7 ms·

Kanji Club: Search Kanji by Parts with Instant Feedback

97 points by polm23 6y ago

ehnto 6y ago
I have been using jisho.org to great effect, you add parts grouped by number of strokes in the Radicals drop down. It can be quite intuitive but I can't always figure it out. I see this is using a different approach, so I look forward to trying it out!
- EE84M3i 6y ago
  My go-to for this is jisho, although it completely fails to be usable on phones. I've more recently started just using the google IME handwriting input, which is using some ML magic that lets it be extremely fuzzy about stroke order/count, relative placement, etc and I think must incorporate some sort of image/bitmap based recognition that many ones do not. E.g. you can I imagine it wouldn't be as useful for chinese, but for Japanese is works quite well. You can use it on android and on the google translate website.
fenomas 6y ago
This looks cool! One suggestion - when clicking an element on the top page, you might consider treating that as "add this element to the search string", rather than as "show the search results for this element". The idea being, many users won't offhand know how to get their IME to produce characters like 亅 or 乚 or 儿, so they'll probably click on such elements, intending to then refine their search. Edit: second piece of feedback - there are a couple of cases where katakana are used to refer to certain radicals, and it would be an easy usability improvement to alias those characters. E.g. ル→儿、ウ→宀 and so on.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > many users won't offhand know how to get their IME to produce characters like ... 儿 One of the most common characters in (simplified) Chinese? It's number 192 in this dataset - http://hanzidb.org/character-list/by-frequency?page=2 http://hanzidb.org/character-list/by-frequency?page=2 - among company like 老、门、先、立、比... Not to mention it literally defines 儿话.
  - wtn 6y ago
    But you won't find 儿 in Japanese character dictionaries. It will come up if you type ひとあし in an IME, but most people wouldn't know that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- polm23 6y ago
  Thanks! For the second piece of feedback, I actually already do this for a few characters, like ム. ル is another good candidate. I am not sure if ウ is a bit of a stretch... Note this is also done for radicals with obvious correspondences, like 心草水獣, so you can search 水木 for 淋. For the first piece of feedback, I have had other people request that, but I am not sure how to balance it with having detailed kanji pages. One thing to note is that while it is less convenient, on the detailed kanji page there is a link to "search this kanji" - I use that when I know a character that contains the part I want, but can't remember the name of the part itself.
  - glandium 6y ago
    ウ is not really a stretch. It's called ウ冠 after all. BTW, this kind of search is common in 電子辞書. Mine is almost 20 years old and has a 部品読み search.
    - polm23 6y ago
      Ah, right you are - I didn't realize. I'll have to add that. I had heard of 電子辞書 having this feature, but I've never actually used one. Glad to see that 部品 was the right word, I had been kind of uncertain about that and gotten feedback about it. https://jp.sharp/sc/eihon/pa660/text/kangi.html https://jp.sharp/sc/eihon/pa660/text/kangi.html
  - fenomas 6y ago
    > not sure if ウ is a bit of a stretch They don't look identical, but the radical is often referred to that way, e.g. when describing a kanji over the phone. Also same thing with ワ and 冖.
    - polm23 6y ago
      Thanks, I'll stick those in!
wirthjason 6y ago
