is my computer’s font messed up, or is this kanji just… different?
i came across a word in a manga (cardcaptor sakura) and while it has furigana so i knew what it was, i wanted to look up the kanji, anyway
however, when i typed it, it gave me something that looked very different than what i was expecting, so i tried drawing it into the ime pad, but with the same result
so i brought it to wanikani to find the radical that i remembered learning on my previous run:
this is the mask radical. it looks like horns, rice paddy, and sun
i’m like, great, cool, this is what i’m seeing in the book
but this is what the kanji looks like:
that’s… mouth, eight (or fins), horns, a sideways sun? and sun
the kanji in the book is mouth and mask, but this kanji here does not involve anything that looks like mask to me
is this a recent kanji redesign, or is my font wrong?
i had followed some instructions on setting my computer’s language so that this one program would have japanese instead of garbled symbols, but i wouldn’t think that would do this
i used to have a similar problem with i think it was オ and 才 looking the same, but that’s because my computer was defaulting to chinese (even after telling it to be japanese, it would eventually revert), but now those are distinct, so i don’t know what’s going on (other than me just being a dumdum)
Basically the 曽 kanji is a simplified form of 曾 but 噌 isn’t jouyou so it kept the traditional version of the component while, for instance, 增 simplified into 増 because it’s jouyou.
There are a bunch of similar cases all over the place as you start to get beyond the world of jouyou kanji.
So nothing is wrong on your end, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to look like and you’ll have to get used to it…
Yeah, WaniKani’s approach to radicals is sometimes “close enough is good enough”. Like the “Easy” radical 易, which has an extra horizontal stroke (i.e. 昜) in every single kanji it’s taught in aside from the 易 kanji itself.
They’re mnemonic devices, so they’re not meant to be precise in the first place, as mentioned before. But even then, it would be impossible to account for all alt versions if you really did want to.
i understand there are going to be variations, but it looks so drastically different as to be unrecognisable as the radical it claims to be
also, how can it be “simplified” if it has more strokes?
edit: oh, i was thinking backwards (as usual)
the mask radical is the simplified version
In this case it would probably be helpful if WK briefly mentioned in their meaning section for the 噌 kanji that yes, the mask radical looks a bit different here and why (you could even mnemonicify it a bit if you wanted: miso is a traditional Japanese food so you wear a traditional mask which is more complicated than more modern mask designs).
But as @Belthazar says WK have always been a bit loose with radical shapes because they don’t care about describing the kanji precisely enough that you can write them correctly. (Merging the ⺭and ⻂radicals together into “spirit” is probably the worst offender here, since (1) it affects a lot of kanji (2) it merges two distinct traditional radicals (3) the two radicals look very similar so if you want to write them you’re likely to misremember which kanji uses which (4) the two radicals actually have different meanings that tend to line up with the meanings of the kanji that use them.)
yea, i understand that wanikani is for learning specifically how to read kanji and that if you’re going to write, they expect you to type
however, like i said, the kanji is so very different that i got confused
i think i’ll add your explanation to it for when i get there
i intended to also practice writing with every lesson/review, but i just can’t be bothered to get out paper and a pencil maybe it’s not too late… i’m only level 16… but i already have only a few free hours in a day
maybe it’s not too late… i’m only level 16… but i already have only a few free hours in a day