Has anyone noticed a new font style with some of the kanji during reviews? 統 (とう、unite) was stylized differently during my last review. I didn’t recognize the thread radical on the left (which is fine, now that I get it; I need practice reading different font styles anyway). Also, the top drop on the right is angled.
When I look up the kanji, it’s stylized as I’m used to seeing it.
During reviews:
When I look the kanji up using the search function:
wanikani doesn’t force japanese font, and a lot of devices default to chinese
i can’t help you fix it because i’m pretty sure i had to look up a tutorial, myself 
Ah, that might be the case. I wonder why my laptop suddenly decided to impose a different font. Thanks for the tip.
Linux by chance?
Not to my knowledge. Just a straight-up Mac OS with nothing fancy added on. There is an update I’ve been putting off. I’ll try doing that and some basic clean-up and see what happens.
Never used mac, but their OS is linux based.. originally decades ago, lol. It still shares some of the same code. I just upgraded to Fedora 44 about a week ago and apparently something with the Google Noto Sans CJK JP font has changed. It is using the Chinese kanji rather than the Japanese ones.. which is kind of annoying me, lol. I’ve been slowly looking into what changed with Fedora, but the bit of stuff I have come across has other people saying something with the Noto font changed in a few distributions.. may be worth checking your fonts
That’s interesting. I did have English, Japanese, and traditional Chinese as preferred fonts in my system settings. I’ve removed the Chinese. Will see if that helps.
Unix, not Linux 
At any rate it’s only true for the very low level stuff, the graphic stuff is completely custom.
This may help: Reddit - Please wait for verification
It seems to be the same as for Android: you need to add Japanese to your preferred languages, below English if you still want your system to be in English.
I just downloaded the google files and replaced the system ones and it now works properly. I don’t know what they’re using by default in Fedora 44 (or maybe just how the install managed to get stuck on Chinese), but either way, if it helps you the noto font link is: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+JP
yes, lol. I just assume nobody knows what that is.. half the time Linux is already stretching it. Although, these days Microsoft is killing Windows every chance it gets so =p
Also, I thought mac still used X11? or at least it did at some point when I had looked at it before, Although, granted that was quite a while ago now.. I don’t keep up with it so maybe they have replaced a bunch of the more major things like how Linux has moved to Wayland
So, I had to change the font defaults for my browser. Changing the OS preferences on my Mac wasn’t enough. The exact settings will be different for everyone, depending on the machine and browser, but here’s what worked for me:
All seems good now. Thanks, everyone, for your help troubleshooting.
I’m on Windows and I had the exact same problem today… strange!
Yeah, it was sudden for me. I’m not sure what changed, but in searching for solutions, I noticed some talk about a Chrome update.
I don’t know much about Windows systems, but I suggest doing all available updates, making sure you have the latest version of your browser, and then checking your language settings for both your operating system and your browser. Hope this helps!
P.S. I found this thread on reddit that’s specifically about Windows. It’s three years old so some of the specifics may be off, but the procedure seems worth trying.
I still had trouble this morning. The issue seems to be with Chrome rather than my Mac; when I copy a kanji that’s rendered as Chinese from WK and paste it into Word on my Mac, it shows up as Japanese. In fixing things on Chrome, I needed to change both the languages and font settings. Here’s an updated list of how I (hopefully) fixed the improper rendering:
I’m still seeing random characters show up in the Chinese version from time to time. It only happens sporadically; most of the kanji are rendered correctly in Japanese. It also differs between the review interface and just looking up a kanji or vocabulary word.
Here’s how 経済的、けいざいてき looked this morning during a review on Chrome (note the thread radical on the left):
Here’s how the word looks when I find it on WK with the search function:
I tried to get to this same vocab word in reviews using Safari for comparison but it didn’t pop up quickly (I have a large review backlog). When I look up the word on Safari with the search function, it renders correctly.
I’ve done all the troubleshooting I know how to do. I don’t think it’s just my settings. @Mods can you help?
One more troubleshooting thing I’m trying: I changed the fixed-width font to Osaka in Chrome. Supposedly it’s a Japanese font that can render Latin and Japanese letters proportionally. I won’t know if it worked until I come across some of the problematic characters during reviews.
UPDATE (6/23): 経済的 rendered just fine in my reviews this afternoon.
Hey! I read through what you wrote, and you discovered pretty much everything I tell people in these situations: it is a system issues, either OS or browser. The biggest problem combo is Windows + Chrome, but in my experience reading people’s experiences with this over the years, it’s always Chrome.
And you found the same Reddit thread I did. I found one over 10 years old where people pinpoint Chrome, so it seems to be a known issue, at least to users.
In lieu of a fix from Google, mess with all your language and font settings on Chrome (which you did), and if all else fails, switch browsers for WaniKani. I know that’s not “it” as far as a solution is concerned, but it truly is the answer for now.
Good work on doing so much digging yourself, and at least I can say Mozilla Firefox got your back!
Things seem okay for me now, and at least I know how to handle troubleshooting in the future. Thanks for the detailed response! I really appreciate it.
This is necessary for the forums, but for WaniKani the app this really should not be necessary. WK should mark all the Japanese text as Japanese so the browser doesn’t have to guess. Symptoms like “same word renders with Chinese font in reviews but Japanese font in the vocsb info page” are pretty suggestive of part of WK not marking things up for language correctly. (I guess it’s possible that Chrome has a “text explicitly marked up a Japanese renders with Chinese font even when Japanese font is available” bug. But if I had to bet I wouldn’t bet on that.)
But nobody notices if they’ve configured their browser to prefer Japanese over Chinese, which is what almost all Japanese learners will want for other websites anyway. So it’s only a small group of users that ever report this kind of thing, and they usually end up working around it, as in this thread…
WaniKani does mark all Japanese text with the lang="ja" tags, and this has been investigated extensively by engineering. I have seen this report over and over, and it’s 99% of the time on the Chrome browser. Smarter people than me concluded it was a Chrome bug, which is why I recommend the browser switch.
