I have a specific kanji character that I want to look up, but I have no idea how to do this. I could draw it on the touchpad on my MacBook, is there anything built into Mac OS X to handle kanji lookup like this? I recall it being able to do it for Chinese, but wasn't sure about Japanese.
How do people do this normally? Do you just have to search by the number of strokes and pray you can find it in the list?
I don't *think* there's anything built into os x to handle advanced searching/lookup of kanji. I have http://www.jedict.com/ which I use sometimes, but to be honest (and not self-serving), it's just as easy if not easier to do it on renshuu, since there's several different ways to look it up including selecting 'components' of the kanji in addition to stroke counts.
As for writing it in, though, maybe someone else can chime in with something.
A bit late, but I thought I might add a few things, too ;)
For kanji you know how to draw you could use a dictionary that has a SKIP lookup (more info on that [url=http://www.basic-japanese.com/Hilfsdateien/skipCode.html]here[/url]).
But as マイケル has mentioned the dictionary on this site has a nice feature for finding those kanji, too. If you haven't seen it yet, or didn't know how to use it: Open the kanji dictionary, click on 'show table' next to Parts table. Then just choose some or all parts of the kanji and click on the search. You can narrow it down by choosing more components, or by adding the stroke count, but that's not necessary for most search results.
