Few little tricks/tips you can use on jisho.org

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
  1. 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 😉

  2. Was always annoyed that jisho didn’t show pitch accent (as it’s fantastic otherwise), thanks for the tip on the extension!

  3. This is awesome. I use jisho probably 20 times a day and didn’t know any of this.

  4. > 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.


    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.

    —-

    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.

  5. 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…

  6. 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.

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