About

The CJK Dictionary Institute (CJKI) was founded in 1993. Its principal activity is the compilation of large-scale dictionary databases of proper nouns and technical terms for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and Arabic, currently with over 50 million entries. CJKI has become the world’s prime source for CJK lexical resources for the IT industry and software developers, providing high-quality comprehensive dictionary data, educational tools, and consulting services. Based in Saitama, Japan, CJKI is headed by Jack Halpern, editor in chief of The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary and several other dictionaries that have become standard works for learning Japanese.

Our Business Model

CJKI has a flexible business model that is decided on a case-by-case basis to suit the convenience of the customer. We are not “resellers,” nor are we “data vendors”, we are a linguistic institute, and create the data ourselves based on several decades of experience and extensive knowhow of CJK and Arabic lexicography. Our fundamental policy is to customize our databases to the specific requirements of the customer at no extra charge. To achieve this, we study our customers’ needs in-depth and prepare a data package that meets the customer’s precise needs. We also build custom databases from scratch and have extensive experience in putting together teams to compile large-scale dictionaries in a short period of time, using our sophisticated tools for automating the compilation process.

Jack Halpern

Jack Halpern (春遍雀來), CEO of The CJK Dictionary Institute, is a lexicographer by profession, specializing in Japanese and Chinese. His work as an editor in chief of learner’s dictionaries resulted in various renowned standard reference works.

Jack Halpern has been a resident of Japan for over 40 years, but was born in Germany and has lived in France, Brazil, Japan, and the United States. He is an avid polyglot who has studied 18 languages (speaks 12 fluently).