Kanji is a pain in the butt to look up on the web. Especially if you don’t know the reading to be able to figure out the kanji to add to a dictionary. Well Microsoft IME Pad to the rescue, and you thought Microsoft was useless.
The current manga I am going through right now I have no idea on some of the kanji and the furigana really isn’t helping me out at all. I try to type in so many combinations and use the input converter to get me to the right kanji. For example I might type in さかな and then hit space bar to get the correct kanji (魚). Unfortunately sometimes that doesn’t always work because you can’t see the furigana or the furigana just isn’t enough. Like this:
Now to be honest I can’t really tell if that is a す or a ず. I have tried both combinations and many others to find the correct reading for the kanji, but to no avail. The solution is the IME Pad built into windows from at least XP on. You have to be sure to have turned it on when you added the Japanese Keyboard, will cover this in another post. Once you have the Japanese keyboard on I always leave the language bar maximized at the top of my screen because I use I so much, but the colored area is what the IME Pad looks like. And is also perfectly accessible in the start/taskbar at the bottom.
Basically from there you just use your mouse to draw the kanji. I have yet to figure out if stroke order actually means anything to IME Pad or not so far it hasn’t seemed to matter. I will say that sometimes you need to draw it two or three times to get what you are after, at least its that way for me because I suck at it.
See how the kanji isn’t quite finished from the above kanji listed. And notice how horribly drawn it is, but I am able to pick it right out. From here you can right click on the kanji and hit “insert character” or hover over it for the readings to type.
I will say I am sorry I don’t know of alternatives for this on Linux or Mac OSX maybe a lovely reader would like to post a how-to on doing it in Mac OSX and/or Linux.
Hope this helps some people.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
great post! it really works, even if you try writing kanji absolutely horribly, it will figure it out.
yeah unfortunatly you might have to write it 2 or 3 times to get it but you can usually get it to figure it out.
There are two alternatives to this. One is to look up kanji by listing radicals. WWWJDIC has such an option. The other is using OCR (optical character recognition) software such as eTypist. Basically, what you do is scan the manga, enlarge the image a bit (plus rotation, get it down to black/white), then let the software figure it out for you.
I will definitely check into these. Especially the second one. I like to play with OCR stuff as it is a fun technology, but the WWWJDIC sounds easiest so I'll have a look at that first. Thanks for the tips.
Thanks for the tip! I've been using the Japanese keyboard for ages but had never used the IME Pad option.
Here is a website that has an identical feature. http://jpdic.naver.com/
In fact, you may not figure out what the meaning of the kanji since this is Japanese-Korean web dictionary. But you can easily find where you should draw kanji you don't know, and it functions very well. I have never failed to search for the right kanji, and I believe that those who use different OS other than windows will be fine as well.
Pretty awesome!!!
I had no idea this function was available despite having used the keyboard for over 2 years o_O;; Thanks for sharing 
Thanks for showing me that. I typically use Tangorin's search http://tangorin.com/mr-kanji but it can't always find everything.
Errr … I am using Microsoft IME too (on Win XP), and I got the kanji on the first attempt. The difference between what you did and what I did was that I entered both the furigana for the kanji and the hiragana directly following it. So, instead of searching “su”, I searched “sugita”, and that kanji was the first on the list!
I am supposing that that would work on earlier IMEs as well. The thing to note is that kanji are usually suffixed with kana that denote the form of the word. So the Japanese word is the combination of both kanji and kana.
THis method should work most of the time, except when you have colloquial contractions, such as “cha(u)” for “shima(u)”. In that case, I suppose the best option is to guess the long form.
kanjis have a special writing order ….this makes it a bit difficult, but when getting used it, believe me, the pain becomes pleasure