Konfucijansko učenje in pismenost v japonskih šolah obdobja Edo

With the political stability, economic growth and cultural revitalisation of Japan after its unification by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the educational infrastructure also grew to meet new literacy demands. Governmental schools endowed by the shogunate (Shōheikō) and by the domains (hankō), which catered to the upper military class of the samurai, focused on classical Chinese studies, particularly the Neo-Confucian canon taught in kanbun, a style of classical Chinese. Given the prestige of Neo-Confucian Chinese learning and of the kanbun writing style, these were taught also in temple schools (terakoya) and private academies (juku) that were open to the lower classes, thus contributing to the spread of this particular type of literacy. However, Chinese learning in these schools often involved memorising rather than reading, both because of educational traditions and socio-ideological factors, and also because of the sheer difficulty of reading kanbun, a de facto foreign language. The present article investigates the contrasting implications of Neo-Confucian learning and of the kanbun writing style for the development of education and literacy in Japanese society: while the prestige of Chinese learning contributed to the demand for and development of educational facilities, its complexity also acted as an obstacle to the development of widespread functional literacy.Potem ko je Tokugawa Ieyasu združil Japonsko, se je s politično stabilnostjo, gospodarsko rastjo in kulturnim preporodom ter zaradi rastoče potrebe po pismenosti razvila tudi izobraževalna infrastruktura. V šolah pod okriljem šogunata (Shōheikō) in provinc (hankō), kjer so se izobraževali samuraji, so poudarjali študij kitajskih klasikov, zlasti neokonfucijanskega kanona zapisanega v slogu kanbun, tj. vrsti klasične kitajščine. Zaradi velikega ugleda tako neokonfucijanskih kitajskih študij kot tudi pisnega sloga kanbun so se te vsebine učile tudi v šolah pod okriljem templjev (terakoya) in zasebnih šolah (juku), ki so bile dostopne nižjim družbenim slojem. To je prispevalo k širjenju te vrste pismenosti, toda učenje kitajskih vsebin v teh šolah je pogosto potekalo v obliki pomnjenja na pamet bolj kot branja in razumevanja, tako zaradi družbeno-ideoloških dejavnikov in japonske vzgojne tradicije, kot tudi zaradi težavnosti branja sloga kanbun, ki je bil dejansko tuj jezik. Članek obravnava nasprotujoča si vpliva neokonfucijanskega učenja in uporabe pisnega sloga kanbun na razvoj izobraževanja in pismenosti v Japonski družbi: po eni strani je ugled kitajske učenosti prispeval k povpraševanju po izobraževalnih ustanovah in k njihovemu razvoju, po drugi pa je kompleksnost tega sloga in sistema pisanja delovala kot ovira k razvoju splošne funkcijske pismenosti

The Japanese-Slovene dictionary jaSlo: its development, enhancement and use

The Japanese-Slovene dictionary jaSlo: its development, enhancement and useThe paper presents the on-line Japanese-Slovene dictionary jaSlo, in particular the ways in which it has been used, and how it has been extended with examples mined from a parallel corpus. The paper first describes jaSlo and the structure of its dictionary entry, its Web interface for searching, and an analysis of the access logs. The use of jaSlo in the context of the Japanese reading-support tool Reading Tutor is described next, again followed by an analysis of the access logs. Also discussed is the manner in which usage examples were added to the dictionary, and an evaluation of their usefulness. The paper concludes with directions for further work

「日本語非母語話者の読解コーパス」から見える非漢字圏日本語学習者の辞書使用

University of Ljubljana / National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics会議名: 言語資源活用ワークショップ2019, 開催地: 国立国語研究所, 会期: 2019年9月2日−4日, 主催: 国立国語研究所 コーパス開発センター非漢字圏日本語学習者が日本語を読む際、読めない漢字や分からない言葉を辞書で調べるのに相当な時間を費やすが、学習者がどんな辞書をどのように使い、そこでどんな工夫と困難点がみられるかを探るために、国立国語研究所で開発中の「日本語非母語話者の読解コーパス」に収録されたデータの一部を、辞書使用という観点から分析した。このコーパスのデータは、日本語学習者が普段使っている辞書などのツールを使いながら各自が選んだ文章を読み、理解したことを母語で話す場面を録音（一部録画）、文字化したデータである。調査対象はヨーロッパ各地の大学で日本語を習っている初級から上級までの学習者29名のデータである。分析の結果、辞書選びの段階から、検索を実行し、得られた情報を文脈へ適用する段階まで様々な工夫と困難点がみられたが、より効果的な辞書使用の指導に向けた辞書使用分析の枠組みとデータアノテーションについて述べる

