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By Cho Jin-seo

Staff reporter

Sales of pocket-size electronic dictionaries are rapidly increasing this year with makers fascinating young consumers with multimedia features like music and audio-book players, photo viewers and even movie players.

Also thanks to Koreans’ ever-growing enthusiasm for foreign languages _ especially English and Chinese _ leading e-dictionary makers such as Sharp and Reigncom hope to sell up to 1.2 million this year, or 20 percent more than last year’s, and so far, they are right on track.

Sharp says that it alone has sold 200,000 dictionaries from January through March, which is the peak season for educational gadgets as the school year begins in March in South Korea. Reigncom is also in an upbeat mood, saying that it sold 150,000 Dicple dictionaries in the same period, led by the robust sales of its high-end D26 model.

``E-dictionaries may not form a 10-million or 20-million unit market like mobile phones do, because the consumers are mainly students, but it surely has a lot of room for further growth,’’ said Kim Kook-hyun of Sharp Korea, the No. 1 seller. ``Like every home has several dictionaries and an encyclopedia, we believe it will be the same for electronic dictionaries.’’

According to the Japanese maker, which took about a half of the e-dictionary market in South Korea last year, about three out of four electronic dictionaries selling these days are multimedia models that can play MP3 music and audio books and have an expansion memory chip slot.

Those high-end gadgets can cost more than 300,000 won ($300), but other popular brands, such as Reigncom, Nurian and Casio, are also rapidly shifting to the top-end market. Notably, Nurian has introduced a five-inch LCD model that is capable of accessing the wireless Internet.

The e-dictionaries have a short but impressive history in Korea. First finding a market in Japan, the portable word finders first got into the mass consumer market in Korea by Japanese makers such as Sharp and Casio around 2000. College students started buying them when they took overseas language courses. Now with prices of basic models falling to below 80,000 won ($80), it has become one of the most coveted items for high school and middle school students, said Sharp’s Kim.

To take advantage of Korea’s world-famous broadband Internet network, makers have forged strategic alliances with e-learning providers to secure educational contents. Sharp says that it provides some 1,000 downloadable audio English lectures for its e-dictionary buyers. Handwriting recognition through touch-sensitive screens is also a common feature for ones made by Casio and others.

One thing that further spurs the demand for e-dictionaries is the growing popularity of Chinese. Most e-dictionaries sold these days support at least three languages _ English, Japanese and Chinese _ and they are often more useful to people who learn Chinese, due to the language’s tricky phonetic system.

``It often becomes a tedious chore because you have to look after all possible matches when you don’t know the exact spelling of a Chinese word. But with an electronic dictionary, all you have to do is make a rough guess and if it’s not right, push the `next’ button until you get the right match,’’ said Lee Soon-hyuk, a student at Chinaro institute in Kangnam, southern Seoul.

``I’ve never seen anyone who uses a paper dictionary in class,’’ he continued. ``There are seven people in my class and they all carry electronic dictionaries. I think it will soon become a necessity for everyone, once the prices become more affordable.’’