Okay. The point is that 鬱 is not a simplified version of it.
That’s really interesting. I had no idea. Not that I might encounter it much just reading print media, but it’s good to know about as it apparently exists as a thing. ^>^
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As a Chinese speaker who never needed to know the traditional form of the that kanji (it’s 专 in Simplified Chinese), I would definitely do that too, for lack of practice. If you look at the forms used in Chinese though (both simplified and traditional), you’ll see that there are other elements that differentiate them, which make remembering the difference easier in Chinese. For example,
Often has a little hook in the bottom lefthand corner of the upper right component, with the vertical strokes descending beyond the tips of the lowest horizontal stroke. The horizontal strokes inside also aren’t required to run all the way across to ‘close’ the box.
The ‘box’ that looks like 田 is closed and the vertical strokes don’t go any further. Also, there’s an additional couple of strokes in the traditional form compared to the modern Japanese form.
On the other hand, this is the Japanese version of 博:
(Side note: I do know that even on Chinese calligraphy sites, some calligraphers have written it like this, but it seems the standard version taught in Chinese-speaking countries today is the first one.)
This isn’t really meant to be a criticism, but I feel like this is one of those cases where the Shinjitai simplification’s focus on shape has accidentally made it harder to remember the correct kanji even though the new kanji are easier to write. It’s like switching out certain kanji so fewer kanji need to be remembered e.g. 暗誦 (recitation) being replaced by 暗唱 (example taken from here: https://www.imabi.net/kakikae.htm). Thankfully, it seems the main meaning of 唱 in Japanese is ‘chant’ or ‘recite’, because in Chinese, 唱 refers primarily to singing, whereas 誦 is very much a word one would use for poetry, so it wouldn’t make sense in Chinese. China’s simplifications seemed to mainly focus on phonetic substitutions or established 草書 symbols, which arguably avoided more of these problems because the number of strokes for most characters was drastically reduced. On the other hand, well, Japan’s Shinjitai kanji preserve more of what people feel made traditional characters beautiful, so there’s that…
Oh well, maybe I’m just complaining because I can’t bring myself to face the fact that I made a kanji error just because this is a character set I’m less familiar with. I take pride in writing things correctly. Still, in all frankness, back in primary school, there were definitely plenty of cases in which people forgot or added a stroke because they had got things muddled up in Chinese class, so it’s not exactly a rare problem in either simplified system. Two classics were 真 and 直: two or three strokes in the middle? (Answer: three) People often get it wrong because in Chinese, the central bit looks similar to 且. In Japanese though, this problem doesn’t exist, either because the top is disconnected from the long horizontal stroke, or because there is no horizontal stroke, just an ‘L’.
Returning to 専 though, I guess the only way to remember is to know that 専 and words like 博 aren’t related, which can be guessed from their on’yomi: when one kanji is the ‘main’ part of another, the more complex kanji tends to have a similar reading, which isn’t the case here.
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