Probably 80% of Japanese students are more interested in making tools to study Japanese than actually studying Japanese. It’s a kind of yak shaving. I know this applies to me. (Which is why my Nihongo is crap.) I’m not sure if this happens with other languages, East Asian or not.
- wk_end 6y ago
  Not totally surprising. It's a natural human impulse (maybe?) to want to build or improve your tools when working on something, especially when it feels like your tools are inadequate. And while there are good resources for learning Japanese, they're few and far between in my experience. And nothing, so far as I know, is completely comprehensive on its own. Personally, I've never gone ahead and made my own Japanese learning app or anything like that, but while studying I do pretty regularly think, "man, this would be so much better if it did X; I wish I had an app to do Y", etc., etc. Because of Western attitudes towards Japanese pop culture, a lot of people learning Japanese are...well, they're gonna be kinda nerdy, frankly. And that means they're more likely than average to have the sort of skills that allow them to build (software) tools to help them study. Throw in that learning Japanese, at least for Westerners, is a monumental task mostly driven by intellectual curiosity (rather than for, say, economic opportunities), it'll attract the sort of ambitious and intellectually curious people that'll actually endeavour to make their own tools, with the necessary skills to do it.
  - luigi23 6y ago
    > Because of Western attitudes towards Japanese pop culture, a lot of people learning Japanese are...well, they're gonna be kinda nerdy, frankly. And that means they're more likely than average to have the sort of skills that allow them to build (software) tools to help them study. Whoa, you nailed it here. Never thought of it this way.
  - Bigpet 6y ago
    > It's a natural human impulse I don't know about that. It certainly seems common amongst the programmer crowd. But I've found that there's plenty of people capable of doing the "5 hours of routine work" without ever thinking "If I spend like 4 hours engineering this weird hack, then I might get this done really fast" (and then of course ending up wasting days trying to get it to work)
jiehong 6y ago
In Chinese you have input methods that do exactly that. In particular Array 40 [1], which map pieces of characters to each key on the keyboard to input them. Other such methods, such as the more popular Cangjie [2] or Boshiamy [3], mix shape, stroke order and sound. I suppose no such methods exist to write Japanese? [1]: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%A1%8C%E5%88%97%E8%BC%B8%E5%85%A5%E6%B3%95 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%A1%8C%E5%88%97%E8%BC%B8%E5... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boshiamy_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boshiamy_method
- kevin_p 6y ago
  Something similar is even built into many pinyin IMEs. To take the same example OP used, Microsoft Pinyin (the default Chinese input method on Windows computers) will let you input 榎 by typing umuxia. (Explanation: U puts it into component mode, then mu = 木 and xia = 夏) It's a bit more finicky than OP's version though because the order is important, uxiamu won't give you any useful results.
- fenomas 6y ago
  In Japanese, character input is basically 100% about readings. As such TFA isn't analogous to an IME, it's just an informational reference for looking up unfamiliar characters. If you wanted to type the character, you'd probably look up its reading and then enter that into your Japanese IME.
- polm23 6y ago
  I'm not aware of any methods like that in widespread use for Japanese. I think in some IMEs you can search kanji by radicals, but you have to type the radicals phonetically first.
