I often run into kanji that I don't recognize and need some way to translate
them into kana, so that I'm able to look up the meaning.

What's the most useful utility (in any form, web-based, application, iPhone
program, etc) for performing this task? Something where I can draw in the
kanji and have it identify it from that is probably best.
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kanji resources writing-identification
What's the best utility for identifying kanji?
There are dozens of methods and approaches. Some you might have heard of are
"Bushu radical decomposition", "SKIP", stroke-reading (as you directly copy
the kanji).

<http://jisho.org/kanji/radicals/> is a pretty handy method if you're decent
at decomposing kanji into radicals.
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2011-05-31T19:01:51.643
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If you have a Nintendo DS then
[漢字そのまま楽引辞典](http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ds/arjj/) (Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki
Jiten) is a great tool. It accepts kanji and kana entry via the touchscreen,
and includes a JP->EN dictionary, a EN->JP dictionary, and a JP->JP
dictionary.
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2011-05-31T19:06:16.493
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One tool for identify kanji is SKIP Codes, which were developed by Jack
Halpern for his kanji dictionary. It works even if you don't quite know kanji
radicals, much less the primary radical in a kanji.

[basic-japanese.com](http://www.basic-japanese.com/Hilfsdateien/skipCode.html)
has some information about how to determine the skip code for a kanji.From
there you need a dictionary that understands skip codes.

[Kanjidic](http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/kanjidic.html) includes SKIP
codes and is free. You can search it for example
[here](http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1B).

Japanese.app for iPhones is one such tool with a good UI that makes skip codes
easy to use:

![Japanese.app's SKIP code entry](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gvxMS.png)

There's also the iPhone Chinese handwriting keyboard for trying to reproduce
the kanji directly, but I've had limited success with that since Japanese is
neither Traditional nor Simplified Chinese.
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The first thing you need is a little knowledge about the radicals. If you can
break a kanji down into it's radicals, you can look it up in books and
electronic dictionaries. It makes it easier to understand the kanji too, since
you can identify its parts. If you can name a few of them, you can often type
the names into an electronic dictionary to filter choices. Here's a couple of
places to learn:

Names of many radicals:
<http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa070101a.htm>

Radicals by stroke count: <http://nuthatch.com/kanji/demo/radicals.html>

A dictionary lookup with radicals: <http://jisho.org/kanji/radicals/>

The next thing you need is to know about stroke order. Learn the general
rules, like write left-to-right, and how a horizontal, then vertical stroke
count as one (like in 口, which has 3 strokes, not 4). You can learn most of
these rules by learning the first 30 or so basic kanji.

With these two things, you're ready to look up kanji in a book, but it is
tedious doing it that way. Instead of this, find a touch-screen device and get
some software for it. Nintendo makes a good dictionary for DS, and iPhones or
iPads work well.

With iPhones, iPads (and even the touchpad on a newer MacBook) you can write
in Chinese characters, but they still don't have support for Japanese kanji.
Plenty of the Chinese characters are the same as Japanese kanji, but there are
enough differences to make you confused. Find an app with a custom input
method instead. I use
[Daijirin](http://www.monokakido.jp/iphone/daijirin.html) to write in kanji,
and it has a custom input method. After I find it, I either search in that
app, or copy and paste into another app.
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