直 Doesn't have the "L radical" when I type it outside of wanikani!

WHY??? Is it a 国 or 國 kind of situation? The “Ice radical” looks completely different outside of wanikani but it’s pretty obvious why, what’s going on here?

Oh, this is a unicode thing I remember encountering!

You’re seeing the Chinese version of that character.
As I recall, there’s a few characters where multiple versions are similar enough that unicode stores them in the same place and the default they chose looks strange in Japanese. (so it’s only very few characters, not all where there are differences between languages)

See this thread:

The solution is setting Japanese in your preferred browser settings, like this is mine now in Chrome:

That tells your browser which version of the character to prefer when there’s no other information.

(of course if you want to study both Chinese and Japanese and have it always be consistent, you’re out of luck unless websites and users rigorously add tags to those characters to eliminate the technological ambiguity. But again, it’s only a handful of characters, and 直 is the most noticeable, because this only happens if the versions are all very similar indeed)

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It’s probably just a font issue. Are you using a Chinese font or a Japanese font? The character is written differently in each language:

Screenshot 2021-05-29 at 21.57.24
(Sorry for the botched screenshot. I think everyone else has provided or will provide you with a much better explanation of how to fix the technical issues that cause this. I’m just here for the linguistic side of the story.)

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Thanks for this, I had noticed some inconsistencies even when copy/pasting a character and just assumed it was another variation or font, not straight up the Chinese version

I’m afraid if I do this stuff like ã ê ç etc won’t display properly.

No problem! I assumed the same thing to be honest, so the thread I linked was news to me, and that’s why I remembered it.

It should be fine - I haven’t noticed anything odd since making the change.
image

It’s a ranked list, so as long as you keep the language(s) you want before Japanese, it shouldn’t in any way overrule characters that are a part of your preferred language.

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Wow, it even worked like that on firefox :open_mouth:

Ah yes, Han unification, AKA why we still have to deal with Shift-JIS in $CURRENT_YEAR.

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