Poučevanje japonščine v Sloveniji na terciarni ravni: dosedanje izkušnje in prihodnje perspektive

Japanese language teaching does not have a very long tradition in Slovenia, yet the teaching of Japanese has significantly developed both in qualitative and in quantitative terms in the past 20 years. This paper presents an overview of past Japanese language courses and of the development of Japanese language instruction in Slovenia at various levels of instruction and in different institutional settings, pointing out changes in learner motivation, increasing accessibility of language learning resources, and the growth and diversification of (present and potential) Japanese language teachers. The paper concludes with some suggestions for further development and for an increased networking among Japanese language teachers and learners.Didaktika japonščine v Sloveniji sicer nima zelo dolge tradicije, toda poučevanje japonščine se je v zadnjih dvajsetih letih izrazito razvilo tako količinsko kot kakovostno. Članek diahrono opisuje dosedanje oblike pouka japonščine in razvoj didaktike japonščine v Sloveniji, s posebnim poudarkom na spremembah motivacije za učenje japonščine, rastoči dostopnosti virov za učenje jezika ter rasti števila in profilov sedanjih in potencialnih učiteljev japonščine. Na osnovi tega so predstavljene možnosti za bodoči razvoj didaktike japonščine in za nadaljnje povezovanje med različnimi učitelji japonščine

Študenti v vlogi slovaropiscev: raba enojezičnih in dvojezičnih korpusov za poglabljanje znanja o besedah

Learning vocabulary is one of the most challenging tasks faced by learners with a non-kanji background when learning Japanese as a foreign language. However, learners are often not aware of the range of different aspects of word knowledge they need in order to successfully use Japanese. This includes not only the spoken and written form of a word and its meaning, but also morphological, grammatical, collocational, connotative and pragmatic knowledge as well as knowledge of social constraints to be observed. In this article, we present some background data on the use of dictionaries among students of Japanese at the University of Ljubljana, a selection of resources and a series of exercises developed with the following aims: a) to foster greater awareness of the different aspects of Japanese vocabulary, both from a monolingual and a contrastive perspective, b) to learn about tools and methods that can be applied in different contexts of language learning and language use, and c) to develop strategies for learning new vocabulary, reinforcing knowledge about known vocabulary, and effectively using this knowledge in receptive and productive language tasks.Učenje besedišča je ena najbolj zahtevnih nalog pri učenju japonščine kot tujega jezika za študente, ki še ne poznajo kitajskih pismenk. Študenti se pri tem velikokrat ne zavedajo širine nabora informacij o posameznih besedah, ki je potreben za uspešno komuniciranje v japonščini. Za vsako besedo morajo namreč poznati poleg njene pisane in glasovne oblike ter pomena tudi njene oblikoslovne, skladenjske, kolokacijske, konotacijske in pragmatične lastnosti ter družbeno pogojene omejitve pri njeni rabi. V članku predstavimo rezultate ankete o rabi slovarjev med študenti japonščine na Univerzi v Ljubljani ter izbor referenčnih virov in zbirko vaj, ki smo jih sestavili z naslednjimi cilji: a) razviti zavest o različnih vidikih besedišča, tako z enojezičnega kot s kontrastivnega zornega kota; b) spoznati orodja in metode, ki se lahko uporabijo v različnih kontekstih učenja in rabe jezika; c) razviti strategije za učenje novega besedišča, utrjevanje znanega besedišča in za učinkovito rabo tega znanja v pasivnih in aktivnih jezikovnih nalogah

Analiza strategij poenostavljanja v učbeniku za branje japonščine kot tujega jezika

