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Comment by fenomas | Hacker News Reader

This looks cool!

One suggestion - when clicking an element on the top page, you might consider treating that as "add this element to the search string", rather than as "show the search results for this element". The idea being, many users won't offhand know how to get their IME to produce characters like 亅 or 乚 or 儿, so they'll probably click on such elements, intending to then refine their search.

Edit: second piece of feedback - there are a couple of cases where katakana are used to refer to certain radicals, and it would be an easy usability improvement to alias those characters. E.g. ル→儿、ウ→宀 and so on.

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Thanks! For the second piece of feedback, I actually already do this for a few characters, like ム. ル is another good candidate. I am not sure if ウ is a bit of a stretch... Note this is also done for radicals with obvious correspondences, like 心草水獣, so you can search 水木 for 淋.

For the first piece of feedback, I have had other people request that, but I am not sure how to balance it with having detailed kanji pages. One thing to note is that while it is less convenient, on the detailed kanji page there is a link to "search this kanji" - I use that when I know a character that contains the part I want, but can't remember the name of the part itself.

ウ is not really a stretch. It's called ウ冠 after all.

BTW, this kind of search is common in 電子辞書. Mine is almost 20 years old and has a 部品読み search.

Ah, right you are - I didn't realize. I'll have to add that.

I had heard of 電子辞書 having this feature, but I've never actually used one. Glad to see that 部品 was the right word, I had been kind of uncertain about that and gotten feedback about it.

https://jp.sharp/sc/eihon/pa660/text/kangi.html

> not sure if ウ is a bit of a stretch

They don't look identical, but the radical is often referred to that way, e.g. when describing a kanji over the phone. Also same thing with ワ and 冖.

Thanks, I'll stick those in!

> many users won't offhand know how to get their IME to produce characters like ... 儿

One of the most common characters in (simplified) Chinese? It's number 192 in this dataset - http://hanzidb.org/character-list/by-frequency?page=2 - among company like 老、门、先、立、比...

Not to mention it literally defines 儿话.

But you won't find 儿 in Japanese character dictionaries. It will come up if you type ひとあし in an IME, but most people wouldn't know that.

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