Outline
Purpose
'Nihongo de Care-Navi' is a multilingual (Japanese, English and Indonesian) vocabulary database. The Japan Foundation Japanese-Language Institute in Kansai created the site in order to support Japanese language learners working in the fields of nursing and care-work.
Feature
In order to help workers in hospitals and care institutions communicate with their colleagues, superiors, patients or clients, Nihongo de Care-Navi consists of more than 8,000 daily-use Japanese expressions and basic vocabulary entries. In addition, to help learners understand how to employ words in context, there are around 4,400 example sentences using vocabulary entries in beginners' level sentence patterns. The site also includes illustrations for certain care work-related actions, tools, or anywhere else necessary.
There is a scale of priority for learning vocabulary for different situations according to its relative difficulty and frequency of use. The system [Priority★－★★－★★★] is used.
: very high priority
: high priority
: less high priority
Searching
There are 3 ways to look for vocabulary using 'Nihongo de Care-Navi'.
(1) If you know the word you're looking for, please use "Search". Enter the word you want to look up, then search. Even if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for, if you know how it begins or ends you can enter the part you do know in either 'words/phrases beginning with -', or 'words/phrases ending in -'
(2) If you want to look up words related to a particular scene or topic, choose "Tags". Here, to aid communication with patients/users, you can find important expressions used for 'Calling Someone', or 'Basic Vocabulary' related to various care-work scenes.
(3) If you'd like to look for a model sentence using a particular vocabulary entry, please use "Search for Example".
Lists and Columns
Besides being a multilingual vocabulary collection, there are various other uses for the 'Nihongo de Care-Navi'
- "Kanji 200" is a selection of 200 kanji often seen in the workplace. You can search for kanji by their ON and KUN readings.
- In the "Counters" section, you can find a list of counters for various objects. Print out the lists as a handy guide.
"Column Hot CARE" introduces bits of knowledge about Japanese life and its culture, and also how Japan differs from other countries.
Senior staff member Ms. Saito introduces particular technical terms / abbreviations that would be used in her workplace.
To help users learn new vocabulary and expressions, a different example sentence is displayed in "Today's Example" every time you access the site.
In the "Care-Kun Navi", "Care-Kun" (the cute mascot of this site) introduces 5 items closely related to the word or expression that you have searched.
In cases where supplementary explanations are needed for entries (e.g. technical terms), a 'Note' is included on the search results screen.