Reading is one of the bases of second language learning, and it can be most effective when the linguistic difficulty of the text matches the reader's level of language proficiency. The present paper reviews previous research on the readability and simplification of Japanese texts, and presents an analysis of a collection of simplified texts for learners of Japanese as a foreign language. The simplified texts are compared to their original versions to uncover different strategies used to make the texts more accessible to learners. The list of strategies thus obtained can serve as useful guidelines for assessing, selecting, and devising texts for learners of Japanese as a foreign language.Branje je eno od temeljev učenja drugega ali tujega jezika in je lahko posebej učinkovito, ko jezikovna težavnost besedila ustreza bralčevemu nivoju jezikovnega znanja. Članek nudi pregled dosedanjih raziskav na področju berljivosti in poenostavljanja japonskih besedil ter predstavlja analizo zbirke poenostavljenih besedil za učence japonščine kot tujega jezika. Iz primerjave poenostavljenih besedil z njihovo originalno različico izhaja seznam različnih strategij, ki so jih pisci uporabili, da izboljšajo dostopnost besedil za učence. Seznam teh strategij lahko služi kot iztočnica za ocenjevanje, izbiranje in sestavljanje besedil za učence japonščine kot tujega jezika

Confucian Learning and Literacy in Japan’s Schools of the Edo Period

With the political stability, economic growth and cultural revitalisation of Japan after its unification by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the educational infrastructure also grew to meet new literacy demands. Governmental schools endowed by the shogunate (Shōheikō) and by the domains (hankō), which catered to the upper military class of the samurai, focused on classical Chinese studies, particularly the Neo-Confucian canon taught in kanbun, a style of classical Chinese. Given the prestige of Neo-Confucian Chinese learning and of the kanbun writing style, these were taught also in temple schools (terakoya) and private academies (juku) that were open to the lower classes, thus contributing to the spread of this particular type of literacy. However, Chinese learning in these schools often involved memorising rather than reading, both because of educational traditions and socio-ideological factors, and also because of the sheer difficulty of reading kanbun, a de facto foreign language. The present article investigates the contrasting implications of Neo-Confucian learning and of the kanbun writing style for the development of education and literacy in Japanese society: while the prestige of Chinese learning contributed to the demand for and development of educational facilities, its complexity also acted as an obstacle to the development of widespread functional literacy

Predgovor (v angleščini)

