Best way to find out a kanji in your manga book?

[rpgherogaz]

I have a few manga books (RAW with kanji)

From the off, I am stumped on a pronunication of a kanji, but i have no way to putting it into the yahoo Japanese dictionary!!

Is there a free, fast and effective way to bring up these kanji??

Like where you can draw the kanji and it reconises it? So i can insert it??

I know of one site, but it doesnt really work....

Thanks!

[Psy]

A good way to search online is via SKIP code or by using a handwritten interface. You can also search by a number of methods using software such as JEDict (for the Mac) or WaKan/JWPce. (for Windows) Granted, you could also use character dictionaries... but doing it that way can get really frustrating really quickly.

Good luck with the RAWs.

[Belton]

Skip code is a sort of a nice idea but ultimately a bit frustrating, probably useful in a paper dictionary but I don't think it's widely licensed. Component or pattern matching is about the simplest way to narrow the search on a computer. Sometimes called multi-radical.
http://www.jisho.org/kanji/radicals/
is a well implemented on-line dictionary.

I usually use a similar feature in JEDict (see Psy-san's post)

That handwriting recognition is interesting. A trackpad is a bit tricky to draw with though. Maybe if I get my wacom connected it'd be an interesting interface.
It's very dependant on proper stroke order though. try writing　火　incorrectly. It won't recognise it even if your shape is correct.

[QuackingShoe]

Unless I can look it up through some more expedient method (I already know alternate readings of characters, already know the meaning from context and can search through English, etc), I use handwriting recognition with a mouse exclusively. It's native to the windows and mac IMEs, so you don't actually need to use any special sites, and it only takes a few seconds. That's still usually too much of a hassle for me (I'm lazy) unless I'm especially curious, but it's still better, in my opinion, than searching by any of the other methods. You do need to know proper stroke order, but if you've done Heisig, or if you just have some experience writing kanji in general (stroke order always follows the same basic principles, so you can surmise the proper [or mostly proper; the tricky characters generally make allowances for common mistakes] order at first site), that's never a problem. Or at any rate, I've never had it become a problem.

Also, since stroke order is about the only important thing, you can be absurdly messy, so it doesn't matter how terrible you are with a mouse.