Outlier Kanji Dictionary and etymology for teaching

In line with the WK community tradition to casually make requests that require man-years to fulfill for subjective benefits, I would say what Outlier Kanji definitely needs is their own app. I tested the (aptly named) app Japanese they will piggy-back, and … it’s not that great. Apart from having a distinct “straight-outta-JMDict” feeling and example sentences from the Tanaka corpus that didn’t even make it to Tatoeba (second sentence seen: English definitely wrong), when you want to browse kanji using the reference function you basically get a two-fingernails wide pop-up with the information (for example the Outlier dict). That may be semi-good for the information the app usually has, but terrible for Outlier.

The app already includes an Essential Edition for the kanji of school grade 1, and it is not an advertisement for Outlier (partly because all kanji are boring and don’t display any benefit for learning, and partly because they are super-short). Now with the full edition they want to include vocabulary entries inside dictionary entries as an adaption to Japanese, while the same words are already in the normal dictionary. What’s the point of that?

To be useful the app needs to have strong browsing abilities, like showing all kanji with the same component dynamically. With their current approach is seems like they will end up doing it as hyperlinks inside dictionary entries, while you are stuck with a search in JMdict. (It seems Japanese is still in development (?), but I don’t think it will be awesome anytime soon if ever).

I would say either a decent specialized app, or release an API where people can come up with ways to display the information that doesn’t suck.

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