Q. How can I find out what Chinese, Japanese and Korean material is available. Can I search using CJK vernacular scripts?

You can use Library Search to find Chinese, Japanese and Korean language material.  You can use Simple Search then filter by the language options; or, use Advanced Search and choose the language before entering the search terms.

Most records for Chinese, Japanese and Korean material contain both Romanisation and vernacular scripts. You can search these records using either Romanisation or vernacular scripts. 

The Romanisation systems used in the library catalogue are: 

• Hepburn for Japanese material
• McCune-Reichauer for Korean material
• Pinyin for Chinese material

If searching is done in Pinyin, each Chinese character should be input as one Pinyin syllable, except for personal and geographic names, where syllables should be joined. For example: 

• zhong wen (not zhongwen) - Chinese language
• zhongguo - geographic name
• jia pingwa - personal name

For Korean materials, each grammatical element is separated with a space but try a few different spacing as search results may vary.