Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
What does a Japanese person do if he wants to look up a completely unknown word in the dictionary? There must surely be a way to use a Japanese dictionary to look up an unknown ideograph?
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In order to look up a word written in Japanese. you need to first identify the component of the glyph (kanji) referred to as "radicals".
Knowing which component qualifies as a radical is difficult if you are a learner.
There are over 200 commonly used radicals.
Once you've located your radical, you count the number of strokes it's made up of.
The number of strokes will allow you to open your dictionary to find a list of radicals containing the correct number of strokes.
From there, you can get a list of glyphs (kanji) that use these radicals. Once the initial glyph has been identified thus, you can easily find words formed from these glyphs.
I gave up trying to use Kanji dictionaries long time ago. I now copy / paste unknown glyphs into online dictionaries. An ebook reader w/ a built-in JP dict would be really nice...