Google search results tell me that no one has ever asked this question, and there aren’t many websites that have this feature. Only Kanshudo, Jisho and Wiktionary offer such search, and neither of them is comprehensive. What I want is simple: I type in a mora/phoneme, and I get a comprehensive list of kanji that have that particular reading (my main focus is on-yomi). Either all the kanji that officially have that reading, or ideally all kanji that have that reading plus kanji that sometimes have that particular reading in a certain compound for whatever reason (through rendaku, or because conventionally a word is written with that specific kanji, even though that’s not its ordinary reading etc.).
Example: An almost comprehensive list of kanji with the reading どう- 同, 動, 道, 導, 働, 童, 洞, 銅, 堂, 胴, 瞳, 憧, 撞, 萄, 慟, 獰, 恫, 瞠, 等, 豆. As you can tell, the kanji 同 makes kanji that incorporate it be read どう as well (筒 is an exception though). Same for 童. I call them “blueprint kanji”. But doing the kind of search I want with radicals/blueprint kanji would be extremely inefficient.
Ideally, the list wouldn’t include obsolete/archaic kanji, or extremely rare variations of kanji with that particular reading.
I’m asking this because now that my vocab size is approaching 20k words, I realize more and more how kanji are *the* backbone of the Japanese language. Without them, Japanese is a husk of a language, and remembering which phonemes go with which kanji makes memorizing words much easier. It has got to a point where I now think in terms of kanji, not kana anymore. I hear a random word like せんどう and my brain immediately tries to figure out what’s the most likely combination of kanji that would form the word せんどう (although unfortunately when I first heard 扇動 I didn’t realize せん was from 扇, although I had an inkling that どう was 動 from context).
9 comments
https://learnjapanese.moe/kanjiphonetics/
A good anki deck for this can be found here
hmm is this what you wanted?
go to jisho and make this your search:
> #kanji しょう
it actually lists all kanji with しょう as a reading
oh sweaty just start using japanese
youll get over this hurdle very quickly.
Not sure why such a thing would exist *and* be aimed at native English speakers.
Start looking for them on the Japanese internet.
https://kanji.jitenon.jp/cat/search.php?getdata=3069_3046&search=contain&how=%E3%81%99%E3%81%B9%E3%81%A6
Not exactly what you’re asking but I wrote a kunyomi searcher tool: https://kanji.guide/kun/
I know you’re asking about onyomi, but maybe someone will find this useful. It’s only limited to the joyo kanji though.
EDIT: Also if you can be arsed doing that, you might use some of the tools I wrote to build that like [this one](https://github.com/Morgawr/kanji-data-analysis) to do the same for onyomi, but I’m sure there’s better stuff out there.
>I realize more and more how kanji are the backbone of the Japanese language. Without them, Japanese is a husk of a language
Kanji are part of a writing system, they’re not the backbone of the language. They’re just symbols that represent the spoken language. You really shouldn’t be thinking of kanji when you’re doing listening or speaking.
It’s not a comprehensive list, but Cure Dolly has an [article](https://learnjapaneseonline.info/2014/12/06/the-key-to-japanese-kanji-pronunciation-meet-the-sound-sisterhoods/) going over the sound elements and some general trends.
Have you tried https://www.kanjipedia.jp?
Might be a silly suggestion but what about auto complete? E.g. your phone keyboard set to japanese and then type どう you’ll get this:
https://i.imgur.com/FgeoXZX.jpg