I’ve always known that 薔薇 (バラ Rose) is the stereotypical “hardest” kanji to write. But it’s not commonly used. In terms of Joyo Kanji or commonly used kanji, 鬱 (ウツ melancholy) has the highest stroke count and is pretty difficult.
However, I personally haven’t practiced writing kanji in forever. I’m not sure I could write even most basic kanji anymore. Do you guys practice writing?
Source: The Most Difficult Japanese Kanji (Practically Speaking) - YouTube
well that feeling when you see a weird kanji shows up in forum and know the reading and meaning
hahaha
I don’t practice writing cause I’m so exhausted practicing with Crabigator master everyday.
The hardest kanji are the ones you haven’t learnt to write yet.
I have an Anki deck with all the kanji I learn on WK. So I write them pretty much every day, maybe it’s unnecessary and I’m just wasting my time but I feel like I recall kanji better that way. I’m not particularly strict with stroke order though
Not 
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There’s nothing particularly special about any individual kanji if you put your mind to it. People just have little reason to write 鬱 or 薔薇 in their lives all that often.
A different way to think about “difficult to write” kanji might be the ones where people “know” how to write it, but frequently use the an incorrect element or stroke style. Little things like where the lines meet and whatnot can be particularly tough.
For instance many Japanese people add a dot to 専 because similar shapes in 博 and 縛, etc, have that dot.
I think a better translation for 鬱 would be depression?
Or even gloomy, like WK says (lol)
But yeah, that is a big boy isn’t it.
I think they all cover the meanings of 鬱, including melancholy.
It has a really cool mnemonic I read about the other day!
リンカーンはアメリカンコーヒーを三杯飲んだ
Rinkān wa Amerikan kōhī o sanbai nonda
Lincoln drank three cups of American coffee
And he does that when he gets depressed and gloomy! (my little addition).
Courtesy of here
Also, someone once pointed out that despite its complexity, there’s no other common-use kanji similar to it, so it’s pretty easy to recognise.
Yeah, it would be a bit different if there hadn’t been so many simplifications. I wonder how much they considered simplifying it.
The kanji 庁 used to be
I’d be curious to look through all the old versions of stuff and see if anything had some of those elements of 鬱.
What about this crazy “character”:
It is actually a combination of 招財進寶. I’m sure I’ve seen it quite a lot when I was in South-East Asia, but I paid attention to it only the last time I saw it in Taipei.
Any of you saw this in Japan?
wait, you know that Taiwan doesn’t belong to South East Asia right? xD
AFAIK probably the only SEA country that you may see this kanji is Singapore, which is probably quite rare case.
my god, you mean that’s the simplified version of it?
Of 鬱? No it wasn’t simplified. I mean many other kanji got simplified, so monstrosities like 鬱 are rare now, but they didn’t used to be.
According to Wiktionnary, it has been simplified in China to 郁
Looking at that kanji’s page on WK, I find it amusing how they constructed the Psychopath radical just for that one kanji.
Ah ok, understood. I was trying to think of a monster kanji.
That’s awesome 
