掲示板 Forums - Enhanced kanji search

As I was reading old forum posts, I discovered that renshuu used to have a feature where you could click on any of a kanji’s readings and it would search for other kanji with the same reading. I guess it didn’t get much use, because when Michael asked if anyone would mind if he removed it, no one said anything.

I’d like to have that feature back. With a few tweaks I think it could be very useful. The tweaks I envision are

• Search by field. On’yomi would only match on’yomi; kun’yomi match kun’yomi; meaning match meaning; and radical match radical. So for example, a search for ユ wouldn’t match 夢, and a search for ねずみ wouldn’t match 鼬 (weasel) just because it has the ねずみ radical (鼠).
• Exact match. When you are looking for kanji with the same reading, you usually don’t want a substring match. Maybe you should be able to toggle this post-search using the filter drop down. It would probably make sense to have the fields searched controlled by the filter drop down as well.
• Term combinations. Sometimes you want to search term by term, but sometimes you are only interested in an exact match on all the terms. For example, if I’m looking for kanji related to 稲, I might want to find other kanji with the same readings テ and トウ, like 稻, but not 玎 (テイ、チョウ、トウ) or 掟 (トウ、チョウ、ジョウ、テイ).

One problem with this proposal is that clicking on a reading currently has a different function: controlling whether that reading is “known” or not. Perhaps this could be enabled by toggling an edit mode. For example, a pencil icon next to the readings could bring up a dialogue that would let you check or uncheck any of the readings. I think I’d actually prefer that UI over what we have now.

Obviously, this is a nontrivial change, but I don’t think it would require all that much work. I’m likely as not mistaken though, so feel free to inform me otherwise.

Sure, I’d like that too, but I was under the impression that Michael had already said that was going to require a fair amount of work, more than I think this would. On the other hand, maybe this would make component searches easier to implement. So who knows?

When you tap on the readings, isn't there a link to search for that reading in the kanji dict?

Indeed there is. Funny that I never noticed. The tweaks would still be welcome.

It largely depends on how the rest of November goes. I am still working a ton on the grammar update (which has hit a few road blocks), and looking to aim towards stability at the end of December as we'll be moving countries at the end of the year. We've got a big push in the discord community as well with regards to community tools. So if things go well and I find myself with some time, I'll definitely consider these.

I just ran across a perfect use case for this. There are 270 characters with the reading カイ. There are 91 with the reading エ. I’m interested in the ones that have both readings. I can’t think of a way to find this out at present.

If this was made, how would you imagine the input to be presented? Would you by copy/pasting those pieces in, or would you like to have a list (like now) that you could tap on? If that is the case, how would tapping on, for example, pieces A and B differ from the "filter" functionality now?

I've now figured out that the filter by parts will do a search for the parts for me if I just leave the search text input as blank. I was always trying to put the * wildcard in there when I just wanted to look by parts. So, I guess the requirement for an existing search to filter on was only imposed by my ignorance.