There’s one tool i want and will probably write myself:
Multi Radical Kanji Search.
edit: website is online, see Multi-Radical Kanji Search thread
You enter multiple radicals, and get a list of kanji containing all of them.
It would look similar to this:
This already exists for RTK radicals, try it here:
The problem is, RTK radicals are very different from WK, not just the names, WK also has a few radicals RTK doesn’t.
(I know WK doesn’t use the “official” “radicals”, which are based on the 18th century chinese Kangxi dictionary, which is surely an unimprovable framework! They don’t even have “official” japanese names, only common nicknames - rant rant)
Why would this be handy?
Because it would be faster in many cases where a radical is contained in many kanji.
Let’s say we’re looking for 準. Try entering ‘turkey’. It would probably take a long time to find your kanji. But if you enter ‘turkey water’ (water in RTK is tsunami in WK), you’ll find it instantly.
If we search by turkey in WK, we get this wall to search through. Happy hunting!
A more ambitious improvement to WK search would be being able to search not just the WK set of 2055 Kanji, but at least the most common 2500 or more. Of course that would require “annotating” a lot of Kanji by hand. Ideally you’d be able to import and export the radical to kanji mappings, so it can always be extended, maybe collectively by the community, and you can swap between sets like WK, RTK or even your own. This may be be a future addition to the script.
There is actually one app which can basically do this already with WK radicals, Houhou. But:
- It’s only on Windows.
- Have to do a lot of clicks to enter multiple radicals
- Doesn’t filter interactively (live), and you can’t delete filters (radicals) individually.
There is also already a visual version of this:
https://kanji.sljfaq.org/mr.html
It’s nice, but still, searching for the radicals is a bit slow and painful, even if you know the stroke count.
(i suppose you could memorize the position of each radical in the grid with enough patience)
My questions to you all:
Would you find this useful?
Any feature requests or comments? What would you like improved compared to the RTK version?
Features i’m planning so far:
- Copy to clipboard button for each kanji (maybe just click on the kanji)
- Search radicals by name or (maybe/later) graphic
- order radicals by stroke count, but not with each stroke number neatly on the same row or column
- display the name for each radical (maybe just by hover)
- Radical to Kanji associations: Can modify, export and import (later)
- Switch between WK, RTK and custom names (later)
One note about the RTK version
The original github repository for it was taken down by a DMCA claim from RTK. I’ll have to be careful not to infringe on RTK either, maybe think about what exactly what the problem was and how to avoid it. Curiously, i found a fork of it that wasn’t taken down (that i probably shouldn’t link). In the worst case, just leave out RTK support and leave it for users to import the radical names.
I’ll probably try to get a prototype started this weekend, unless the replies make it obvious that it’s a completely stupid idea or something ^^ i’ll also give this its own thread then.
edit: Multi-Radical Kanji Search thread is up