掲示板 Forums - Discussion: in forum dictionary lookups

What you're looking at is that I typed a #, then whatever I would have searched for in the vocab dictionary. It looks it up, then you can tap on the specific entry. Much more targeted than the current # functionality.

On top of that, in the actual post, it will show the term (食べる/たべる), and you can tap on it like you do words in a sentence to get more info, add to a schedule, all that good stuff.

It works QUITE well so far (not available to other users yet), but I'd like to expand it out to kanji, grammar, sentences, and possible lists in the community lists.

Currently, dictionary links are made using #, ##, or ### for words, kanji, or grammar (respectively). If we were to follow with #### for sentences, we'd need something else for community lists as well! Doesn't really scale.

The lookup tool in the new forum software is not overly complex, so I am somewhat restricted by what I do. I'm not sure I could have a second popup that says "choose what to search", then lookup based on that. Seems clumsy.

So, should I have a different character for each lookup type? #, @, <, > (for example?)

Any other ideas?

You could use digraphs like #% #+ #[ #{ etc.

Thanks for the feedback! At the moment, I'm leaning towards the dropdown. While those suggestions are very clean, I do not think they will be assimilated as easily by regular users, especially if they are on mobile, and don't want to switch over to symbols on their keyboard. I could even switch the # over to ? to make it even easier for them to stay on the same keyboard.

I doubt they will have a question mark followed immediately by a character (English or Japanese), though, so it would not trigger it.

You'd need to type something like ?interesting or ?たべる for it to trigger, but saying

How do you do this?

(or)

Is this even possible?!?

would not make anything pop up :)