Yes, JET alum Tim Martin interviewed Jim Breen, creator of WWWJDIC, one of the most popular online Japanese dictionaries, which revolutionized Japanese-language learning technology. This was the first dictionary I used, and while I tend to use Space ALC for helping localize phrases (often to hilarious effect), WWWDIC’s multi-radical kanji and text glossing have been key tools for many of the English-speaking JSL learners of my generation.
Photo courtesy of Jim Breen. Via JETWit.
Jim Breen is the man behind a resource that probably every English speaker trying to learn Japanese has used: the massiveWWWJDIC online dictionary. In the 1980s, Breen developed an interest in Japanese that led to him programming a Japanese dictionary for DOS as a hobby. While a professor of digital and data communications at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, Breen continued working on the dictionary, until eventually it bloomed into an interface that connects and cross-references hundreds of thousands of entries for words, names, and kanji.
Now a recognized authority on lexicography and the Japanese language, Breen continues to work on his “hobby,” and is pursuing a Ph.D. in computational linguistics. In this exclusive interview, JQ spoke with Breen to find out how it all began, his thoughts on language teaching and the JET Programme, and how he thinks technology will affect our experiences with foreign language in the future.
….
“As someone who had spent much of my life around computers, I had hankered to come to grips with handling Japanese text on computers. I had been told in Japan that it was too hard for Western computers to ‘do’ Japanese because of the need for fonts, etc., so it was a refreshing surprise in late 1989 to read a message on the sci.lang.japan Usenet newsgroup, one of the first groups I subscribed to, that Mark Edwards at the University of Wisconsin was writing a free Japanese word processor that could run on ordinary PCs. Soon after that came the announcement of a kanji terminal emulator program (KD) for PCs. I downloaded Mark’s program (MOKE 1.0) and saw that it was indeed possible to see and enter kana and kanji on an ordinary 8086. From then on, I was hooked.”
Breen also weighs in on programming Japanese, revising kanji vs vocab dictionaries, the JET Program, and machine translation.
The Lobster Dance 
Leave a Reply