The Basic KANJI project carried out at Ritsumeikan. Asia Pacific University aims at creating an innovative language learning system for the foreign population of Beppu, allowing them to prepare for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. The system is furthermore sufficiently general, so that anyone interested in learning Japanese language can benefit. The project is carried out by linguists, language teachers, computational linguists, and computer scientists in interdisciplinary research work. Efficient knowledge engineering is known to be a demanding and colossal undertaking. From one point of view the linguists and language teachers demanded the implementation of novel diadactic ideas; from another point of view approaching the realization by common means was realized as not appropriate by them, because it would have meant the manual input and a detailed encoding of massive amount of data. Resultantly, a new approach to content authoring was evolved by the computer scientists which made it possible to develop the system with realistic resources. BasicKANJI is a continual research work and the approach adopted was appreciated and deemed feasible by the linguists in our team. The flexibility of this approach towards the implementation of didactic demands has been confirmed each time they programmed a new module.