It is my pleasure to introduce this thematic issue dedicated to the lexicography of Japanese as a second or foreign language, the first thematic issue in Acta Linguistica Asiatica since its inception.Japanese has an outstandingly long and rich lexicographical tradition, but there have been relatively few dictionaries of Japanese targeted at learners of Japanese as a foreign or second language until the end of the twentieth century. With the growth of Japanese language teaching and learning around the world, the rapid development of very large scale linguistic resources and language processing technologies for Japanese, a new generation of aggregated, collectively developed or crowd-sourced resources evolving in the context of the social web, a shift from static paper to constantly developing electronic resources, the spread of internet access on hand-held devices, and new approaches to the use of language reference resources stemming from these developments, dictionaries and other reference resources for learners, teachers and users of Japanese as a foreign/second language are being developed and used in new ways in different user communities. However, information about such developments often does not reach researchers, lexicographers, dictionary users and language teachers in other user communities or research spheres. This special issues wishes to contribute to the spread of such information by presenting some recent developments in this growing field.Having received a very lively response to our call for papers, not all papers selected for publishing could fit into this issue, and part of them will be included in the December issue of ALA, which is also going to be dedicated to Japanese lexicography.The first round of papers included in this issue presents a varied cross-section of current JFL lexicographical work and research. All papers in this issue point out the relative scarcity of appropriate reference works for learners of Japanese as a foreign language, especially when compared to lexicographical resources for Japanese native speakers, and each of the endeavours presented here confronts this lack with its own original approach. Reflecting the paradigm shift in Japanese language research, where corpus research is again playing a central role, most papers presented here take advantage of the bounty of newly available corpora and web data, most prominent among which is the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese developed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tokyo, and which is used by Mogi, Pardeshi et al. and Sunakawa et al. in their lexicographical research and projects, while Blin taps data for his research from the web, another increasingly important linguistic resource.The first two papers offer two perspectives on existing Japanese dictionaries. Tom Gally in his paper Kokugo Dictionaries as Tools for Learners: Problems and Potential points out the drawbacks of currently available Japanese dictionaries from the perspective of learners of Japanese as a foreign language, but at the same time offers a very detailed and convincing explanation of the merits of monolingual Japanese dictionaries for native speakers (kokugo dictionaries), such as their comprehensiveness, detailedness and quantity of contextual information, when compared to bilingual dictionaries, which make them a potentially useful resource even for an audience they are not targeting - foreign language learners. His detailed explanation of possible uses and potential hurdles and pitfalls learners may encounter in using them, is not only accurate and informative, but also of immediate practical value for language teachers and lexicographers.Toshinobu Mogi, in his paper Towards the Lexicographic Description of the Grammatical Behaviour of Japanese Loanwords: A Case Study, investigates the lexicographic description of loanwords in Japanese reference works and notes how information offered by currently available dictionaries, especially regarding the grammatical aspects of loanword use, is not sufficient for learners of Japanese as a foreign language. After pointing our the deficiencies of current dictionary descriptions and noting how dictionaries sense divisions do not reflect the frequency of different senses in actual use, as reflected in a large-scale representative general corpus of Japanese, he uses a fascinatingly detailed analysis of the behaviour of a Japanese loanword verb to describe a corpus-based method of lexical description, based on the correspondence between usage forms and senses, which could be used for the compilation of Japanese learners' dictionaries meant for the reception and production of Japanese.The second part of this special issue is composed of four reports on particular aspects of ongoing lexicographical work targeted at learners of Japanese as a foreign language.Prashant Pardeshi, Shingo Imai, Kazuyuki Kiryu, Sangmok Lee, Shiro Akasegawa and Yasunari Imamura in their paper Compilation of Japanese Basic Verb Usage Handbook for JFL Learners: A Project Report, after pointing out - as other authors in this issue - the lack of a detailed and pedagogically sound lexicographical description of Japanese basic vocabulary for foreign learners, propose a corpus-based on-line system which incorporates insights from cognitive grammar, contrastive studies and second language acquisition research to solve this problem. They  present their current implementation of such a system, which includes audio-visual material and translations into Chinese, Korean and Marathi. The system also uses natural language processing techniques to support lexicographers who need to process daunting amounts of corpus data in order to produce detailed lexical descriptions based on actual use.The next article by Marcella Maria Mariotti and Alessandro Mantelli, ITADICT Project and Japanese Language Learning, focus on the learner's perspective. They present a collaborative project in which Italian learners of Japanese compiled an on-line Japanese-Italian dictionary using a purposely developed on-line dictionary editing system, under the supervision of a small group of teachers. One practical and obvious outcome of the project is a Japanese-Italian freely accessible lexical database, but the authors also highlight the pedagogical value of such an approach, which stimulates students' motivation for learning, hones their ICT skills, makes them more aware of the structure and usability of existing lexicographic and language learning resources, and helps them learn to cooperate on a shared task and exchange peer support.The third project report by Raoul Blin, Automatic Addition of Genre Information in a Japanese Dictionary, focuses on the labelling of lexical genre, an aspect of word usage which is not satisfactorily presented in current Japanese dictionaries, despite its importance for foreign language learners when using dictionaries for production tasks. The article describes a procedure for automatic labelling of genre by means of a statistical analysis of internet-derived genre-specific corpora. The automatisation of the process simplifies its later reiteration, thus making it possible to observe lexical genre development over time.The final paper in this issue is a report on The Construction of a Database to Support the Compilation of Japanese Learners’ Dictionaries, by Yuriko Sunakawa, Jae-ho Lee and Mari Takahara. Motivated by the lack of Japanese bilingual learners' dictionaries for speakers of most languages in the world, the authors engaged in the development of a database of detailed corpus-based descriptions of the vocabulary needed by learners of Japanese from beginning to advanced level. By freely offering online the basic data needed for bilingual dictionary compilation, they are building the basis from which editors in under-resourced language areas will be able to compile richer and more up-to-date contents even with limited human and financial resources. This project is certainly going to greatly contribute to the solution of existing problems in Japanese learners' lexicography.It