I’ve started reading the Sakura Japanese graded readers and I’ve come across unsimplified forms of kanji. An example of this is 才/歳.
So, I was wondering, should I bother seeking these out so I can learn them at the same time as their simplified equivalent? Does Wanikani teach these? Should I just look them up and learn them through exposure as I encounter them?
Beyond that, I wonder how commonly there are used in recent writing. I’ll probably keep encountering these either way as I enjoy folktales, and that generally comes with an older writing style, but nevertheless I am still curious about this.
Wanikani does teach 歳 at level 46 it seems. I think for sanity’s sake looking them up through experience would be must faster because some are probably more common than others. I know 才 and 歳 are ones that I learned from Genki 1 so that’s a common unsimplified kanji.
a quick search for 旧字体 よく使われる brought this website up that seems simple enough, but there were many more links within the search. If you want to look up the 旧字体 before encountering them maybe something like this site would help?
But I think experienced immersion is better (looking up when finding them) just to save time in the long run (not study things that you don’t necessarily need to know(?)
To be clear about 才 vs 歳: the former is mostly used for kids in elementary school because it is easier to read, but from middle school onwards 歳 is used. However, this is not an example of 旧字体 and in fact there is no 旧字体 for 才.
I haven’t looked thoroughly, but perhaps the most common 旧字体: 龍 is taught by WK and can be seen everywhere. I have very little experience reading recent writing so I can’t comment on the frequency there, but my general advice would be to not worry about them until you run across them in immersion.
The place you might see them most often is probably names. 桜→櫻, 斎→齋 etc.
As with just about everything, I would suggest you just learn them as you go. The more you try to “prelearn” the language, the more you’re gonna end up spending learning stuff that isn’t very important.