I’d like a resource that tells me what a kanji is ACTUALLY made of, not the radicals you use to draw it. I don’t mind if it’s J - J, but obviously prefer J - E.
For example:
Searching for 題 should result in: SOUNDS LIKE 是, MEANS 頁
Searching for 是 should result in: (historically) MEANS 早, SOUNDS LIKE 止
Searching for 止 should result in: CAN’T GO ANY FURTHER; or maybe DRAWING OF “foot”.
Searching for 岩 should result in MEANS 山 AND 石.
If I look for a character on Takoboto I get this kind of information, which is only useful when you see a kanji and want to find it.
It really should just tell me it means 日 and sounds like 寺. That’s how the kanji was made.
Wiktionary has this information (mostly) but it loads really slowly and what I’m after is just a small detail on each character’s page, there’s a lot of information that clutters it. First world problem? Maybe (I live in the third world tho), but when I’m going through new kanji and want to quickly understand what they are so I memorize them better, Wiktionary wastes at least 60 seconds for each lookup (I use a phone).
EDIT: If there are no digital resources, physical will suffice
EDIT: I guess you literally want it to say “sounds like” and “means”? I mean, “means” wouldn’t really be the right way to put it to me anyway, but it shouldn’t be hard to tell if it’s a 形声 which one is the phonetic and which is the semantic component most of the time.
This is the physical kanji dictionary I have for origins, though it has lots of other information as well.
i’ve found some informational articles and a couple textbooks that have the phonetic compositions on google but i don’t think there’s specifically a wiki/resource with phonetic semantic composition for every kanji …
This works fine too! It doesn’t say which part is semantic and which is phonetic, but honestly if I can’t figure that out I’m better off making up some random mnemonic
And there’s historical versions of the character as well:
Takoboto has built-in support to link to Kanji Study. If you tap on the orange kanji, there will be a menu item to view the character in Kanji Study app, just below the option to show radicals.
Outlier has their own app for Android and iPhone, but I haven’t tried it.