is my pleasure to introduce this thematic issue dedicated to the lexicography of Japanese as a second or foreign language, the first thematic issue in Acta Linguistica Asiatica since its inception.Japanese has an outstandingly long and rich lexicographical tradition, but there have been relatively few dictionaries of Japanese targeted at learners of Japanese as a foreign or second language until the end of the twentieth century. With the growth of Japanese language teaching and learning around the world, the rapid development of very large scale linguistic resources and language processing technologies for Japanese, a new generation of aggregated, collectively developed or crowd-sourced resources evolving in the context of the social web, a shift from static paper to constantly developing electronic resources, the spread of internet access on hand-held devices, and new approaches to the use of language reference resources stemming from these developments, dictionaries and other reference resources for learners, teachers and users of Japanese as a foreign/second language are being developed and used in new ways in different user communities. However, information about such developments often does not reach researchers, lexicographers, dictionary users and language teachers in other user communities or research spheres. This special issues wishes to contribute to the spread of such information by presenting some recent developments in this growing field.Having received a very lively response to our call for papers, not all papers selected for publishing could fit into this issue, and part of them will be included in the December issue of ALA, which is also going to be dedicated to Japanese lexicography.The first round of papers included in this issue presents a varied cross-section of current JFL lexicographical work and research. All papers in this issue point out the relative scarcity of appropriate reference works for learners of Japanese as a foreign language, especially when compared to lexicographical resources for Japanese native speakers, and each of the endeavours presented here confronts this lack with its own original approach. Reflecting the paradigm shift in Japanese language research, where corpus research is again playing a central role, most papers presented here take advantage of the bounty of newly available corpora and web data, most prominent among which is the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese developed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tokyo, and which is used by Mogi, Pardeshi et al. and Sunakawa et al. in their lexicographical research and projects, while Blin taps data for his research from the web, another increasingly important linguistic resource.The first two papers offer two perspectives on existing Japanese dictionaries. Tom Gally in his paper Kokugo Dictionaries as Tools for Learners: Problems and Potential points out the drawbacks of currently available Japanese dictionaries from the perspective of learners of Japanese as a foreign language, but at the same time offers a very detailed and convincing explanation of the merits of monolingual Japanese dictionaries for native speakers (kokugo dictionaries), such as their comprehensiveness, detailedness and quantity of contextual information, when compared to bilingual dictionaries, which make them a potentially useful resource even for an audience they are not targeting - foreign language learners. His detailed explanation of possible uses and potential hurdles and pitfalls learners may encounter in using them, is not only accurate and informative, but also of immediate practical value for language teachers and lexicographers.Toshinobu Mogi, in his paper Towards the Lexicographic Description of the Grammatical Behaviour of Japanese Loanwords: A Case Study, investigates the lexicographic description of loanwords in Japanese reference works and notes how information offered by currently available dictionaries, especially regarding the grammatical aspects of loanword use, is not sufficient for learners of Japanese as a foreign language. After pointing our the deficiencies of current dictionary descriptions and noting how dictionaries sense divisions do not reflect the frequency of different senses in actual use, as reflected in a large-scale representative general corpus of Japanese, he uses a fascinatingly detailed analysis of the behaviour of a Japanese loanword verb to describe a corpus-based method of lexical description, based on the correspondence between usage forms and senses, which could be used for the compilation of Japanese learners' dictionaries meant for the reception and production of Japanese.The second part of this special issue is composed of four reports on particular aspects of ongoing lexicographical work targeted at learners of Japanese as a foreign language.Prashant Pardeshi, Shingo Imai, Kazuyuki Kiryu, Sangmok Lee, Shiro Akasegawa and Yasunari Imamura in their paper Compilation of Japanese Basic Verb Usage Handbook for JFL Learners: A Project Report, after pointing out - as other authors in this issue - the lack of a detailed and pedagogically sound lexicographical description of Japanese basic vocabulary for foreign learners, propose a corpus-based on-line system which incorporates insights from cognitive grammar, contrastive studies and second language acquisition research to solve this problem. They  present their current implementation of such a system, which includes audio-visual material and translations into Chinese, Korean and Marathi. The system also uses natural language processing techniques to support lexicographers who need to process daunting amounts of corpus data in order to produce detailed lexical descriptions based on actual use.The next article by Marcella Maria Mariotti and Alessandro Mantelli, ITADICT Project and Japanese Language Learning, focus on the learner's perspective. They present a collaborative project in which Italian learners of Japanese compiled an on-line Japanese-Italian dictionary using a purposely developed on-line dictionary editing system, under the supervision of a small group of teachers. One practical and obvious outcome of the project is a Japanese-Italian freely accessible lexical database, but the authors also highlight the pedagogical value of such an approach, which stimulates students' motivation for learning, hones their ICT skills, makes them more aware of the structure and usability of existing lexicographic and language learning resources, and helps them learn to cooperate on a shared task and exchange peer support.The third project report by Raoul Blin, Automatic Addition of Genre Information in a Japanese Dictionary, focuses on the labelling of lexical genre, an aspect of word usage which is not satisfactorily presented in current Japanese dictionaries, despite its importance for foreign language learners when using dictionaries for production tasks. The article describes a procedure for automatic labelling of genre by means of a statistical analysis of internet-derived genre-specific corpora. The automatisation of the process simplifies its later reiteration, thus making it possible to observe lexical genre development over time.The final paper in this issue is a report on The Construction of a Database to Support the Compilation of Japanese Learners’ Dictionaries, by Yuriko Sunakawa, Jae-ho Lee and Mari Takahara. Motivated by the lack of Japanese bilingual learners' dictionaries for speakers of most languages in the world, the authors engaged in the development of a database of detailed corpus-based descriptions of the vocabulary needed by learners of Japanese from beginning to advanced level. By freely offering online the basic data needed for bilingual dictionary compilation, they are building the basis from which editors in under-resourced language areas will be able to compile richer and more up-to-date contents even with limited human and financial resources. This project is certainly going to greatly contribute to the solution of existing problems in Japanese learners' lexicography

