As I've only had to use learning material so far, I've never actually needed to look up any words outside the internet (rikaisama works fine in this regard).

However now I've decided to take my learning to the next level and use not just native material on the web but games as well.

I'll be playing FFXIV:ARR in japanese on a jp server which should give me practice on output as well. My question is, how will I be able to effectively search unknown words on the web if I don't know the kanji or reading beforehand? I can't simply copy and paste text to the browser window outside the chat box. Is knowing the stroke number going to be enough? I really don't want the process to become a huge hassle every time I come across a new word...

Couldn't you use a kanji dictionary?

Betelgeuzah Wrote:As I've only had to use learning material so far, I've never actually needed to look up any words outside the internet (rikaisama works fine in this regard).

However now I've decided to take my learning to the next level and use not just native material on the web but games as well.

I'll be playing FFXIV:ARR in japanese on a jp server which should give me practice on output as well. My question is, how will I be able to effectively search unknown words on the web if I don't know the kanji or reading beforehand? I can't simply copy and paste text to the browser window outside the chat box. Is knowing the stroke number going to be enough? I really don't want the process to become a huge hassle every time I come across a new word...

I use iPad/iPhone application called Midori to find unknown kanjis. I simply have to draw kanji on a screen. However, I don't know how to do that on other devices.

You'll have to input them by drawing or looking up by radical. Its pretty inconvenient in general. I find drawing is much easier because typical dictionaries don't use the Heisig radicals as we know them. This seems like a pretty good tool for that:
http://kanji.sljfaq.org/

Also, I used to have a drawing tool on the microsoft IME when I was using windows vista, but it seems to have disappeared when I moved to windows 7. Does anyone know how to get that back?

For kanji learning SKIP codes are really useful, mathy way of classifying kanji. Really helpful when you havent seen most of the primitives.

http://www.basic-japanese.com/Hilfsdatei...pCode.html

Besides drawing the kanji, two popular search methods are the so-called "multi-radical" and "skip" (http://www.basic-japanese.com/Hilfsdatei...pCode.html) searches. The latter takes a bit longer to learn, but it is very effective

On my iPhone, I use either "imiwa?" (skip) or "ShinKanji" (drawing, multi-radical).
On internet, many sites provide kanji search functions: for instance, a multi-radical search on http://tangorin.com/kanji/, or a combination of several methods on http://dict.regex.info/cgi-bin/j-e/S=16/...i?sDict=on

The skip method is also used in the Kanji Learner's Dictionary
http://www.amazon.fr/The-Kodansha-Kanji-...4770028555
and the NEW JAPANESE-ENGLISH CHARACTER DICTIONARY (NJECD)
http://www.kanji.org/kanji/dictionaries/njecd/njecd.htm

On Mac, JEdict has drawing input as well as multiradical.

I am sure there are many more.

tip for saving time! if it's a compound and you know the other kanji then you can look it up on the dictinoary with the Begining WITh, ending with, etc.
I recommend sanseido for that... http://www.sanseido.net/ you can see the results clearly.
of the options you'll probably use all but the second one for what i'm suggesting!
前方一致
完全一致
後方一致
部分一致

I love this site: http://jisho.org/kanji/radicals/

You can look up a kanji by selecting one or more of its radicals, and then find words that utilize that kanji. Did I say I love this site? Oh, I did? Sorry, must be all the endorphins that flood my brain when I use it.

All the Japanese IMEs support entering characters by drawing them. Of the three free IMEs, Baidu is the best, Google the next best, and Microsoft the worst at correctly offering the kanji you wrote. (I prefer the google IME for other reasons, but I like to have Baidu installed just for entering unknown characters.)
Other methods are fine, but, if you know the basics of stroke order... it's pretty easy to just enter it in your IME's handwriting interface.

Thanks, guys. I downloaded a kanji recognizer for android, that should help a bit.

I'll have to look into google IME too. At least I know the stroke order so it shouldn't be too much of a hassle.

Betelgeuzah Wrote:Thanks, guys. I downloaded a kanji recognizer for android, that should help a bit....

Also on Android you might already have Aedict? If so, you can select settings/kanji search and then you have three choices: by radical, by drawing recognition and by layout (SKIP).

Wow! That's an impressive array of physical input recognition tools.

You can probably use Anime Games Text Hooker.

Quote:AGTH works by intercepting program calls of system text functions. So when game tries to print some text on the screen - it's not just printed but also captured as text. AGTH doesn't scan for text any files or program memory, doesn't try to OCR any screen area - it just logs text interaction of program and system.

When that fails, you can try to OCR the screen with [url=http://www.kanjitomo.net/][/url].

Quote:KanjiTomo is a program for identifying Japanese characters from images:

Kanji lookup is done by pointing the mouse to any image on screen (either from a file, program or web page). Dictionary lookup is done at the same time. Horizontal and vertical text are both supported.