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Comment by jiehong | Hacker News Reader

In Chinese you have input methods that do exactly that. In particular Array 40 [1], which map pieces of characters to each key on the keyboard to input them.

Other such methods, such as the more popular Cangjie [2] or Boshiamy [3], mix shape, stroke order and sound.

I suppose no such methods exist to write Japanese?

[1]: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%A1%8C%E5%88%97%E8%BC%B8%E5...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boshiamy_method

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Something similar is even built into many pinyin IMEs. To take the same example OP used, Microsoft Pinyin (the default Chinese input method on Windows computers) will let you input 榎 by typing umuxia.

(Explanation: U puts it into component mode, then mu = 木 and xia = 夏)

It's a bit more finicky than OP's version though because the order is important, uxiamu won't give you any useful results.

In Japanese, character input is basically 100% about readings. As such TFA isn't analogous to an IME, it's just an informational reference for looking up unfamiliar characters. If you wanted to type the character, you'd probably look up its reading and then enter that into your Japanese IME.

FWIW, on Android at least, there's Google手書き入力 which does a pretty fantastic job in my experience. It's good enough that funky stroke order, missing strokes, and full-on cursive still usually Just Work.

I normally use the Kanji draw [1] application which is also surprisingly good at recognizing what I'm trying to input. Not nearly as forgiving as Google's solution [2], which I sometimes have to fallback to, but usually it works if I can at least roughly guess what the official way of drawing a character is and check for inexact matches. Plus it's FOSS.

[1]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ch.seto.kanjirecog/

[2]: "Note that this will NOT work - at all - if you don't know basically how to draw kanji. If you just draw something any old way that looks like it, it certainly won't be recognised."

I'm not aware of any methods like that in widespread use for Japanese.

I think in some IMEs you can search kanji by radicals, but you have to type the radicals phonetically first.

It is a surprise. Many input methods does not care about whether you type what but the decomposition into parts, not radicals. Hence why not.

And for such a large table once again it is hard. Should have studied the chinese inout method and use the 26 keys instead of a table.

Anyway also interest the web site and how the Json work ...

That's surprising.

I only learnt Mandarin Chinese for a few months, but I did find the app "Pleco". The most useful parts are the handwriting recognition -- which worked even on my beginner-writing -- and the live OCR.

But there's also an "assemble the character from bits" thing[2], though it relies on you knowing how many strokes are in each component. I use(d) it occasionally when I couldn't use OCR, as it was fairly slow (and inexact) for me to count strokes.

https://www.pleco.com/

[2] https://i.imgur.com/lvm0Uln.png (I only pressed 木. 夏 has 10 strokes, and 榎 is listed further down in the ⑩ section, with 45 other characters, presumably in an order)

Further to this I use Pleco for chinese and not sure any Japanese get close to it.

so far quite successfully use this for Japanese doc for reading abd studying : Nihongo it is expensive but doing ocr a bit it helps a lot of doing my homework. (Not as good as it does do live ocr like Pleco.)

I wonder whether those sharp and Casio ... but they do not do ocr.

It's not surprising when you think about how Japanese is written. A typical Japanese sentence will have a few Kanji and a lot of phonetic Kana:

日本語はちょっと書きにくい。

It would make no sense to switch between phonetic input and writing Kanji by pieces, so instead purely phonetic IMEs are used.

There really isn’t a good Japanese counter part to Pleco.

Pleco has said they’ve looked into producing an app for Japanese, but apparently all the good dictionaries and handwriting engines are locked up in exclusive deals with publishers and denshi Jisho.

We are starting to see handwriting engines that are good and not in exclusive licenses, but the technology to for it has existed for decades.

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