An Overview of Korean Dictionaries for Foreigners

 

An Overview of Korean Dictionaries for Foreigners

 

Bae Juchae

 

「외국인을 위한 한국어사전 개관」 『한국사전학』14, 한국사전학회, 2009. 10. 25. (pp.7-51)

Journal of Korealex 14, October 2009, Korealex.

 

 

    Korean dictionaries for foreigners (hereafter KDF) has a long history of 900 years or so, if Gyerimyusa (鷄林類事) is considered the first of them.  But many of us would be stricter about the qualification for a KDF so that one of New Korean-English Dictionary (1968), Cosmos Korean-Japanese Dictionary (1988), Shogakukan Korean-Japanese Dictionary (1993), Learner’s Dictionary of Korean (2006) should be the first one.  The first three are bilingual dictionaries and the last is a monolingual dictionary.

    Learner’s Dictionary of Korean (2006) was made with the help of two corpus-based Korean dictionaries for Koreans (hereafter KDK), i.e. Yonsei Korean Dictionary (1998) and Standard Korean Language Dictionary (1999).  So it has many good points that the preceding KDKs didn't have.  But its Achilles’ heel is that it was written only in Korean, so most of Korean learners below advanced level cannot understand the dictionary texts.  It is urgent to translate it into foreign languages.  In addition to this regular KDF, many special KDFs have been published home and abroad since 2000.  There is a good outlook for KDF.