I'm only halfway through RtK1 but I'm already often encountering compound words made entirely of kanji I know. When I don't have any idea how to pronounce them, the fastest way to look them up in the dictionary is to use the Heisig keywords to find the corresponding kanji.

I can do that with the study section and then copy/paste into WWW JDic for example but it would be more convenient and faster to have an interface that would do that automatically. Is there an existing EDICT client that already implements that functionality?

JEDict on the mac allows you to look up kanji by heisig number by attaching the prefix "e" to the corresponding number (e.g. e467 or e1056 etc.), and it's also possible by typing the keyword directly into the kanji tab. Don't know if there is a PC equivalent, though, or if the online version has that functionality. I've never used it.

I have been wondering if something like that exists as well. It would be awesome!
I often use the "study" section then copy and paste.

That's a nice idea. Now that you mention it it's silly struggling to draw the kanji cleanly in the handwriting recog. pad when you know perfectly well the keyword.

With JWPce, you can look up kanji with their Heisig keyword. It always has Heisig keywords listed for those kanji.

With Wakan you can search kanjis by Heisig index, fast and clean. =)

With Denshi Jisho you also can do that. Or if you want, you can use this url: http://www.jisho.org/kanji?rt=jap&readin...g&code=100
and change "100" by the heisig number that you want. Or use the study section of this page .

Thanks for the replies. However, there seem to be some confusion, so I'll explain my idea more clearly. I'm not looking for a way to look up an individual kanji. The idea here is to use the keywords as a fast way to look up compound words.

For example, today I was curious about word 保存. I had absolutely no idea how the word is pronounced and I don't know any other words using those kanji but I remember their Heisig keywords.

What I'd like to do is to write "protect suppose" as my search query and find the entry for the word 保存　ほぞん. (if possible with a kind of keyword auto-completion interface similar to the one used on this website.)

What I actually did was look up the first kanji in the study section, copy-paste it in wwwjdic and then I repeated the operation for the second one.

The only difference is a question of speed and convenience. It doesn't matter much when looking up a single word but when trying to read a text full of unknown words, that makes a huge difference.

I think that would be most efficient way to look up unknown kanji words for someone who has done the Heisig, which is why I think somebody could have already implemented such a search system. Now you would be right if you said "Codexus, don't be such a lazy bum and code it yourself!" but if that already exists, I'd rather use the time to study Japanese rather than start another coding project (I've too many of those already).

Codexus Wrote:保存. I had absolutely no idea how the word is pronounced and I don't know any other words using those kanji but I remember their Heisig keywords.

What I'd like to do is to write "protect suppose" as my search query and find the entry for the word 保存　ほぞん.

I thought this would be a great tool too at one point. I still think it is actually, but how I do it these days is just use Wakan. It is really not that much slower. I do a clipboard lookup when I can for a compound, if that is not possible than I will pick one kanji in the compound that I know the keyword for then look that up on the character page in Wakan (you can do this with 3rd ed keywords or with frame number), once I do that a list of compounds will display at the bottom of the screen, the list usually isn't that long (because you can filter out really rare compounds) and it will only take a couple seconds to find the one I want.

It's not as elegant, I agree, but maybe it can serve you in the interim while you look for (or write) what you actually want.