I was hoping that I'd be able to figure it out by myself but seems like I'm stuck with this.

I have some paper-based books that I bought but I have a hard time reading them. But I am sure that I want to read them next.

The main problem is that they contain words compounds with such rare kanji that I cannot look them up very easily just by typing possible choices of On or Kun yomi from memory and combining 2 kanjis into the word I'm looking for. Jisho.org also doesn't seem to help me with finding those kanji that have lots of strokes and basically this whole thing slows me down so I haven't been reading for like 4 months.

I was thinking that having an android camera dictionary app would be able to solve the problem ,but it feels kind of too complicated. And when it's hard to read for me, I don't read.

The main problem is that those books are paper-based but I'm not going to buy any kind of new stuff and those are definitely the books that I want to read so I don't wanna read any other stuff either.

Basically my question with this would be, how should I deal with looking up the strange words that I don't know?( in this case) It's hard or almost impossible to look them up for me because they seem very unusual to me. And I don't wanna search for long like crazy for those strange kanji either. They are so small sized( font) that looking up by stroke count ( which in this case would be very time-consuming because of the big amount of strokes) would be difficult.

Yeah, I totally agree that if there's a bit of a speed bump to looking up words then it can really reduce the amount of time you want to spend reading.

I found that having a portable dictionary (special purpose electronic dictionary or pda/smartphone/whatever) with stylus-based handwriting kanji recognition was the key for me in getting over this particular problem. Much much easier than trying anything that requires looking up radicals or counting strokes or guessing readings.

(If your kanji are rare because they're old pre-simplification forms then you might want to test any gadget you're thinking about buying -- my dictionary's handwriting system can recognise those but the actual dictionary doesn't always have the words with the old forms so you can end up with an annoying indirection via the kanji-dictionary part of it.)

Just personal curiosity -- what kinds of books are these? And can you give some examples of the kanji that are tripping you up?

And when you say you can't find them at jisho.org, do you mean the multiradical lookup? Because I have to say, that's been the fastest way for me to look up kanji I don't know. I've also had luck using a mouse or finger to write out the kanji (I think Mac and Windows both accept handwriting input?), but not so much when it has a ton of strokes.

You could try googling the words leading up to the kanji or after the kanji to see if a quote from the book is online and then simply copying and pasting the kanji.

Fillanzea Wrote:Just personal curiosity -- what kinds of books are these? And can you give some examples of the kanji that are tripping you up?

And when you say you can't find them at jisho.org, do you mean the multiradical lookup? Because I have to say, that's been the fastest way for me to look up kanji I don't know. I've also had luck using a mouse or finger to write out the kanji (I think Mac and Windows both accept handwriting input?), but not so much when it has a ton of strokes.

Stuff like this　躊躇


Just too many strokes, which makes it very tiny and hard to see, for my N2 level it's something I have never seen like before, but my Japanese flatmate knew it right away.
But I'm not gonna bother my flatmate for every strange kanji that I don't know.

I read kind of Spiritual, psychological or slightly scientific/philosophical style books. They are anything but famous in the Japanese book world.

Stuff that has lots of words like consciousness, perception etc. in it.

Gotta try some kind of a handwriting input dictionary, if I find anything good that works for android. Thanks.

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:You could try googling the words leading up to the kanji or after the kanji to see if a quote from the book is online and then simply copying and pasting the kanji.

That's a very good idea but sadly I read rare stuff :/

'Hesitation' is not really something unusual, but the kanjis just trip me out. Why so complex...

I tried writing this first kanji by hand on Aedict on Android and it didn't come up even after 3 times. Maybe it's because I did it without a stylus, I dunno.

there is an awful lot of kanji out there, especially in novels, that is really weird and not in RTK but still commonly used.

having done RTK, you still only know 3,000 of around 10,000 characters... it's like even after doing core10k and knowing 98% of the words you're likely to encounter... there's still about 2-3 words per page in a book that you won't know. That's actually kind of a lot. RTK1&3 is the same.

I'd suggest adding those kanji/words to your rtk deck as you go along and study them like everything else.

Ideally I would have to first read books on pc and use a pop-up dictionary to improve but I am tired of reading on the computer already and want to read even more complex paper-based books without too much hassle.