  - ngcc_hk 6y ago
    It is a surprise. Many input methods does not care about whether you type what but the decomposition into parts, not radicals. Hence why not. And for such a large table once again it is hard. Should have studied the chinese inout method and use the 26 keys instead of a table. Anyway also interest the web site and how the Json work ...
hawflakes 6y ago
Reminds me a bit of http://zhongwen.com http://zhongwen.com which also enables radical search/learning http://zhongwen.com/bushou.htm http://zhongwen.com/bushou.htm
m3at 6y ago
I'm not affiliated with it but used the app for years, so I can recommend Akebi [1] for Android users. It let you do a search by path as well, and it's all local storage with no ads or feature bloat. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.craxic.akebifree&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.craxic.ake...
redrobein 6y ago
Isn't this a problem SKIP already solves. Many kanji dictionaries already support it and it's also usable in cases where you don't know what a "part" is called. https://kanji.sljfaq.org/skip-help.html https://kanji.sljfaq.org/skip-help.html https://kanji.sljfaq.org/skip.html https://kanji.sljfaq.org/skip.html
- cooper12 6y ago
  SKIP is about matching the kanji to a pattern and counting the strokes of the two portions. This is more about inputting the kanji's constituent parts themselves. For example, say we have the kanji 訓. For a SKIP-based lookup, you'd see this as 言|川, and you probably know that's 7 and 3 strokes. Whereas with this approach, you could type in the parts, e.g. いう (backspace) to get 言 and かわ to get 川. A lot faster when kanji have many parts or you're not so sure about the stroke counts. Yes, SKIP would be more helpful if you don't know the parts.
- polm23 6y ago
  SKIP is cool but you have to learn it, whereas this just uses knowledge you already have.
tasogare 6y ago
I’ve done the same thing few years ago (2015) and wrote a master 1 thesis about the method (my professor didn’t like it). People from my former univ didn’t understand how to make use of it despite the explanations. I still use it from time to time to search complex chu nom.
Tade0 6y ago
I think I'm doing something wrong. I typed "ひと" into the input and got no results(even though the first entry matches this query). Anyway I've been using this: https://kanji.sljfaq.org/mr-old.html https://kanji.sljfaq.org/mr-old.html as my daily driver and while it looks kind of dated, it's rock solid. What I'm still searching for though is a table of jōyō kanji with their uniquely identifying radicals.
- fenomas 6y ago
  It's not a reading->kanji search, it's a part->whole search. I.e. search for 人 and one of the results will be 囚 since it has 人 in it.
teye 6y ago
Mega thanks for making and posting this. I've been searching for a tool to "destructure" exactly this way... not necessarily down to radicals, but to any part that has meaning by itself. Thank you for citing your sources too. As others have mentioned, much of the fun of learning is developing the tools, and this thread helps fill a gaping hole in mine.
anshumankmr 6y ago
Show this to Kanjiklub.
- Metacelsus 6y ago
  Careful, you might get eaten by a rathtar
rasguanabana 6y ago
IMHO it’s far less intuitive in comparison to radicals lookup on jisho.org. Most notably, it lacks stroke count in radicals and found characters.
- Timpy 6y ago
  I'm surprised I couldn't find 亻 here, I understand it can be found under 人 but that's not going to be obvious to a lot of beginners.
NDICjQ2zlm5vJ6S 6y ago
Looks like http://kanji.wareya.moe/ http://kanji.wareya.moe/ ( or even older https://www.chise.org/ids-find https://www.chise.org/ids-find ) with a slightly different UI.

