Dictionary
A Japanese dictionary built for listening
Search in kanji, kana, romaji or English. Conjugated words resolve to their dictionary form and show you the step — 食べたい → 食べる — and alongside the textbook examples you get phrasings mined from real podcast transcripts, each with a play button for the moment it was said.
Tap any of the seeded examples. 食べたい shows the conjugated form resolving to 食べる, and library shows that English works as a query too.
Most dictionary apps assume you already know the dictionary form of the word you are looking up. That is fine when you are reading and hopeless when you are listening, because what reaches your ear is never the dictionary form.
Kanji, kana, romaji or English
Type it however you have it. 図書館, としょかん, toshokan or library all land in the same place, and katakana and hiragana are treated as the same thing so you do not have to guess which one the entry used.
It handles the form you actually heard
Words in the wild are conjugated, and a dictionary that only knows 食べる is not much help when what you heard was 食べたい. Search the conjugated form and it resolves to the dictionary form, showing you the step it took — 食べたい → 食べる — so you learn the relationship rather than just getting the answer.
Paste a whole sentence and you get one entry per word, in order. Useful when a line defeated you and you want to take it apart yourself.
Your words come first
Results arrive in two groups. In your words is anything you have already saved, with how well you know it — so looking something up doubles as finding out whether you met it before. In the dictionary is everything else.
Examples from audio somebody actually recorded
Alongside the textbook example sentences, common phrasings are mined from the transcripts in Wakatta's own catalogue, and each one keeps a pointer back to the moment it was said. That is what the In real audio tag and the ▶ next to an example mean: not a sentence written to demonstrate the word, but a sentence someone said while talking about something else.
A phrase has to appear at least three times across the catalogue to qualify, which keeps out transcription noise and one-off turns of phrase.
Where the definitions come from
Definitions are JMdict, the long-running Japanese-English dictionary project maintained by the EDRDG, refreshed weekly. Example sentences come from the Tatoeba/Tanaka corpus. Where a sentence was generated rather than sourced, it is labelled as such — you always know which kind you are reading.
The dictionary works without an account. Saving a word is what needs one.
Look up the word you actually heard
Free to start, no account needed. iOS and Android.
