5 
FOREWORD 
 
 
Having received a lively response to our call for papers on the lexicography of 
Japanese as a second language, the editorial board decided to dedicate two issues of 
this year’s ALA to this theme, and I am happy to introduce the second round of papers, 
after the first thematic issue published in October this year. 
This issue is again divided into two parts. The first two papers offer analyses of 
two aspects of existing dictionaries from the point of view of Japanese language 
learners, while the following four papers present particular lexicographic projects for 
learners of Japanese as a foreign language. 
The first paper, by Kanako Maebo, entitled A survey of register labelling in 
Japanese dictionaries - Towards the labelling of words in dictionaries for learners of 
Japanese, analyses register labelling in existing dictionaries of Japanese, both in those 
expressly intended for learners of Japanese as a second language and those intended for 
native speakers, pointing out how register information provided by such dictionaries is 
not sufficient for L2 language production. After stressing the usefulness of usage 
examples for learners trying to write in Japanese, she offers an example of a corpus-
based register analysis and proposes a typology of labels to be assigned to dictionary 
entries, calling for the development of corpora of different genres to be used for lexical 
analysis. 
In the second paper, An analysis of the efficiency of existing kanji indexes and 
development of a coding-based index, Galina N. Vorobеva and Victor M. Vorobеv 
tackle one of the most time-consuming tasks learners of Japanese are confronted with: 
looking up unknown Chinese characters. After a comprehensive description of existing 
indexes, including less known indexing systems developed by Japanese, Chinese, 
Russian and German researchers, they compare the efficiency of these systems using 
the concept of selectivity, and propose their own coding-based system. Although 
searching for unknown characters is becoming increasingly easy with the use of optical 
character recognition included in portable electronic dictionaries, tablets and smart-
phones, not all learners have yet access to such devices. Efficient indexes for accessing 
information on Chinese characters are therefore still a valuable tool to support 
language learners in this most tedious task, while the ability to decompose a character 
into component parts remains an important basis for character memorisation. 
The second part of this issue presents four projects aimed at supporting particular 
lexical needs of learners of Japanese as a second language. 
In the first paper, Development of a learners’ dictionary of polysemous Japanese 
words and some proposals for learners’ lexicography, Shingo Imai presents a new 
lexicographic approach to the description of polysemous words. As Imai rightfully 
stresses, the most basic and common words learned by beginning language learners are 
actually often very polysemous; being deceivingly simple at first glance, they are often 
introduced with simple glosses or basic prototypical examples at the first stages of 
learning, and later treated as known words in intermediate or advanced textbooks, even 
if used for less common senses which are still unknown to the learners, causing much 
6  
confusion. In the dictionary series presented here, polysemous headwords are 
thoroughly and systematically described within their semantic networks, where the 
connections between core and derived meanings are schematically visualised and 
exemplified. 
The following two papers present two of the first and most popular web-based 
systems for Japanese language learning support, both of which have been developing 
for more than a decade, supporting Japanese language learners all over the world. 
Reading Tutor, a reading support system for Japanese language learners, 
presented by Yoshiko Kawamura, is a widely known and used system based at Tokyo 
International University, which offers automatic glossing of Japanese text with 
Japanese definitions and examples, and translations into 28 languages. After 
introducing the system, its development, functionalities and its tools for signalling the 
level of difficulty of single words, characters, or whole Japanese texts, the author 
describes its possible uses in language instruction and autonomous learning, and one 
concrete example of its application to the development of learning material for a 
specific segment of learners, foreign candidates to the Japanese national examination 
for certified care workers, mostly Filipino and Indonesian nurses working in Japan. 
The author concludes with suggestions for fostering autonomous vocabulary learning. 
The other Japanese language learning support system with an equally long and 
successful tradition, developed at Tokyo Institute of Technology, is presented by its 
initiator, Kikuko Nishina, and one of its younger developers, Bor Hodošček, in 
Japanese Learning Support Systems: Hinoki Project Report. The article presents the 
many components of this successful system, including Asunaro, a reading support 
system aimed especially at science and engineering students and speakers of 
underrepresented Asian languages, Natsume, a writing assistance system using large-
scale corpora to support collocation search, Natane, a learner corpus, and Nutmeg, an 
automatic error correction system for learners’ writing. 
The last project report, by Tomaž Erjavec and myself, introduces resources and 
tools being developed at the University of Ljubljana and at Jožef Stefan Institute: 
JaSlo: Integration of a Japanese-Slovene Bilingual Dictionary with a Corpus Search 
System. The dictionary, corpora and search tools are being developed primarily for 
Slovene speaking learners of Japanese, but part of the tools, particularly the corpus of 
sentences from the web-harvested texts, divided into five difficulty levels, can be used 
by any learner or teacher of Japanese. 
I hope you will enjoy reading these articles as much as I did, and wish you a 
peaceful New Year. 
 
 Kristina Hmeljak Sangawa