PURPOSE: To feed a Japanese sentence at a high speed by retrieving plural units of the 2nd KANJI (Chinese character) which can form phrases with the 1st KANJI out of a phrase dictionary by a phrase selection key after the input of the desired 1st KANJI and then selecting a desired KANJI.

CONSTITUTION: When a desired KANJI is inputted directly from an input part 10, a character code generating part 11 sends the corresponding character code to a control part 12. The part 12 reads the corresponding character pattern signal out of a character generator 14 and sends it to a screen buffer 16. The contents of the buffer 16 are displayed on a CRT17. Then a phrase selection key 10a of the part 10 is pressed, a phase selection signal is applied to the part 12. The part 12 retrieves plural character codes which can form phrases with the KANJI already fed out of a dictionary 13. Then the character pattern signal corresponding to said character code is read out of the generator 14 according to the character code corresponding to the retrieved KANJI and displayed on the CRT17.