One of the things that I had the least bit of a clue about when it comes to Japanese was how to locate a kanji (a “word”, of sorts) you don’t know, and as far as I can tell, there aren’t very many good descriptions out there explaining this process. From reading, I figured that it had to do with radicals. I found out that radicals were commonly reoccuring “parts” of a kanji, and that you could somehow look for a kanji in a dictionary based on the stroke count in the radical/kanji.

For you to actually understand what’s going on here, you need to know about stroke count. Briefly put, stroke count is the number of strokes to paint a character. This sounds simple. For example this “character” has 4 stroke counts, right?

Three horizontal plus one vertical. Except it’s not that simple. Look at this, for example:

The blue line is “stroke #1″ and the black line is “stroke #2″. The first stroke looks like two strokes, but it is done in a single motion, despite the abrupt curve. Now that we know that, we can look at actual kanji. As I said before, a kanji is usually divided into several, commonly reoccuring radicals. The image above with the blue and black? That’s a radical. Most radicals are actual kanji characters as well, but not all kanji are radicals.

I’ve talked about this for a while now but you still don’t even know what the problem is, unless you know something about Japanese (e.g. you are not Kalle’s friend, you are a student of Japanese). The problem is basically this: in the alphabet, you can just look at a word and read it out, hopefully pronouncing it somewhat correctly, but most importantly, you can take a dictionary for the appropriate language and find the word. Easily. A-Z Ea-z Eaa-z Easa-z Easia-z Easila-z Easily. And that doesn’t work in Japanese, unless you have the pronunciation for the word:

The above is a kanji character. That’s all you know at this point, and our goal is to figure out what it means. It’s an image, so you can’t copy-paste it into lookup’s edict dictionary (or its web equivalent) and get the answer handed to you. Instead, you need to do some puzzling. If you happen to be extra bright today, you’ll notice that the radical we talked about earlier is actually in the above kanji character. Lookit:

So why do we care? Because the way to figure out a kanji without knowing its pronunciation is to do a multi-radical search. It is also possible to use a dictionary (you know, one you hold in your hand), but frankly I don’t have one, and frankly I don’t care. So, back to radicals. The image actually contains two more radicals. One is a little tricky, because it includes the red-colored radical above (Eureka moment: a kanji can contain the same radical twice, if the radical has a simpler or a more complex variant, and searching on the simpler one works fine). So what other radicals are there?

This one! And…

… this one. As you see, the second one does have the little cross-shaped radical inside of it.

Sometimes you just don’t find that damn radical though. In those cases, you use the total stroke count for the entire kanji to see a list of alternatives. If you only say, it has this kanij:

… you will find 240 alternatives. In fact, it won’t even let you pick&choose. However, looking at the kanji itself again …

We can count the number of strokes. Which in this case happens to be 8. Adding ‘8′ to the stroke count and searching on that, we will find 24 alternatives. If we find both of:

And we search on those two, without stroke count, we get 4 alternatives. That’s nice. If we include stroke count we get 2 alternatives. If we’re unsure of the number of strokes (sometimes it’s hard to tell and you easily over-count), we can put in a range instead, e.g. 7-9, which would display the kanji with 7, 8, or 9 total strokes.