How do you type a kanji that you don't know how to pronounce

[watermen]

How do you type a kanji that you don't know how to pronounce?

[Psy]

Both Windows and Mac have radical and stroke based methods of looking up characters (see the IME pad on Windows or the Character Palette on Mac), in addition, there is a handwriting analysis feature in the Windows IME pad, so you can draw (you need to know proper stroke order) unknown characters there as well. Just fool around with the language bar/language menu and you should have no trouble finding it.

[watermen]

Both Windows and Mac have radical and stroke based methods of looking up characters (see the IME pad on Windows or the Character Palette on Mac), in addition, there is a handwriting analysis feature in the Windows IME pad, so you can draw (you need to know proper stroke order) unknown characters there as well. Just fool around with the language bar/language menu and you should have no trouble finding it.

There is no IME pad in Mac OS 10.5. So how do I find the kanji?

[untmdsprt]

Both Windows and Mac have radical and stroke based methods of looking up characters (see the IME pad on Windows or the Character Palette on Mac), in addition, there is a handwriting analysis feature in the Windows IME pad, so you can draw (you need to know proper stroke order) unknown characters there as well. Just fool around with the language bar/language menu and you should have no trouble finding it.

There is no IME pad in Mac OS 10.5. So how do I find the kanji?

The character palette has everything you need to find the character in question. Easiest way to find it is by radical or stroke number. Once you find this character, you can then past it into a document, or even in the Dictionary app.

Since you are using 10.5 (Leopard), the kotoeri menu bar has everything in English. If you'll go to this menu, do a search for reverse conversion, (sorry, I'm not at my Mac right now to give you the proper description of everything), and it will then turn the kanji into hiragana. If you paste this into the Dictionary.app, it will do a search for all words with this kanji, and will also give you the hiragana.

For those who don't have Leopard, you can also find the kanji in the character palette, but you'll have to paste it into Firefox and then use rikaichan to learn how to pronounce it. BTW, the kotoeri menu is also with previous versions of OS X, but it was always in Japanese.

Further help:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php? ... 2101755356

[Belton]

You look it up. then re-write or copy and paste

online
www.jisho.org
has a nice interface and multi-radical lookup.

There is a handwriting recognition tool at
http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html

offline
JEDict
www.jedict.com
is a standalone dictionary reader for the mac that has a good kanji search interface and also a crude way of writing the kanji for lookup as well.

In OSX 10.5 the Character Pallette (turned on in the "International" System preference pane -- Input menu) if you choose "View: Japanese, by Radical" it will let you visually search by stroke count and radical like a paper dictionary.

[Arhazivory]

You look it up. then re-write or copy and paste

online
www.jisho.org
has a nice interface and multi-radical lookup.

There is a handwriting recognition tool at
http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html

offline
JEDict
www.jedict.com
is a standalone dictionary reader for the mac that has a good kanji search interface and also a crude way of writing the kanji for lookup as well.

In OSX 10.5 the Character Pallette (turned on in the "International" System preference pane -- Input menu) if you choose "View: Japanese, by Radical" it will let you visually search by stroke count and radical like a paper dictionary.

Thanks a lot for these links. I can see how they'll be very helpful to me as well.