Been hurting my brain, hopefully I am missing something simple. I came across the 杯 kanji on some packaging and wanted to look it up. I opened up the Kanji Study app and started to search by radical, first for 木 and then for 不. The problem I ran into was 不 is not a “real” radical (I found out). How …

The meaning of “radical” that WK is using is more like “element” or “component.” It’s a colloquial meaning that people use because jumping into a full explanation of how radicals are used is a bit complicated, and the app you used may be using a more strict definition, which is a translation of the …

A worthwhile question but I’m missing something - how did you find the Unicode character, without first solving your problem? :thinking:

Wow, thank you for the detailed explanation! :slight_smile: I had not known about 部首 and have started looking more into it. So all kanji no matter how many radicals they look like they have its actually only one true radical? So for example 本 would only have 木 and not 一 even though it looks like and…

If you’re using a “search by radical” system that only gives the 214 indexing radicals as options, then yes, you won’t be able to search by things that are present in kanji, but never used for indexing purposes. In the case of 本 you can find both its radical 木 and its other element, 一, in such a sys…

Haha, good question! Googling “木不 kanji” and got lucky seeing it in the results :stuck_out_tongue:

Perfect. So kanji who use radicals that are not apart of that system can be inherently more difficult to find. In this case how would you recommend searching for 杯, is there a better way than by radicals that I can use?

This thread from yesterday has some recommendations for drawing-based lookups. [image] How to Lookup Words in a Video Game Questions Lately I’ve been playing Stardew Valley in Japanese and it’s quite fun, however I don’t recognize some of the kanji. As I’m not sure of th…

Seems like a lot of the suggested sites / apps let you search for wildcards for words where you don’t know a kanji in the word but not for parts of a single kanji, however, I tried the drawing feature on jisho and IT WORKED. My horrible drawing of the kanji worked. :laughing: I’ll add that to my too…

So, the way you’d look up kanji in a regular paper dictionary is that you’d look it up by the primary radical first, and then by the total number of strokes in the kanji (or in some dictionaries, the total number of strokes without the primary radical). Online search-by-radical dictionaries let you …

The de facto standard are the Kangxi radicals. There are no characters that exist that don’t have one of those 214 radicals. Also, the majority of the radicals are the semantic component of phono-semantic compounds, which are the vast majority of characters. You would find the character under 木, and…

Would you look at that… I did exactly what you said and searched 木 and filtered by 8 strokes and it was there! [Screenshot_20210210-220131]

Radical Question 杯

Japanese Language Questions

Leebo February 11, 2021, 2:04am 8

This thread from yesterday has some recommendations for drawing-based lookups.

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Radical Question 杯

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