Kanji is a pain in the butt to look up on the web. Especially if you don’t know the reading to be able to figure out the kanji to add to a dictionary.  Well Microsoft IME Pad to the rescue, and you thought Microsoft was useless.

The current manga I am going through right now I have no idea on some of the kanji and the furigana really isn’t helping me out at all.  I try to type in so many combinations and use the input converter to get me to the right kanji.  For example I might type in さかな and then hit space bar to get the correct kanji (魚).  Unfortunately sometimes that doesn’t always work because you can’t see the furigana or the furigana just isn’t enough. Like this:

Now to be honest I can’t really tell if that is a す or a ず. I have tried both combinations and many others to find the correct reading for the kanji, but to no avail.  The solution is the IME Pad built into windows from at least XP on.  You have to be sure to have turned it on when you added the Japanese Keyboard, will cover this in another post.   Once you have the Japanese keyboard on I always leave the language bar maximized at the top of my screen because I use I so much, but the colored area is what the IME Pad looks like.  And is also perfectly accessible in the start/taskbar at the bottom.

Basically from there you just use your mouse to draw the kanji.  I have yet to figure out if stroke order actually means anything to IME Pad or not so far it hasn’t seemed to matter.  I will say that sometimes you need to draw it two or three times to get what you are after, at least its that way for me because I suck at it.

See how the kanji isn’t quite finished from the above kanji listed.  And notice how horribly drawn it is, but I am able to pick it right out.  From here you can right click on the kanji and hit “insert character” or hover over it for the readings to type.

I will say I am sorry I don’t know of alternatives for this on Linux or Mac OSX maybe a lovely reader would like to post a how-to on doing it in Mac OSX and/or Linux.

Hope this helps some people.