I carry around the Kanji Learner's Dictionary which uses 79 radicals instead of 214 and what it does is for the kanji that have radicals that fall outside the 79, it dumps them into a section at the front for kanji "without a radical". It's kind of annoying, because you want to look up a kanji and you know it has a radical in the 214, but because the radical is not one of the 79 you have to pretend it doesn't have a radical.

What do people prefer to use? 79 or 214?

I've basically never used a radical lookup system; I used computer lookup or an electronic dictionary. Now when I have to use a paper dictionary I can usually look up by reading, although if I do have to use the radical one it's usually the traditional 214 system.

I'd prefer a dictionary that lets you type a kanji and select any part of that kanji to search by.

I don't think I've ever used a printed kanji dic...I used to use http://www.tangorin.com. Now I'm using an android phone with a handwriting pad app, in combination with an EPWING viewer app.

I prefer a dictionary which uses 632 radicals (or should I say, graphemes). http://yarxi.ru/

PS
Oh, it seems the english version of YARXI also exists. http://www.jishop.com/features.html

Yeah, I don't know, the KLD is a bit hard to use sometimes because it can be hard to determine the kanji type of anything that's not a left-right kanji. In fact the first few left-right kanji on the dictionary are 川、小、水 and 心. I personally would never have realised they're left-right on my own!

Still, it's a great dictionary and I love it. I wonder if it's worth it to get the new edition...

Vempele Wrote:I'd prefer a dictionary that lets you type a kanji and select any part of that kanji to search by.

Already implemented, though limited to elements that aren't on the multi-element lookup table.