Is it really that important to look it up? I'm guessing you can read everything else on that page, so can't you read on quite happily? My tactic for reading paper books is to occasionally allow myself to do intensive reading sessions, where I look up some or all of the words I don't know and add them to anki, but to mostly just read as best I can. You still get to increase your vocabulary and learn common words within the text (which means it gets easier as you go along), but you get way more reading practice and advance quickly enough to enjoy the book.

If you can be satisfied just learning the words, rather than understand the sentence you found them in, you could copy them down and continue reading. At least it wouldn't interrupt your reading so much then, and would you feel okay about asking your flatmate to tell you the readings for a list of words just once a day?

P.s. What's the name of the book?

um, i dunno, firstly, make sure you read from the beginning of the book, because non joyo kanji in a lot of books are introduced with furigana the first time they come up. If you're already doing that, try to read books that have more furigana? (check them before you buy). I came across 躊躇 quite a few times in 伊坂幸太郎 books, but it always had furigana the first time it was used, so they do exist...

Splatted Wrote:Is it really that important to look it up? I'm guessing you can read everything else on that page, so can't you read on quite happily? My tactic for reading paper books is to occasionally allow myself to do intensive reading sessions, where I look up some or all of the words I don't know and add them to anki, but to mostly just read as best I can. You still get to increase your vocabulary and learn common words within the text (which means it gets easier as you go along), but you get way more reading practice and advance quickly enough to enjoy the book.

If you can be satisfied just learning the words, rather than understand the sentence you found them in, you could copy them down and continue reading. At least it wouldn't interrupt your reading so much then, and would you feel okay about asking your flatmate to tell you the readings for a list of words just once a day?

P.s. What's the name of the book?

呪術師と私―ドン・ファンの教え

Writing down to a list and asking is also an option

IceCream Wrote:um, i dunno, firstly, make sure you read from the beginning of the book, because non joyo kanji in a lot of books are introduced with furigana the first time they come up. If you're already doing that, try to read books that have more furigana? (check them before you buy). I came across 躊躇 quite a few times in 伊坂幸太郎 books, but it always had furigana the first time it was used, so they do exist...

my book doesn't have any trace of furigana whatsoever
But it's hard to trade the books that you have bought and wanna read for something else :p

躊 comes up very quickly on jisho.org if you select 'kanji by radicals' and put in 足 and the bottom part of 守 as the radicals. It's much faster to pick out a couple of the most prominent radicals than to try to write out the entire kanji -- took me about 10 seconds.

躊躇 is a fairly common word, but I almost always see it written with furigana even when reading adult books. As long as you're not reading anything prewar or historical fiction or anything about China (or maybe Korea?) there shouldn't be TOO TOO many obscure/non-Joyo kanji when you're reading.

I also will agree with Splatted that you should consider doing more extensive reading with less dictionary lookup. Or just read something a little easier.

jettyke Wrote:

IceCream Wrote:um, i dunno, firstly, make sure you read from the beginning of the book, because non joyo kanji in a lot of books are introduced with furigana the first time they come up. If you're already doing that, try to read books that have more furigana? (check them before you buy). I came across 躊躇 quite a few times in 伊坂幸太郎 books, but it always had furigana the first time it was used, so they do exist...

my book doesn't have any trace of furigana whatsoever
But it's hard to trade the books that you have bought and wanna read for something else :p

hahah yeah, it's not so easy. hmmm. Well, i had a similar problem when i was learning cognitive psychology, biology, etc. from books. There were sooooo many words i didn't know, so i just ended up just taking a day to go through as much of the book as possible picking out words on jisho with the kanji-by-radical finder, anki-ing them, then coming back to read it a week or so later.

But it was a right pain, and honestly, it's probably better to try to read something online that would contain those same terms and auto-import them to anki (e.g. wikipedia entries).

That'll work for academic terms, but not for stuff like 躊躇. If you really want to read those books you're gonna have to give up perfectionism & just enjoy what you do understand, i guess lol

Tagaini Jisho has a particular "Component search" mode where you can write the components and it will show you the kanji that include them.

