Mobile Japanese Dictionary: Takoboto vs Jisho vs immit

You look a Japanese word up on your phone, get the reading and the meaning, close the tab, and a week later you are looking up the same word again. The lookup works. The remembering does not. That gap is the real problem with most mobile Japanese dictionary apps, and it is the thing none of them were originally built to close.

This is a comparison of three tools that sit in different parts of that problem: Takoboto, Jisho, and immit. Takoboto is a free offline dictionary app built for your phone. Jisho is the Japanese-English dictionary most learners already know. immit is a popup dictionary with a built-in spaced repetition system, built for reading on a computer. They are not the same shape, and the honest answer to "which one" depends on where you read and what you want to happen after you look a word up. I have used all three while studying Japanese. Here is how they actually differ.

What the best Japanese dictionary app needs to do

The best Japanese dictionary app has one core job and a few jobs people forget to ask about. The core job is fast, accurate lookup: type or paste a word in kanji, kana, romaji, or the latin alphabet, and get the reading, the part of speech, the English translation, and ideally example sentences. Good apps also let you filter search results by word type or tag so you are not scrolling past all the words to find the one you meant. The jobs people forget: does it work offline, does it have audio, and does it help you learn Japanese vocabulary, or just show you a word once.

Most Japanese dictionary apps nail the first job. The split happens on the last one. A digital dictionary already beats a paper one on efficiency and portability, and it can be updated dynamically as new terminology and phrases enter the language. But looking a word up and remembering it are two different things. Some of these tools stop at lookup, and one of them is built to carry the word forward into review. That distinction is the spine of this comparison.

Takoboto: the offline mobile dictionary

Takoboto is a free Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionary app for Android, iOS, and iPad, with a Windows app as well. As of June 2026, the core dictionary is fully offline, so it works on a plane or in a cafe with no connection. It holds roughly 200,000 Japanese words with English translations and a large bank of example sentences (drawn from the open JMDict and Tatoeba projects), and you can search in Japanese, English, kana, romaji, or latin alphabets using your normal keyboard. Each entry gives you the word's meaning, part of speech, audio pronunciation, and kanji information with stroke order.

Where Takoboto is genuinely strong is dictionary depth. It searches conjugated forms, so you can look up 食べました and reach 食べる, it recognizes common misspellings, it lets you find kanji by selecting radicals, and tapping a word shows its pitch accent. For study, it has flashcards, custom word lists, favorites, history, and kana tables, and it exports new words cleanly to AnkiDroid with the example sentence attached. The built-in flashcards are a simple quiz that cycles through your saved words rather than a full spaced repetition system, so for serious review most learners pair it with Anki via that export. There is an optional paid tier (Takoboto Cloud) that syncs your lists and study data across devices. Verify the current free and premium split on before you rely on it, since subscription features change.