Kanjiroushi

Welp, I got my iPhone. Yay!

The first thing that I did was try to find some software applications or websites to help me study Kanji on the go.

One of my favorites for my old PDA was King Kanji from Gakusoft. That application kept me company on my 40-minute commute to and from work in Japan. I would draw the characters and take the little tests until my eyes bled. I passed though.

So what is a student of Japanese supposed to do without a stylus? However will we learn the stroke order without practice?

So far, I've been unable to locate any meaningful Japanese writing utility for the iPhone.

I did find the useful iChinese application posted on TUAW - but I'm not studying Chinese, so it's a step off to the left.

I contacted the creator of iChinese and asked him if it was feasible to create the same application with the　常用 set broken down into the various levels. I went a step further and said I'd pay him good money to come up with a Lookup-by-Kanji method for searching a dictionary instead of by radical. Now *that* would be useful.

He got back to me a couple of times with questions and I gave him all the links I could find. Hopefully he'll come back with something brilliant soon.

The most useful app for studying Japanese that i can find so far is Kanjiroushi. You should check it out. It leaves a bit to be desired from a navigation standpoint, and the mock-tests aren't very good for meaning, but it definitely helps you figure out the on-yomi and kun-yomi on-the-fly and has a fairly usable dictionary lookup utility.