02.08.2006
The way japanese language is written can roughly be divided into two different ways.
One is Hiragana & Katakana, which has no actual meaning, but instead represents phonetic information (and therefore rougly equates our western alphabet).
On the other side you have Kanji (chinese characters) which represents a meaning, but has no obvious pronounciation or phonetic information embedded in it.
For whoever who is trying to learn japanese, meeting a rogue kanji can be a highly tedious affair. By rogue kanji I mean a kanji in the wild with no means to copy & paste it into a lookup tool. You are then stuck with a ideogramaitc symbol you have no idea what means, and no idea how it should be pronounced or written. In short, it's very hard to look up.
One alternative involves identifying what radicals it consists of, identifying the approxomite amount of strokes it requires and manually looking it up in a table, radical by radical. Let me tell you: This takes time.
Fortunate for me, I found a nice tool to do all this work for me. its called "JWPce", short for "Japanese Word Processor CE" or something. I'm sure you can use it to write letters and stuff, but I have Microsoft Word for that.
What's neat about this tool is the Kanji-lookup feature. You tell it what radicals your kanji has, how many strokes it has minimum, and you get a nice short list to choose from.
Now all you need to do is copy & paste that into your favorite lookup tool. Me, myself, I use "Hello! Dictionary" which I developed myself some time ago. I'll post it later.
Oh! JWPce can be found here.