How do you look up kanji

16 comments

1. 僕は漢字を知らなければ、日本人の友達に質問をします。
   あと、僕はTakobotoに漢字を見つけます。
   僕のメッセージを読まなければ、ごめんなさい。僕の日本語は下手だと思いますけど、ただあなたを助けたかった。

2. What app are you using? The draw I put in Google translate is pretty awesome I’ve found. I just copy the kanji from there to look up in a dictionary like jisho.org.

3. If you know how strokes work and can get a proper stroke count, you can narrow it down here: (4 stroke example) [https://jisho.org/search/%23kanji%20%23strokes:4](https://jisho.org/search/%23kanji%20%23strokes:4)

4. If you’re on iPhone you can set up a Japanese to English dictionary then you click highlighted text and click look up. But it’s notoriously difficult to highlight the correct kanji especially in Japanese when there’s no clear separation between words.

   I can also long click on mac and it brings up a definition but I’m yet to try setting up a Japanese dictionary with this.

   Edit: https://imgur.com/a/SCMrOos
   Like so.

   Sorry. I reread and I realise you said ‘not’ on a webpage. I now understand that my suggestion is irrelevant. But still useful for others. So it stays

5. Like the other person commented, Takoboto. Available both on mobile and pc.

6. I use jisho as well as someone else here, but instead of using their feature to organize by stroke count, I usually use their feature to “build” a kanji by radicals. It can be time consuming to use the first few times, but I find it really effective!

7. I tend to use jisho for looking up things that I can copy on the PC, takoboto on the phone and google lens when reading manga or seeing something in a game that you can’t easily copy and paste, the character recognition from Google lens works much better than trying to draw the Kanji myself in my experience. Even building the Kanji from the radicals like you can in jisho doesn’t always work for me, because sometimes I choose the wrong radicals and it isn’t very forgiving with that.

8. On apps like Jsho you can input radicals piece by piece and find all the kanji with those radicals. Really helps when I’m looking up something I can’t really draw well like 選

9. I use an app called DAKanji, I don’t remember where I got it tho, but you can draw the kanji and it shows similar ones (doesn’t care about radicals or stroke order)

10. jisho.org

11. Not gonna lie, I draw them in Pleco dictionary for Chinese and hope to the gods it’s not a unique shinjitai kanji 😂

12. I find that I have better luck drawing kanji and getting the correct answer with a Casio EX-word. I bought a used one on eBay for about $50.

13. Kun or On is pronunciation for the kanji?

14. Try Yomiwa app

15. completely off topic.

    but wow your question reminds me of the days I was into novels. at the age of 7 or 8 IDK, I was hooked on books but as a Japanese kid who just knew 200 or something basic kanjis it was pretty difficult to read Japanese books swimmingly even with rubies. so I begged my parents to buy a kanwa（漢和） dictionary which specializes in kanji and promised never to bother them by asking about kanji. so it happened. When I held my own heavy kanwa dictionary in my hands, I was overjoyed because there were so many kanjis in it and some of them especially with many strokes one looked really cool to me. I made up my mind with this dictionary I would read every single book in my school’s library and you know what? turned out it was really difficult to look up a kanji on a kanwa dictionary. think about how you sort all kanjis. paper dictionaries need to sort items into some order right? in my kanwa dictionary kanjis were sorted by stroke numbers, I believe, because the very first item in the dictionary was “一” and kanjis with many strokes like “鬱” were listed last. Who knows the stroke number of the kanji you don’t know! also there are a bunch of 5-stroke kanjis. so as a kid, it took me more or less 10 minutes to look up one goddam kanji when I was literally into a book! therefore I started feeling like a distraction. eventually I forgot my dictionary and began educational guessing about the meaning and pronunciation of the kanji I didn’t know from several clues like bushu and context. sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t but eventually I learned the correct one by making several embarrassing mistakes in front of people.

    The reason why I wrote this is this new year’s day I went back to my hometown and happened to have a conversation with my mom about my kanwa dictionary and turned out she still has it, which means still I’m not allowed to ask her about kanji lol.

    to sum up don’t use a kanwa dictionary!

16. My favorite dictionary is Shirabe Jisho.

    However, the issue may be your stroke order.