I came across the kanji for mochi on wanikani(this guy: 餅). When I type it here, it looks completely different than what I see when doing my wanikani reviews.(screenshot attached)
I’m assuming this is a font difference of some sort, and I’ve tried a few different fonts. Are there fonts that are more accurate at displaying the most modern interpretations of kanji, and if so, what are some of them? Do I need to change my browser’s fonts to get wanikani to display kanji like餅 properly?
The “mangled comb thing” is how the “food radical” that you see most of the time nowadays used to always look. The food radical version is a simplified form that was chosen as the official updated version when Japan standardized kanji with a variety of lists that culminated in the current jouyou kanji list.
However, 餅 is not a jouyou kanji. As such, it has no standardization. There is no officially correct way to render it. It’s not right or wrong to use the old version versus the new version.
If you desire consistency, yes, someone might be able to recommend fonts that convert all kanji as if they were updated in the standardization phase, but you should expect to encounter both versions almost at random in the real world (though my hunch is that the non-jouyou kanji actually appear more often with their old forms, rather than the new ones, but that’s just my impression)
Another example of such a “shape shifting” radical is 青 which is often seen with 円 instead of 月 in kanji like 錆 and a bunch of others. It confused me a lot the first time I encountered it.