For example, for the word you mention, you would just enter:

足寸 (あし＋すん) for 躊
and
足者(あし＋もの) for 躇

If you know the readings of the most prominent components, it's even faster than the "old" radical look-up.

[Zgarbas]

You could look it up by radicals as Fillanzea did, they should be easy to find on jisho. What I do when encountering unknown kanjis is open up the IME Pad and just try to redraw them (RTK has helped me immensely with figuring out the strokes), it should automatically find what you're looking for, put it in jisho.org and you'll also find the word.

BTW, if you don't mind messing up the re-read/resell value, you could just mark where you encounter unknown words and look them up later. Highlighter, sticky notes and what not. That way you can just skip over that word and continue reading, and look back on it when you're at home and have time to do so.

without wishing to make myself sound a total c**t I could read this kanji. My tactic if I couldn't would be to take the first kanji, take its radical 足 and then go to Jim Breen or my electronic dictionary and type in 足 as a radical and then have a guess how many strokes it has - this usually gives me the first kanji - I then go to google and it will autofill the second kanji. If you know your radicals this should work. 鼎 was a kanji I struggled with recently.

I would always recommend googling - i's amazing what's online in Japanese.

I just used my jisho and drew the first kanji from 躊躇 - there are only two entries in my ジーニアス:
ちゅうちょ　(躊躇) - hesitation, waver, etc.; and
ちゅうちょする　(躊躇する) - hesitate

The whole process took me literally less then 10s. That's why this advice:

pm215 Wrote:I found that having a portable dictionary (special purpose electronic dictionary or pda/smartphone/whatever) with stylus-based handwriting kanji recognition was the key for me in getting over this particular problem. Much much easier than trying anything that requires looking up radicals or counting strokes or guessing readings

has a lot of merit.

The other alternative, if you're feeling cheap, would be Kanji Sono Mama Rakubiki Jiten (IIRC) for the Nintendo DS. If you're in Japan, you should find it at any used video game shop or at Book Off. (Or Amazon.jp.) It's a little slower than a dedicated electronic dictionary, but it has Genius 2 in there somewhere, and you can probably get it for dirt cheap used.

I dusted off my old copy and checked to see if 躊躇 was in there, and it is-- it just took me about 10 tries to get the kanji right, because I couldn't see the radicals on the bottom right. Once I figured out how to write it, it recognized it just fine.

That said, I <3 my Casio Dataplus, even though it's more expensive in comparison. The new Casios will wait as long as you want to draw the kanji on the pad, while Kanji Sono Mama isn't so patient. So if you suck at drawing the kanji on the DS, or you don't have a DS, and you can scrape together ~25-30,000 yen (depending on the model), then get the Casio. Otherwise, just get Kanji Sono Mama for now, until you feel like you have to have a better dictionary.

An electronic dictionary with kanji recognition is perfect for this. I guess it's possible find a cheap one second hand as they are expensive and I bet tons of people end up selling them.

These complex kanji are a good example of where component lookup can actually be easier than drawing; people mentioned the method earlier.

Now you can memorize this and then have fun when you run across 躊躇う later.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Now you can memorize this and then have fun when you run across 躊躇う later.

Oddly enough I just ran into 躊躇 with furigana ためらい this afternoon :-)
(巷説百物語 by 京極 夏彦 -- he seems to love obscure kanji choices...)

jettyke Wrote:

Splatted Wrote:Is it really that important to look it up? I'm guessing you can read everything else on that page, so can't you read on quite happily? My tactic for reading paper books is to occasionally allow myself to do intensive reading sessions, where I look up some or all of the words I don't know and add them to anki, but to mostly just read as best I can. You still get to increase your vocabulary and learn common words within the text (which means it gets easier as you go along), but you get way more reading practice and advance quickly enough to enjoy the book.

If you can be satisfied just learning the words, rather than understand the sentence you found them in, you could copy them down and continue reading. At least it wouldn't interrupt your reading so much then, and would you feel okay about asking your flatmate to tell you the readings for a list of words just once a day?

P.s. What's the name of the book?

呪術師と私―ドン・ファンの教え

Writing down to a list and asking is also an option

Sorry, I thought I replied to this earlier.

I really didn't expect book to be an academic work before I looked it up.

P.s. The mixture of intensive and extensive reading really does work well.