Looking up kanji in a dictionary

How do you look up the meaning of kanji characters you don't know in a kanji dictionary? Is it by stroke count? Radicals?

I'm a self-taught Japanese reader (i.e., can read hira/kata but don't understand it), and I also study Chinese fairly heavily. I can recognize some common words (大, 小, etc.) and other words that are the same in both languages (人 and 電). Trying to expand my vocab by reading Japanese sentences, but kanji has always thrown me for a loop!

 

Depends entirely on what type of dictionary you use. Almost all of them use some kind of lookup based on the radicals used, but different dictionaries use different approaches. I think the Nelson Kanji dictionaries list kanji by what they consider to be the 'core' radical (which isn't always obvious unless you already know the meaning of the kanji). On the other hand, the Kodandsha Kanji Learner's Dictionary splits things up into kanji shape type (left->right, top->bottom, solid or enclosure), and then go by the left hand radical from there. The latter also has a readings index at the back, which is useful if you already know one of the readings for the kanji you are looking for.

I recommend the latter dictionary for learners, the former when you already know most Joyo kanji already.

 

The Kodandsha Kanji Learner's Dictionary is what I used to and seems to be a standard. As for throwing you off the loop, it's gonna be like that for awhile. Gotta just keep reading over and over, eventually you'll see the same characters so much, it will be hard to imagine the day you didn't even know them =p

 

Sounds a heck of a lot like Chinese. Most characters are left->right or top->bottom, with a few notable exceptions. Stroke order usually reveals the core radical.

For instance in Chinese the left hand side of 逛 is not the core, since it's usually written last in the words it appears in.

Yep, been there in Chinese. One day it's gibberish, then eventually it reads as easy as English.

Thanks guys, sounds like checking out the Kodandsha Kanhji Learner's Dictionary is a good bet

 

I still use the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary today when I can't be bothered to look something up in the Nelson. The Nelson is great because of the sheer amount of kanji and readings, but it's almost as big as an original XBox and twice as heavy. The Kodansha one fits nicely in your bag.

 

A lot of Japanese students don't bother with radicals that much nowadays because of Denshi Jisho's and their writing functions. Just write the kanji on the screen and you're good to go.

Quite a big investment for those starting with Japanese though, but if you're using the computer for studying then jisho.org is easy when you use their radical search because you can input multiple radicals that appear in a character, and it doesn't matter whether it's the main radical or not.

 

That's also why people seem to be getting worse and worse at kanji, and that includes Japanese people!

Definately get a denshi jisho at some point (though I suspect if you don't really know Japanese kanji yet, now might be too soon), but doing it the hard way and becoming familiar with the radicals will pay off massively in the long run.

 

Fair enough I did learn the radicals at some point (makes studying kanji a lot easier, as well as understanding kanjis you haven't seen before) but for the sake of looking up it's just so much easier than a paper dictionary, not to mention portability..

 

If you have an iPhone, here are two pretty cheap ways to write in your kanji. Note, that it's a touchy feely thing, and neither are "awesome" but can be very useful with patience.

1: Daijirin ($22.99 I believe in the US App store, 2500 yen in the JPN one). Features a tegaki input method, but is a J-J dictionary. A fucking awesome one, but has no English. For prounciations, it will work.

2: Kotoba (J-Multi dictionary) + Chinese Handwritten keyboard enabled.

I'm new to #1 and haven't used #2 in a while so it's hard for me to comment on which is more accurate. They start to get tricky around 8 strokes.