So I have a Nelson kanji dictionary and im trying to be confident using it before buying a denshi jisho. Now there's one MAJOR issue, I have dyslexia.
One common misconception with dyslexia is that you "get letters out of order," in reality, I can't mentally distinguish certain symbols without outside context, for example 7 and Z pretty much occupy the same cell of space in my brain, I can only tell which is which if there's another number or letter next to it.
Obviously this is a big problem when it comes to reading Japanese. As a native English speaker I can safely just assume what the katakana says, but kanji is another beast. With the Kanji Dictionary you first look up the first radical, then go to the index on that radical, and the rest of the kanji's strokes are counted to tell you which section of the index to go to. It's really hard to tell just how many strokes the kanji have in some cases. I was looking up this one '満' and it apparently has 12, but it looks like it could be 13 or 14 with the standard web fonts. Is there a general rule of thumb, like "right angles are a single stroke" or something that can help inform how many strokes there are?
by IChawt