I recently learned about the SKIP code system for looking up unfamiliar kanji, and really like it. (I find I’m generally a lot quicker at it than trying to hunt down the individual components)
One slight downside, while Jisho can look up by skip code, the required syntax is a bit awkward: #kanji #skip:1-7-6. (The need for “#kanji” is pretty unfortunate, especially)
A trick I’m using to speed this up quite a bit is that Chrome allows you to register arbitrary urls as custom search engines. You can register a search engine that specifically takes a SKIP code and plugs it into a “#kanji#skip:[your code here]” search, by using the url: https://jisho.org/search/%23kanji%20%23skip%3A%s.
That’s really cool! I usually look up unfamiliar kanji using handwriting recognition on my phone, but this sounds like a great way of looking up stuff from a laptop or desktop. I’ll have to try this!
I’m not really sure I understand how this would be faster than just breaking a kanji into radicals and choosing with the picker on Jisho, or other methods, but maybe it’s just because I’m not familiar with it, so looking something up the first time would probably take me 5 minutes.
I’ll probably get better at the component picker eventually, but right now I just find that method to be less consistent for me. Usually it works pretty quickly, but sometimes I get stuck looking for something that’s not actually a radical outside of WK, or it’s there but my eyes just aren’t good at picking it out of a row of symbols, or sometimes the things that are actually considered components are really weird to me.
The SKIP method isn’t necessarily faster, but I find there’s fewer “moving parts” where I can screw it up or get stuck. The classification is fairly simple and easily memorized, and otherwise it’s just “count the strokes”. It’s definitely not error-proof: I sometimes miscount strokes (and very occasionally mess up a categorization), but I think I’ve seen fewer errors with the SKIP system so far.
And being able to search directly from any page is nice, too: saves me the step of actually going to Jisho and opening the radical picker.
Thank you! I have a Dictionary that uses skip but didn’t know I could do it via Google/Jisho! The shortcut will be useful I’m sure. I don’t think I’d remember how to look it up without a Google search first.
