Newly Compiled Japanese Kanji Pronunciation Dictionary

Author: Zhao Jitian, Editor-in-Chief
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-11-01
Features: The purpose of the dictionary is to look up shapes, sounds, and meanings. This dictionary is a pronunciation dictionary for Japanese kanji and kanji compounds. Kanji appear frequently in Japanese, with tens of thousands of kanji compounds used, but their pronunciations are completely different from Chinese. This necessitates a specialized pronunciation dictionary. For more than 50% of the Chinese-Japanese homonymous or near-homonymous words, using this dictionary to look up their pronunciations can solve the problem. For the remaining homonymous and non-homonymous words, it is first necessary to use this dictionary to understand the pronunciations before further utilizing a Chinese-Japanese dictionary to look up their meanings. Thus, this dictionary, like a Chinese-Japanese dictionary, is a reference tool for learning and reading Japanese articles. So, for Chinese readers, what is the ideal method to look up Japanese kanji pronunciations? In the past, kanji pronunciations were looked up using the radical-based method. Two decades ago, Japan also published a pronunciation manual for Japanese kanji arranged by radicals. First, the kanji is decomposed into radicals, and the index page number where the radical is located is found. Then, on that index page, the remaining stroke count of the kanji is used to find the corresponding page number in the main text. Finally, on the page where the kanji is located, the kanji and its compound word pronunciations are searched. If there are many entries, they must be looked up one by one. Looking up the pronunciation of a single word requires more than three steps, which is laborious and time-consuming, making it very inconvenient. Moreover, some kanji are difficult to determine their radicals, often leading to irrelevant searches—such as the kanji "," which resembles a wood radical but is actually an eye radical.