Pitchi

I’ve tested out a few words. It displays the pitch accent in a straightforward manner that I like and I believe others will like as well, but having the app pronounce the word audibly is hit or miss. For example, 飴 is pronounced as あめ with a “rising” pitch as expected. However 雨 is pronounced as う, despite the fact that I typed あめ in the search bar and it shows the hiragana below the kanji. Thankfully, it still displays the pitch correctly as a “lowering” pitch, but if you need to also hear it a few times to better match the pitch, the audio won’t help you in this example. This is the only word I’ve found so far with a bug or an error, but this happened to be only the third word I’ve looked up (out of maybe 10 words total at the time of writing this review), so it’s either an unlucky coincidence that I found one of the only mistakes made, or that’s a sign that there are plenty more corrections that should be made to the app before I can recommend this app with a higher rating. If there are any more errors like that I hope they will be systematically found and fixed in the future, so I can be more confident in this dictionary as a new learning resource. I alrighty like and appreciate what’s given here so far! I’ll like it and continue to use it even more overtime, as use cases come up for me naturally in my studies. Something else that I have noticed is that the word search will not search for “compound” words like 気持ち悪い, but will look up the individual words 気持ち and 悪い just fine. And, I cannot search for the conjugation of words like わからない, but I can search for the plain form わかる. This is not a bad thing, but it was confusing that there was no instruction to tell me plainly that I should ONLY be searching for “simple” nouns and “dictionary” form verbs (like 食べる, and not 食べられる or 食べます). Instead, it takes me back to the search bar as if it never acknowledged what I searched. This may lead to confusion about the size of the word bank that the app has to offer. After some more time of using the app, I may come back to this review and edit my rating accordingly.

This seems like the perfect app for learning Japanese pitch accent. Shame it won’t let you look up words.