Predgovor (v angleščini)

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 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. 

JaSlo: Integracija japonsko-slovenskega dvojezičnega slovarja s korpusnim iskalnikom

The paper presents a set of integrated on-line language resources targeted at Japanese language learners, primarily those whose mother tongue is Slovene. The resources consist of the on-line Japanese-Slovene learners’ dictionary jaSlo and two corpora, a 1 million word Japanese-Slovene parallel corpus and a 300 million word corpus of web pages, where each word and sentence is marked by its difficulty level; this corpus is furthermore available as a set of five distinct corpora, each one containing sentences of the particular level. The corpora are available for exploration through NoSketch Engine, the open source version of the commercial state-of-the-art corpus analysis software Sketch Engine. The dictionary is available for Web searching, and dictionary entries have direct links to examples from the corpora, thus offering a wider picture of a) possible translations in concrete contextualised examples, and b) monolingual Japanese usage examples of different difficulty levels to support language learning.Članek predstavlja japonsko-slovenski slovar jaSlo, spletni slovar za slovensko govoreče učence japonščine, in vključitev primerov iz dveh korpusov s pomočjo odprto-kodnega korpusnega iskalnika NoSketch Engine. Korpusa sta jaSlo (milijon besed), vzporedni korpus japonskih in slovenskih besedil, ki je bil zgrajen za ta namen in vsebuje večinoma literarna, spletna in akademska besedila, ter JpWaC-L (300 milijonov besed), korpus spletnih besedil, razdeljenih v povedi, ki so rangirane po težavnostnih stopnjah. S pregledno povezavo korpusnih primerov in slovarskih iztočnic v dvojezičnem slovarju za učence japonščine kot tujega jezika, ponuja sistem uporabnikom prijazen dostop k slovarskim podatkom, tj. reprezentativnim prevodnim ustreznicam, in korpusnim podatkom, ki ponujajo a) širšo sliko možnih prevodnih ustreznic v konkretnih primerih s sobesedilom in b) enojezične primere rabe japonskih besed v povedih različnih težavnostnih stopenj, za podporo jezikovnemu učenju. Članek predlaga možne rabe tega gradiva pri učenju japonščine in se zaključi s smernicami za prihodnje delo