Is there a usage difference between 当 and 正 or 先 and 去
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That’s like asking “when do I use two letters of the same alphabet that share a pronunciation like ‘I’ and ‘e’”. When the word is spelled with an i you use i. When it’s spelled with an e you use e.
When a word uses 正 you use 正. When a word uses 当 you use 当
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Yeah for the majority* of cases 先生 is spelled with 先 and 去生 just isn’t a word.
there are a few words that will have multiple spellings, but every time I see that, jisho lists alternate spellings as “rare”
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Not always. There are frequent cases, typically when it’s a verb, when Jisho attributes a specific meaning to a specific kanji, because the use of different kanji convey different nuances. The notes it uses for 会う are a good example.
I’m not sure there’s any instances where this happens with a noun, though.
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i mean more like, i know some words/kanji are only used in certain situations. like 出かける is used when you are going out, but not when like the train is leaving, even though it means to leave. like is 当 like factually correct and 正 like morally correct, kind of thing
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You seem to be a bit hung up on kanji “meanings”. Kanji are in the end just a way of writing words, and it’s the meanings and connotations of words that matter. The only benefit IMHO to attaching a “meaning” to an individual kanji as you are learning is as a mnemonic hook for helping you to remember words.
Have a look at the list of words 当 is used in – to the extent that there’s a common theme that’s as good a definition of the kanji’s meaning as anything else; and to the extent that there isn’t a common theme, that’s a demonstration that kanji meanings don’t matter much. (The kun-yomi 当たる in particular is about hitting a mark, and by analogy from that about making a correct guess, there’s another cluster of meanings around “being appropriate”, and also a set of words not listed in WK like 当人 “the person in question” where 当 is a prefix meaning “this”, “the ~ concerned”, etc. So that’s three separate clusters of meaning which are only tangentially related to each other.)
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It’s interesting how in Japanese the written text can have more nuances than speech… 
Usually it’s the other way around, because in text you can’t see the expression (unless you use emoji, which doesn’t usually hapen outside online communication)… But in Japanese you can use different kanji to express different nuances…
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It’s largely about vocabularies having this Kanji, and the vocabularies also already have fixed readings, so they can only be written that way.
When vocabularies having the same reading can be written with different Kanji, most often, they can be traced back to some other vocabularies using that specific Kanji. (So that’s what in my eyes when Kanji needs a meaning.)
Much more rarely, some Kanji components or radicals can contribute to the actual Kanji usage.
However, paragraph 2 and 3 aren’t about the cases in the first post. The existence of the vocabularies having the reading fixed by the Kanji is more important.
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Your understanding is fine for 当たる vs 正しい, but pm makes a good point out of not getting too focused on Kanji meanings. I would just learn words and then you’ll notice patterns that are relevant and actually maybe helpful.
When Kanji meanings are most concrete and relevant is really just for prefixes imo. Other than that it’s kinda rough. Like 楽しい vs 楽 for example is still just a single Kanji but they have notably different meanings.
But then you have stuff like
去年
先週
前回
昨年度
Where we have 4 different Kanji all expressing the exact same idea of the previous something. There’s maybe some useful patterns somewhere in certain Kanji, but it honestly isn’t worth learning because of how unreliable they are. At the end of the day, the important thing are the words and not the Kanji. Like sure you can’t use the word 出かける for trains, but the Kanji is fair game if you say 出発.
So yeah, I get what you’re saying and there is meaning tied to Kanji which is super neat, but it’s got surprisingly limited use due to the language not being 100% logical. Kanji meanings are more just a helpful way to remember or guess at some meanings in my humble opinion.
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