Recently I spent 5 weeks in Japan and found myself reading more and more. I constantly saw kanji that I didn’t know and tried to search for them. Most of the time I knew at least one of the radicals, but obviously I know the WK names for them, which are not “official” or anything.
So I decided to come up with a very simple and easy to use webapp to be able to search for kanji. You can input one or more radicals and it will automatically show you whatever kanji that have that radical.
Hope someone finds it useful - I use it quite often!
To look up Kanji by radical I like to use the visual approach by Akebi Android app (there are probably other apps doing a similar thing), if you tap the magnifying glass and swipe left from the right hand side of the screen, you can select different radicals (they are sorted by stroke count). As you select more and more, there is a list of possible combinations of kanji, one of which hopefully is the kanji that you are looking at IRL.
Yes, I know this approach, and I have used it in jisho.org, which has a similar functionality. The problem is that it often took me too long to visually localise the kanji and radicals within the list. For me at least, it is more immediate to type the name of the radicals that I already know.
This is so useful. I’m regularly searching for kanji through Wanikani, which is fine when I can identify a radical that’s not that common, and a lot more troublesome when it’s all super common radicals, so thank you! Yomitan is great, but for those time when I can’t use it, I’d rather search by radical than attempt to badly draw the kanji.
@HopeWaterfall I’m really glad that you find it useful! I might try to break down some of the radicals into simpler ones, because WK builds news radicals from basic ones and sometimes I don’t remember (or don’t know) the more complex ones, so I can’t find stuff…