97 points by polm23 6y ago

I have been using jisho.org to great effect, you add parts grouped by number of strokes in the Radicals drop down. It can be quite intuitive but I can't always figure it out. I see this is using a different approach, so I look forward to trying it out!

EE84M3i 6y ago
My go-to for this is jisho, although it completely fails to be usable on phones. I've more recently started just using the google IME handwriting input, which is using some ML magic that lets it be extremely fuzzy about stroke order/count, relative placement, etc and I think must incorporate some sort of image/bitmap based recognition that many ones do not. E.g. you can I imagine it wouldn't be as useful for chinese, but for Japanese is works quite well. You can use it on android and on the google translate website.

fenomas 6y ago

This looks cool! One suggestion - when clicking an element on the top page, you might consider treating that as "add this element to the search string", rather than as "show the search results for this element". The idea being, many users won't offhand know how to get their IME to produce characters like 亅 or 乚 or 儿, so they'll probably click on such elements, intending to then refine their search. Edit: second piece of feedback - there are a couple of cases where katakana are used to refer to certain radicals, and it would be an easy usability improvement to alias those characters. E.g. ル→儿、ウ→宀 and so on.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> many users won't offhand know how to get their IME to produce characters like ... 儿 One of the most common characters in (simplified) Chinese? It's number 192 in this dataset - http://hanzidb.org/character-list/by-frequency?page=2 http://hanzidb.org/character-list/by-frequency?page=2 - among company like 老、门、先、立、比... Not to mention it literally defines 儿话.
- wtn 6y ago
  But you won't find 儿 in Japanese character dictionaries. It will come up if you type ひとあし in an IME, but most people wouldn't know that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
polm23 6y ago
Thanks! For the second piece of feedback, I actually already do this for a few characters, like ム. ル is another good candidate. I am not sure if ウ is a bit of a stretch... Note this is also done for radicals with obvious correspondences, like 心草水獣, so you can search 水木 for 淋. For the first piece of feedback, I have had other people request that, but I am not sure how to balance it with having detailed kanji pages. One thing to note is that while it is less convenient, on the detailed kanji page there is a link to "search this kanji" - I use that when I know a character that contains the part I want, but can't remember the name of the part itself.
- glandium 6y ago
  ウ is not really a stretch. It's called ウ冠 after all. BTW, this kind of search is common in 電子辞書. Mine is almost 20 years old and has a 部品読み search.
  - polm23 6y ago
    Ah, right you are - I didn't realize. I'll have to add that. I had heard of 電子辞書 having this feature, but I've never actually used one. Glad to see that 部品 was the right word, I had been kind of uncertain about that and gotten feedback about it. https://jp.sharp/sc/eihon/pa660/text/kangi.html https://jp.sharp/sc/eihon/pa660/text/kangi.html
- fenomas 6y ago
  > not sure if ウ is a bit of a stretch They don't look identical, but the radical is often referred to that way, e.g. when describing a kanji over the phone. Also same thing with ワ and 冖.
  - polm23 6y ago
    Thanks, I'll stick those in!

wirthjason 6y ago

Probably 80% of Japanese students are more interested in making tools to study Japanese than actually studying Japanese. It’s a kind of yak shaving. I know this applies to me. (Which is why my Nihongo is crap.) I’m not sure if this happens with other languages, East Asian or not.

wk_end 6y ago
Not totally surprising. It's a natural human impulse (maybe?) to want to build or improve your tools when working on something, especially when it feels like your tools are inadequate. And while there are good resources for learning Japanese, they're few and far between in my experience. And nothing, so far as I know, is completely comprehensive on its own. Personally, I've never gone ahead and made my own Japanese learning app or anything like that, but while studying I do pretty regularly think, "man, this would be so much better if it did X; I wish I had an app to do Y", etc., etc. Because of Western attitudes towards Japanese pop culture, a lot of people learning Japanese are...well, they're gonna be kinda nerdy, frankly. And that means they're more likely than average to have the sort of skills that allow them to build (software) tools to help them study. Throw in that learning Japanese, at least for Westerners, is a monumental task mostly driven by intellectual curiosity (rather than for, say, economic opportunities), it'll attract the sort of ambitious and intellectually curious people that'll actually endeavour to make their own tools, with the necessary skills to do it.
- luigi23 6y ago
  > Because of Western attitudes towards Japanese pop culture, a lot of people learning Japanese are...well, they're gonna be kinda nerdy, frankly. And that means they're more likely than average to have the sort of skills that allow them to build (software) tools to help them study. Whoa, you nailed it here. Never thought of it this way.
- Bigpet 6y ago
  > It's a natural human impulse I don't know about that. It certainly seems common amongst the programmer crowd. But I've found that there's plenty of people capable of doing the "5 hours of routine work" without ever thinking "If I spend like 4 hours engineering this weird hack, then I might get this done really fast" (and then of course ending up wasting days trying to get it to work)

jiehong 6y ago

In Chinese you have input methods that do exactly that. In particular Array 40 [1], which map pieces of characters to each key on the keyboard to input them. Other such methods, such as the more popular Cangjie [2] or Boshiamy [3], mix shape, stroke order and sound. I suppose no such methods exist to write Japanese? [1]: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%A1%8C%E5%88%97%E8%BC%B8%E5%85%A5%E6%B3%95 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%A1%8C%E5%88%97%E8%BC%B8%E5... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boshiamy_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boshiamy_method

