvement, it is neat to see it in action; I can see how it can be useful.

This app has a lot of potential. Sure it crashes, but not enough for me to care. I am now living in Japan, and i spent an hour after downloading the app playing with different kanji characters. It doesnt always give you the right kanji at first, but usually the right one is in the list of given possibilities. The app doesnt like characters that have a black border, and a lighter color inside, commonly used on lightup signs. Which is a little troublesome if you want to know what a store is, but you can always wrote the kanji down and photograph that. Added improvements could be. Instead of a fixed square box, giving the user the ability to resize the box around the kanji to remove small bits of neighboring kanji would go a long way in making the detection better. Also, not throwing away the image afterwards. Itd be great to take a picture of a sequence of Kanji and then being about to one after another scroll through it to read them all. It was frustrating to have to retake pictures along the same sign. Being able to zoom in just a little bit more. I gave the app 4 stars because I do see it as being useful. If they can stabilize the app so it doesnt crash, and off the ability to not have to retake pictures, Id pay money for the app. This will be very useful at the grocery store.

Ive noticed a vast improvement after the update. Far less crashing. I dont know what other people are complaining about. I get pretty accurate results. If you really cant get a clear shot of the character, draw it by hand with a marker. Not only will you get better results, but it will also help you to remember it! Great job guys  Awesome app!

I dont know what everyones complaining about, this app hasnt ever crashed on me. It does take up about 50MB of memory, but with about 130MB at my disposal regularly, its nothing to complain about. As far as detection goes, it works over 90% of the time for me. Even handwritten characters detect well.

Some bad moments

On an iPhone 6 I tell it to take a photo and it just goes to a black screen even though Ive cleared it to use the camera. Display aspect ratio suggests they stopped development at the iPhone 3GS

Not quite ready yet? I tried 5 times. There is no "move and scale" as the App suggests. It can take the photo but the App closes soon after. The photo doesnt show anywhere. Please work on this! Promises to be a great app should it work.

Worked well the first few times. After the fifth time the application quit each time before I could take a picture. You should withdraw it and fix it. I am using iphone4 updated.

Doesnt let you zoom in far enough to frame text on a page. Is this abandonware?

Ive tried a multitude of characters from various sources, and it hasnt correctly matched one in its data base. You need to have an almost perfect photo of the character so it can convert the image into the app. Once youve actually got a photo it can convert/import, it still never correctly matched the image to the character in its data base. I tried to find the most simple characters and the most common, and still nothing... Both the image conversion needs improvement, and the data base matching needs to be be improved to the point that it actually matches anything... I didnt see the lite trial version in the app store mentioned on their web site, but if you dare to try this, I urge you to try a trial version before you literally throw away $4.00. Google, please release goggles for the iphone

I purchased this $3.99 app hoping that it would work properly. However, after attempting to take photos of kanji to translate with this app, here are the following problems I encountered: 1. The program does not acknowledge any of the kanji I attempted to photograph. I live in Japan, so theres plenty of Kanji to choose from. I even tried photographing the simplest kanji (like the kanji for book and water), and it could not recognize. 2. After attempting to use this program about 5 times, now the app closes on me before I can even take a photo. I open the program, select "Take photo to translate", and as soon as the camera mode opens, the program closes and brings me to my iPhone home screen. There are no troubleshooting instructions that come with this program, so I have no idea what the problem is. This was a complete waste of money and I want my $3.99 back. DO NOT PURCHASE THIS APP!! I want to know if there are any other apps available that have a similar function (take a photo of kanji and translate) that work PROPERLY!

Write review