[Web] Multi-Radical Kanji Search - Search 3100+ Kanji by WK radicals

WaniKani API And Third-Party Apps
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Ah, thanks again for finding this! Yes, that’s one of the problems with the differences in RTK and WK. I did actually add the WK leaf radical to the data, but sun was missing for 百 for some reason. I just added it, so this search will work in future.
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Please keep on reporting things like this! :slight_smile:

To go more into detail, a lot of the RTK radical data for kanji 1-2000 was previously written by another person who started the project. They did usually include all the subelements, though apparently not in this case. In general, there were many many errors in the data that I already fixed. I first continued writing down the data in the same style (mostly), but finally from kanji ~3070 on I finished thinking about what structure I would like to continue recording the data with, and it should be more useful and consistent in future with the current style.
By the way, RTK is not as consistent and logical in their element system as I hoped it would be, so there are many traps and issues in recording the data. That’s why I usually don’t ask for help in this, until I’ve figured out more ideas for better ways to deal with this.

Also, I’m guessing you have found this in the reddit thread, but here is my table with RTK to WK radical names:

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Small Update: New option, and a revelation! (1.5.5)
Did you know that Windows and Android often display Chinese variants of Kanji by default? I didn’t, until yesterday!
For most kanji, they are basically the same, but for some, there are significant differences:
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The Chinese version (in brackets) is “say mouth heaven” instead of “say mouth lion ground fins” or “say catapult/give”.

That’s why I added a new option to also show the Chinese version:

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Even basic kanji can have subtle differences. Though I wonder how much of that depends on fonts as well.
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You can also check Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese variants on this neat website, though the amount of space between versions makes it harder to compare:
https://cjkv-dict.com/?search=誤

I always stumbled on the Chinese variant of 誤 (誤) in Anki and struggled recognizing it, thinking it was just a weird font Anki was using. I wonder why it took me more than 2 years after starting WK to find out anything about this, never really heard anyone talk about it, other than one person who thought it was an Anki problem too!

In Anki (or HTML in general), you can force the Japanese font with e.g. <span lang='ja'>. Or 'zh' for Chinese.
(Tools → Manage Note Types → Cards → Back. I now display both variants on my Anki cards)

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On Android (7+), you need to add Japanese to your languages in the system settings. (doesn’t need to be your main/display language)
On Android <7, you had to e.g. use the app Kanji Fix.

In Discord on Windows, I couldn’t get the Japanese variant to display when using English. I had to set my Discord to Japanese.
In Visual Studio Code on Windows I believe I fixed it by adding Japanese to the languages in Windows settings as well, which was recommended somewhere.

I’m now tagging kanji that have a significantly different Chinese variant in my Anki cards and WTK-Search.

@chiaracoetzee by the way, thanks for annotating the kanji with the structure! I hope I can get to integrating that and adding it for more kanji soon. Just been busy with other things.

Currently I’m thinking of adding an option to only search by radicals, not meanings, so for example “blue” doesn’t find 碧 (blue-green) or 瑠 (marine blue in RTK). Tell me what you think about it.

Unfortunately, every option I add reminds me that I finally need to start adding a nicer-looking options menu :wink:

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43

Good old Han unification…

This is interesting; haven’t seen search by WK radicals before…

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Ah, I hadn’t heard of that term before, though I’ve read about UTF characters “unifying” Japanese and simplified Chinese variants into one code, which yes, seems controversial. (Though some variants have their own code)
For example, 誤 seems to be the simplified Chinese version of 誤.

For me this is still the most convenient and fastest method to look up kanji (which I don’t know how to type by IME) :slight_smile:

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