kevin_p 6y ago
Something similar is even built into many pinyin IMEs. To take the same example OP used, Microsoft Pinyin (the default Chinese input method on Windows computers) will let you input 榎 by typing umuxia. (Explanation: U puts it into component mode, then mu = 木 and xia = 夏) It's a bit more finicky than OP's version though because the order is important, uxiamu won't give you any useful results.
fenomas 6y ago
In Japanese, character input is basically 100% about readings. As such TFA isn't analogous to an IME, it's just an informational reference for looking up unfamiliar characters. If you wanted to type the character, you'd probably look up its reading and then enter that into your Japanese IME.
polm23 6y ago
I'm not aware of any methods like that in widespread use for Japanese. I think in some IMEs you can search kanji by radicals, but you have to type the radicals phonetically first.
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  It is a surprise. Many input methods does not care about whether you type what but the decomposition into parts, not radicals. Hence why not. And for such a large table once again it is hard. Should have studied the chinese inout method and use the 26 keys instead of a table. Anyway also interest the web site and how the Json work ...

hawflakes 6y ago

Reminds me a bit of http://zhongwen.com http://zhongwen.com which also enables radical search/learning http://zhongwen.com/bushou.htm http://zhongwen.com/bushou.htm

m3at 6y ago

I'm not affiliated with it but used the app for years, so I can recommend Akebi [1] for Android users. It let you do a search by path as well, and it's all local storage with no ads or feature bloat. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.craxic.akebifree&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.craxic.ake...

redrobein 6y ago

Isn't this a problem SKIP already solves. Many kanji dictionaries already support it and it's also usable in cases where you don't know what a "part" is called. https://kanji.sljfaq.org/skip-help.html https://kanji.sljfaq.org/skip-help.html https://kanji.sljfaq.org/skip.html https://kanji.sljfaq.org/skip.html

cooper12 6y ago
SKIP is about matching the kanji to a pattern and counting the strokes of the two portions. This is more about inputting the kanji's constituent parts themselves. For example, say we have the kanji 訓. For a SKIP-based lookup, you'd see this as 言|川, and you probably know that's 7 and 3 strokes. Whereas with this approach, you could type in the parts, e.g. いう (backspace) to get 言 and かわ to get 川. A lot faster when kanji have many parts or you're not so sure about the stroke counts. Yes, SKIP would be more helpful if you don't know the parts.
polm23 6y ago
SKIP is cool but you have to learn it, whereas this just uses knowledge you already have.

tasogare 6y ago

I’ve done the same thing few years ago (2015) and wrote a master 1 thesis about the method (my professor didn’t like it). People from my former univ didn’t understand how to make use of it despite the explanations. I still use it from time to time to search complex chu nom.

Tade0 6y ago

I think I'm doing something wrong. I typed "ひと" into the input and got no results(even though the first entry matches this query). Anyway I've been using this: https://kanji.sljfaq.org/mr-old.html https://kanji.sljfaq.org/mr-old.html as my daily driver and while it looks kind of dated, it's rock solid. What I'm still searching for though is a table of jōyō kanji with their uniquely identifying radicals.

fenomas 6y ago
It's not a reading->kanji search, it's a part->whole search. I.e. search for 人 and one of the results will be 囚 since it has 人 in it.

teye 6y ago

Mega thanks for making and posting this. I've been searching for a tool to "destructure" exactly this way... not necessarily down to radicals, but to any part that has meaning by itself. Thank you for citing your sources too. As others have mentioned, much of the fun of learning is developing the tools, and this thread helps fill a gaping hole in mine.

anshumankmr 6y ago

Show this to Kanjiklub.

Metacelsus 6y ago
Careful, you might get eaten by a rathtar

rasguanabana 6y ago

IMHO it’s far less intuitive in comparison to radicals lookup on jisho.org. Most notably, it lacks stroke count in radicals and found characters.

Timpy 6y ago
I'm surprised I couldn't find 亻 here, I understand it can be found under 人 but that's not going to be obvious to a lot of beginners.

NDICjQ2zlm5vJ6S 6y ago

Looks like http://kanji.wareya.moe/ http://kanji.wareya.moe/ ( or even older https://www.chise.org/ids-find https://www.chise.org/ids-find ) with a slightly different UI.