Japanese texts place particularly high demands on the reader: even reading simple newspaper articles requires knowledge of 2,000 to 3,000 Chinese characters (in Japanese: Kanji). However, no one, not even the most educated Japanese person, knows all the different readings (pronunciation possibilities) of the commonly used characters. This multitude of at least theoretically possible readings for individual characters makes it difficult to read words (compounds) that consist of multiple characters. Additionally, especially less advanced readers often fail to recognize that the word they are looking for is a proper noun, leading them to search in vain in conventional dictionaries. This character dictionary assists the reader in understanding Japanese texts through an easily learnable search system that allows for looking up characters and compounds.