These might seem obvious but they are helpful if you don’t know them!
1. If you know one kanji in a kanji compound, but you don’t recognize the other, the ? operator helps. Example: let’s say I see 礼服 and I don’t know the second character. Type “礼?” and it will give you resulting words which have 2-characters, first of which is 礼
2. Tags! When learning a new kanji, it’s nice to learn common words with that kanji in it. #common tag is nice for this. All tags are listed here: https://jisho.org/docs
3. Radicals menu. This is (usually…) so much easier than drawing the kanji. If you don’t know what radicals to pick, search for a similar kanji and click on it, it shows you the radicals
4. Wildcard is occasionally handy. \* is the wildcard. example: \*英\* will show you all words with the character 英 in it
5. jisho-pitcher is a plugin you can add which makes jisho show you pitch accent patterns
6 comments
If you want cool features give [Jotoba](https://jotoba.com) a try. It has all of those features you listed and even more:
* suggestions when typing
* More hashtags like genki kanji (eg. #genki4) or #katakana for words
* More languages
* Even better and faster radical picker
And a lot of other cool stuff 😉
Was always annoyed that jisho didn’t show pitch accent (as it’s fantastic otherwise), thanks for the tip on the extension!
This is awesome. I use jisho probably 20 times a day and didn’t know any of this.
> Radicals menu. This is (usually…) so much easier than drawing the kanji. If you don’t know what radicals to pick, **search for a similar kanji and click on it, it shows you the radicals**
I already use all these tips, but I would like to add another site since you mentioned searching kanji by using similar ones.
https://niai.mrahhal.net/similar
You can find similar kanji to the ones you are trying to memorize, this is extremely useful when you find a good phonetic component that’s common between several kanji, you can learn a lot of readings like this by just using words you already know.
And they add a link back to jisho as well, which is super useful as well.
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And in jisho…
A specific thing I use all the time is the operator * to include all words with that kanji in that direction. So for example you are learning a new word, and you think you had seen that kanji before? put it on jisho as:
*火* #common
and it shows you all the common words that use that kanji.
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You can also search for readings in specific to see if there are other kanji you already know that might be using a similar phonetic component
“きょ” #kanji
and you can find characters similarities between characters like 距、拒、巨。This combined with a list of common phonetic components is pretty powerful for memorizing kanji.
One thing I sometimes miss with jisho is searching for radicals by Kanji. Like, if I don’t know 薬 but I do know 楽. I _can_ use the radical picker to pick the radicals, but it’s way slower when I feel like I’m 90% of the way there.
Or being able to search 人 and 木 to get 休.
Also sometimes things get weird and what I think is a 月 is actually 肉 radical, and I can’t even find the Kanji I know, so then I have to look that one up, see what radicals it has, and then try to find those in a new search to find the next thing…
ill also add an awesome resource that has similar features to waht you are explaining;
[https://www.japandict.com/](https://www.japandict.com/)
It has the radical breakdown, stroke order, example sentence, audio etc. Cut/paste any kanji in and you can find what you are after.
edit; oh this is a great tool btw op, ty for sharing.