Paper short abstract:

This presentation offers the role and meaning of the dictionary in Japanese learning after looking at Japanese dictionary compilation in Europe.

Paper long abstract:

Japanese dictionaries that contain more than 100,000 headwords are now being compiled in Germany and Poland. In order to read or write academic papers in Japanese, a big dictionary like one of those is an indispensable tool for the scholars. However as compiling such kind of big dictionaries will cost a lot of time and energy involving enormous amount of money, we can't be optimistic about the future of the development of this kind of dictionaries.

Meanwhile, electronic dictionaries, online dictionaries and dictionary software for smart phones are being developed, and many of those are available free of charge. In Japanese universities and perhaps also in European universities, there are very few students who use printed dictionaries in Japanese classrooms. Most students nowadays use free dictionary software via smart phones. As this story indicates, printed dictionaries are becoming less and less popular these days. And this makes it more difficult to compile full-fledged big Japanese dictionaries.

Another movement concerning the development of Japanese dictionary is the use of corpora for compilation. Since 2011 when National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics released a 100 million words corpus, Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), the number of the research on Japanese language using corpora has greatly increased. Consequently editors of Japanese dictionaries are paying more attention to corpora for dictionary compilation and they have started to compile corpus-based Japanese dictionaries. I will present a dictionary called Nihongo Kyooiku Goihyoo (A List of Basic Vocabulary for Japanese Language Instruction), which I took part in editing, as an example of corpus-based Japanese dictionaries. Then I will talk about what is expected for Japanese leaners' dictionaries and what would be the future of Japanese dictionary compilation.