mission.japan

There are no beautiful kanji dictionaries

Friday, February 09, 2007

With the end of the week closing in I don’t know if I’ll hit my minimum of three entries. We’ll see, but I might pull a Fred and miss a comic. Or I could have a DDD (Dead Derek Day?).

What I really want to talk about is what I put in the title. First I should explain what I mean by a “beautiful” kanji dictionary.

In my mind, a beautiful kanji dictionary

encourages exploration of the relationships between kanji,
exposes those relationships elegantly, and
allows fuzzy and precise searching with equal facility

Paper dictionaries (“dead tree” versions) tend to attack the third point. The first two are more complicated, because they imply the duplication of sets of information across a range of characters. This takes up exponentially more space—many more trees must die to bring you that information.

Technology can accomplish the first two points, but nowhere will you find a kanji dictionary that does this. The fallacy in building an electronic kanji dictionary is that a dictionary is little more than a list of characters, each with a shallow set of data. This way of thinking is not only boring, it’s plain idiocy.

A beautiful kanji dictionary acknowledges that kanji are not atomic units. They are bound together on multiple dimensions—shape, reading, and categories, to name a few. Paper dictionaries by their nature are too flat to show this fully. But a well-designed piece of technology can describe and illustrate the myriad connections in a way that is advantageous and even pleasing to the user.

That is the type of dictionary I want to build.

Comments

David Schaab wrote on February 09:

Then build it! (and they will come – heard that from somewhere). This is a project worthy of attempting and in the world of academics and dare I say e-commerce, may even be fruitful.

Derek Schaab wrote on February 11:

I will, someday. I have a Moleskine notebook set aside for writing down my ideas. But it’s hard to find enough time to really make any progress outside of just planning.

Marketability I don’t know about. Not everyone gets bought by Google or Yahoo. But it would be nice to have as a trinket for my resume.